Create dataset of representative voting records

[gati]

This dataset will list how each congressional representative and senator voted in the house and senate, respectively.

Ultimately, the goal is to see how each candidate's voting record syncs with public opinion, and whether or not that's a useful signal in determining the vulnerability of a house or senate seat in midterm elections.

[milafrerichs]

So I found a very good source. ProPublica has adopted a project from Sunlight Foundation. They have an API where you can get the votes on all bills.

For example: https://api.propublica.org/congress/v1/115/senate/sessions/1/votes/17.json will get you the details of the bill A concurrent resolution setting forth the congressional budget for the United States Government for fiscal year 2017 and setting forth the appropriate budgetary levels for fiscal years 2018 through 2026.", with all votes:

"positions": [{
                    "member_id": "A000360",
                    "vote_position": "Yes",
                    "dw_nominate": ""
                }, {
                    "member_id": "B001230",
                    "vote_position": "No",
                    "dw_nominate": ""
                },
...

[gati]

This is awesome! Is there an endpoint to tie member_id to their real-life name?

What do you think would be next steps for tying bill contents to public opinion (ideally from their district) about the bill?

Good find!

[milafrerichs]

Yes, there is: https://api.propublica.org/congress/v1/115/senate/members.json The documentation can be found here: https://propublica.github.io/congress-api-docs

The next step would be to find bills where there was an opinion poll done by a research institute, find the data behind and tie it to a bill and the vote.

[gati]

oh nice. yes that's a good way to limit the scope. are you up for pursuing that? maybe we could go through that process once, see how hard it is to match an opinion poll and a bill, then decide how hard it'd be to scale that up to all bills in the ProPublica database?

[milafrerichs]

yes, that sounds like a plan. Not sure where I would find representative opinion polls, but I will research that a bit.

[gati]

It might be a little manual, but Pew breaks down their polling/analysis by topic. http://www.pewresearch.org/topics/. Also I know one of the data scientists there, so if that looks fruitful, we might have an in for direct access to datasets. Just let me know!