Indicate whether senate (originally: senate & executive) term is elected, appointed, or something else

[dwillis]

Would cover cases like LBJ's first "term" and senate appointments to fill vacancies.

[UPDATE: Executive is done. Just senate left.]

[konklone]

Would this be importable from the NYT API as a starting point?

[dwillis]

Once I put it in there, yes :-)

[JoshData]

I'd be glad to see this added too.

This will be added to every term for which you have info? So a term will be something like either be "how: election", "how: appointment", or missing if we don't know? (The alternative, only labeling appointments, would be confusing in historical data where you couldn't distinguish elections from we-didn't-add-the-data-yet.)

[dwillis]

Yes, the goal is to have it for every term for which we have information. Not sure what the key is ("how" or "manner" or something else), but something like that. Remember that prior to 1913 or so, senators weren't directly elected anyway, so there's a good bit of variation in that older stuff.

[GPHemsley]

So, I assume "election" and "succession" are appropriate values for president. Do we want to be more specific e.g. when the House has to settle an electoral dispute?

[GPHemsley]

Also, do we want to give separate reasons for start and end? (Lost re-election, died in office, assassinated, etc.)

[konklone]

I think let's just stick to manner of assumption of the office, per-term, for now.

I'm not sure what all the possible values are. For the House, "election", "special election"...for the Senate, "election", "special election", "appointed", "legislature election" (pre-1913)?

[dwillis]

Election and succession are great, thanks! We probably do want to be more specific for when the House decides, yeah. I've got "end reasons" for a limited number of lawmakers, but that would be interesting to add at some point. Possible values are "elected", "appointed", "special election", I think, and we can tackle the pre-1913 stuff later.

[konklone]

Has anyone ever been appointed to the House, or is that Senate only?

[dwillis]

I don't believe so, no, but will try to find out. Once, a serving House member was living in a Virginia district which then became an entirely separate state (Kentucky), from which he was elected Senator. Seriously.

[GPHemsley]

43 addresses presidents.

[GPHemsley]

I'm not sure it's necessary to differentiate between a general election and a special election, at least not at this first pass. (Similarly with House electoral decisions.) Maybe later we can have another field for election details.

And, to be explicit, we want to use nouns not verbs (just so that we pick one): so, "election" and "appointment" over "elected" and "appointed". For the state-chosen Senators, we might be able to get away with just "legislature".

[dwillis]

That seems fine by me, although I'm more likely to gather general/special election distinction at the same time as other details.

[konklone]

We should maintain the distinction between general and special. We're gonna collect this data anyway, let's not miss it and go back later.

Special vs general matters, when you're looking qualitatively at someone's power base, whether they've ever fundraised, whether they're a temporary figurehead or a real figure, newsy stuff like that. Let's just keep it, as we take the time to update our history.

We can keep it in a more formal way, like "election:special" or something, so that it's easy to just care about elected vs not.

-- Eric On Mar 5, 2013 7:28 PM, "Derek Willis" notifications@github.com wrote:

That seems fine by me, although I'm more likely to gather general/special election distinction at the same time as other details.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/unitedstates/congress-legislators/issues/41#issuecomment-14474956 .

[GPHemsley]

If we do it that way, then we'll also need "election:electoral" (or similar) and "election:house" (or similar) for president. The general/special election values wouldn't be appropriate, because of the electoral college. We might also use different succession values, e.g. death, assassination, resignation, etc.

Incidentally, has anyone looked to see if there are different ways the various states elected their senators? This would be similar to the other types of election distinctions.

[konklone]

For presidents, "elected" and "assumed" are the only values we'd need. For House, it's just "elected:general" and "elected:special" (or however we format them, it's not that important). The values don't have to be harmonized across roles, just enough to delineate the ways that that role can be acquired.

The Senate is the only tricky one, and the value in distinguishing how states elected their senators pre-1913 is small. I'm fine with declaring every Senator elected pre-1913 to be elected "by legislature", despite the fact that some legislatures crafted weird laws to allow popular votes for Senate while technically complying with the Constitution. I'm also fine with just calling them "elected", whether it's pre- or post-1913. So Senate would be "elected:general", "elected:special", "appointed", and maybe "elected:legislature".

Let's keep it simple enough that we can accomplish it, close the ticket, and move on. :)

[dwillis]

Is there any objection to adding a "congress" attribute to the terms for current and historical legislators? Figure it would be nice to provide the ability to quickly grab everyone who served in a particular congress without having to know the opening and closing dates.

[konklone]

No objection here.

[GPHemsley]

@dwillis @konklone That was #18, which was closed due to inaction.

[dwillis]

And there's a reason why #18 was closed - this will take a little time, particularly to generate accurate congress-based terms. I'll start with senators and then see how bad it is before proceeding to reps.

[JoshData]

Just merged @GPHemsley's work adding "how: election|succession" to executive.yaml.

[GPHemsley]

...which now needs to be updated for vice presidents.

Except now we'll need 'election' and 'appointment', I think.

[GPHemsley]

The executives (both Presidents and Vice Presidents) now all have a 'how' field associated with each of their terms.

Possible values for the 'how' field are:

• election – Person was elected to the position (e.g. by the Electoral College)
• succession – Person succeeded to the position to fill a vacancy (e.g. President)
• appointment – Person was appointed to the position to fill a vacancy (e.g. Vice President)

These are the only possible options for executives, AFAICT, but other values are likely needed for legislators.

[GPHemsley]

@dwillis Has there been any progress on the 'congress' field? How hard is it to calculate?

[dwillis]

Not a lot of progress, unfortunately, but I haven't made much of an effort to calculate it programmatically, since especially in the early congresses there was a lot of variation in begin and end dates.

[GPHemsley]

Was this work ever completed, or is this still pending?