nominate: DW-Nominate data for US Congressional ideological ratings

Description Usage Format Details Author(s) Source

Description

This dataset is from Voteview, a website by political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal that freely provides information on congressional roll call votes in the United States. The data goes back to the first U.S. congress in 1789, and includes votes from both the Senate and the House of Representatives. In addition the the votes themselves, Voteview's datasets include indicators of politicians' ideological positions, which have been estimated using NOMINATE. See also the 'Details' section below.

Usage

1

Format

A tibble with 49,361 observations and 9 variables:

congress

integer variable indicating the number of a member's congress, e.g. 116 for the 116th congress (2019-2021)

chamber

character variable indicating the chamber in which a member served

state

character variable indicating the state a member represented

party

character variable indicating a member's party

name

character variable in the format "last, first" indicating a member's name

born

double variable indicating a member's year of birth

died

double variable indicating a member's year of death

nominate_dim1

double variable in the range of [-1,1] indicating a member's ideological position on economic matters, also referred to as the 'left-right' spectrum. Lower values indicate left-wing positions, higher values indicate right-wing positions.

nominate_dim2

double variable in the range of [-1,1] indicating a member's ideological position on societal matters, e.g. LBGT rights or slavery. Lower values indicate anti-establishment positions, higher values indicate pro-establishment positions.

Details

At its core, NOMINATE is a scaling procedure that uses algorithms to arrange politicians in a two-dimensional coordinate system based on their voting behaviour and how they compare to others. The x-axis indicates politicians' positions on ideological matters, and the y-axis indicates positions on societal issues, thereby 'mapping' legislatures. For a detailed explanation of the technical background, see the original paper "A Spatial Model for Legislative Roll Call Analysis" by Poole and Rosenthal (1983).

 

Table: Data summary

Name nominate
Number of rows 49361
Number of columns 9
_______________________
Column type frequency:
character 4
numeric 5
________________________
Group variables None

Variable type: character

skim_variable n_missing complete_rate min max empty n_unique whitespace
chamber 0 1 5 9 0 3 0
state 0 1 2 3 0 51 0
party 0 1 4 27 0 51 0
name 0 1 7 42 0 12184 0

Variable type: numeric

skim_variable n_missing complete_rate mean sd p0 p25 p50 p75 p100 hist
congress 0 1.00 68.67 30.17 1 47.00 72.00 94.00 116 ▃▅▇▇▇
born 184 1.00 1873.43 57.36 1721 1831.00 1876.00 1923.00 1989 ▂▅▇▇▅
died 10337 0.79 1927.17 53.39 1790 1890.00 1931.00 1970.00 2018 ▂▅▆▇▆
nominate_dim1 208 1.00 0.01 0.37 -1 -0.33 -0.04 0.35 1 ▁▇▅▇▁
nominate_dim2 208 1.00 0.02 0.47 -1 -0.30 -0.01 0.31 1 ▂▆▇▅▃

Author(s)

David Kane

Source

https://voteview.com/data


davidkane9/PPBDS.data documentation built on Nov. 18, 2020, 1:17 p.m.