WARNING: This package is under construction. Please be patient and leave issues here on Github or contact Luke Sonnet with any questions.
This is a package that enables you to query the Voteview database for roll calls and work with data frames or a pscl rollcall object.
To install this package, run the following (note you have to have devtools installed first):
# install.packages('devtools')
devtools::install_github("voteview/Rvoteview")For more thorough documentation, see the help files for individual functions and the vignette at this link here.
To use Rvoteview, you generally want to search the database to get a list of vote ids and then use those to return the individual votes. We query the database with a search term and some parameters to constrain the search. The default behavior is to search any words as key words, returning the roll calls that best match any key words you enter. Again, there are further examples in the vignette.
So let's start with a search for roll calls with the key word "Iraq".
library(Rvoteview)
res <- voteview_search("Iraq")
#> Warning in strptime(x, fmt, tz = "GMT"): unknown timezone 'default/America/
#> Los_Angeles'
#> Query 'Iraq' returned 345 rollcalls...
names(res)
#> [1] "id" "congress" "chamber"
#> [4] "rollnumber" "date" "yea"
#> [7] "nay" "support" "vote_result"
#> [10] "short_description" "question" "text"
#> [13] "key_flags" "score" "bill_number"
#> [16] "sponsor" "codes.Issue" "codes.Peltzman"
#> [19] "codes.Clausen"
## I will drop description since it is a very long field
res[1:5, 1:5]
#> id congress chamber rollnumber date
#> 1 RH1051102 105 House 1102 1998-10-05
#> 2 RH1010654 101 House 654 1990-08-02
#> 3 RH1020109 102 House 109 1991-05-22
#> 4 RH1020081 102 House 81 1991-05-09
#> 5 RH1050998 105 House 998 1998-08-03Using res$id we can get a rollcall object (from the pscl package) that contains the full set of votes and data for each roll call.
## Get a rollcall object using the ids, please limit to a few ids for now!
rc <- voteview_download(res$id[1:10])
#> Downloading 10 rollcalls
#> Reading vote data for 10 rollcalls
#> Building vote matrix
#> Building legis.data matrix
#> Building rollcall object, may take some time...## Now this object can be used in many 'pscl' methods
summary(rc)
#> Source: Download from VoteView
#>
#> Number of Legislators: 898
#> Number of Roll Call Votes: 10
#>
#>
#> Using the following codes to represent roll call votes:
#> Yea: 1 2 3
#> Nay: 4 5 6
#> Abstentions: 7 8 9
#> Not In Legislature: 0
#>
#> Party Composition:
#> 100 200 328
#> 455 442 1
#>
#> Vote Summary:
#> Count Percent
#> 0 (notInLegis) 4638 51.6
#> 1 (yea) 3491 38.9
#> 3 (yea) 1 0.0
#> 6 (nay) 636 7.1
#> 8 (missing) 2 0.0
#> 9 (missing) 212 2.4
#>
#> Use summary(rc,verbose=TRUE) for more detailed information.You also have lots of metadata on roll calls and legislators in various data frames. For example, we can see some legislator metadata:
rc$legis.long.dynamic[1:5, 1:5]
#> id icpsr name party_code state_abbrev
#> 1 MP10199908 99908 BUSH, George Herbert Walker 200 USA
#> 2 MH10115090 15090 CALLAHAN, Herbert Leon (Sonny) 200 AL
#> 3 MH10110717 10717 DICKINSON, William Louis 200 AL
#> 4 MH10115632 15632 BROWDER, John Glen 100 AL
#> 5 MH10111000 11000 BEVILL, Tom 100 ALYou can also search by start and end date, congress, and chamber. Please see the help files for each function after you install the package to see a little more about how they work.
## Voteview search with options
res <- voteview_search(
"Iraq",
chamber = "House",
congress = 110:112,
enddate = "2013-04-20"
)
#> Query '(Iraq) AND (enddate:2013-04-20) AND (congress:110 111 112) AND (chamber:house)' returned 49 rollcalls...
res[1:5, 1:5]
#> id congress chamber rollnumber date
#> 1 RH1100711 110 House 711 2007-07-25
#> 2 RH1100418 110 House 418 2007-05-24
#> 3 RH1100419 110 House 419 2007-05-24
#> 4 RH1111048 111 House 1048 2010-02-24
#> 5 RH1100920 110 House 920 2007-10-02We can print out the exact query that the function builds using all of these arguments by retrieving the 'qstring' attribute of the returned data frame:
attr(res, "qstring")
#> [1] "(Iraq) AND (enddate:2013-04-20) AND (congress:110 111 112) AND (chamber:house)"We can assemble and use these complex queries ourselves. Here's one example where we look for all roll calls with the key words "estate", "death", or "tax" and was held in the 100th to the 114th Congress.
## Voteview search with options
res <- voteview_search("(alltext:estate death tax congress:[100 to 114])")
#> Query '(alltext:estate death tax congress:[100 to 114])' returned 2035 rollcalls...
res[1:5, 1:5]
#> id congress chamber rollnumber date
#> 1 RH1060861 106 House 861 2000-06-09
#> 2 RH1061064 106 House 1064 2000-09-07
#> 3 RH1060860 106 House 860 2000-06-09
#> 4 RH1060856 106 House 856 2000-06-08
#> 5 RH1060855 106 House 855 2000-06-08You can also search for member data using the member_search function.
res <- member_search("Paul", state = "KY")
res[1:5, 1:5]
#> id icpsr bioname party_code cqlabel
#> 1 MS11241104 41104 PAUL, Rand 200 (KY)
#> 2 MS11341104 41104 PAUL, Rand 200 (KY)
#> 3 MS11441104 41104 PAUL, Rand 200 (KY)
#> 4 MS11541104 41104 PAUL, Rand 200 (KY)
#> 5 MH10015406 15406 BUNNING, James Paul David 200 (KY-04)
