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unitedstates / congress-legislators

Members of the United States Congress, 1789-Present, in YAML/JSON/CSV, as well as committees, presidents, and vice presidents.
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Gaps between term end and next term start #130

Closed bchartoff closed 11 years ago

bchartoff commented 11 years ago

A number of legislators have large gaps between the end of one term and the start of their next. At the heart of my concern is determining how the "end" fields of terms are/were populated (excluding the more straight-forward cases of retirement and death, which do not apply to this issue, which deals with gaps between terms). I ran a quick and dirty script to find these gaps for currently serving legislators (defined n/n+1 term gap as larger than 60 days), and limited to terms where the n+1st term started in january: https://gist.github.com/bchartoff/6273385 and the results https://gist.github.com/bchartoff/6273553

even with these limitations, I found 398 gaps for 130 unique legislators. However this only corresponds to 18 unique end dates. It appears that these dates are linked to congresses, not to legislators (a spot check of the legislators-historical yaml helped confirm). So what do these dates correspond to? Can they be determined programatically (based on last roll call vote?) Right now it's unclear (and therefore potentially misleading) what the "end" field represents.

JoshData commented 11 years ago

It's the adjournment date of the Congress. Should correspond to the dates listed here: http://www.govtrack.us/data/us/sessions.tsv

Also see issue #7. Please don't do any massive changes to dates until some sort of 'congress' field is added to terms.

konklone commented 11 years ago

OK, thanks for filing this, @bchartoff - I'm going to close this as essentially a dupe of #7. If you'd like to tackle #7, that's one way to resolve this. Actually merging that PR would be more of a @tauberer decision, since date changes create work for him and GovTrack. We'd certainly want to do them all at once, while adding a congress field to each term.

GPHemsley commented 11 years ago

FTR, I still think it'd be a good idea to keep the terms year-round (i.e. beginning and ending on January 3rd).

konklone commented 11 years ago

I think that's the plan. The congress field would be used so you don't have to make date inferences to establish the congress of the term.

GPHemsley commented 11 years ago

I believe that was issue #18, which was closed due to inactivity.