Political Science

Provides real-time data on roll call votes, members' of Congress voting histories and their ideology (using NOMINATE scores, a way of spatially measuring ideology on a liberal-conservative economic axis and on a salient "issues of the day" axis), and party ideology scores for each individual Congress back to 1789. Also has a searchable interface and many visualization options. Data in csv and JSON formats.

Tables cover member demographics, congressional elections, campaign finance, committees, staff and operating expenses, workload and productivity, action on the federal budget, polarization and voting alignments. Data in Excel format; dates vary, but generally 1950-present.

Compiles information at the level of the individual legislator on biography, party membership, elections, and committee membership. Legislative data include roll call votes for each member, roll calls coded by issue, roll call text, presidential requests for legislative action and roll calls held in response. Data in delimited, STATA, SPSS, and SAS formats. 1789-1989.

Provides information about more than 400,000 bills introduced in the U.S. Congress along with extensive information about each bill's progress and sponsor. The bills database uses Poole and Rosenthal's ICPSR member IDs to incorporate biographical and institutional position information about each bill's sponsor. Also classifies each bill's title according to the topic coding system of the Policy Agendas Project. Each bill is designated to be primarily about one major topic and one subtopic. Data in .tsv format; 1947-present.

Roll call votes from the House (83rd Congress/1953-present) and Senate (91st Congress/1969-present) utilizing an extensive coding for procedural vote type, party unity, Southern/Northern coalitions, presidential position. Also includes Policy Agenda codes.

Dataset estimating the legislative significance of all enacted public laws from 1877-1994 (more than 37,000). Significance is determined by using the ratings of both contemporaneous and retrospective sources. Each law includes Congress number and session, date of passage, public law number, bill number, originating committee, description, and page length. See Clinton and Lapinski (2006). “Measuring Legislative Accomplishment, 1877-1994,” American Journal of Political Science 50(1):232-49.

This dataset contains metadata for every bill introduced, including sponsors, cosponsors, committee actions, floor votes and a summary, along with the data of the last modification to the bill. Data in XML from 93rd Congress (1973) to present.

Official GPO bulk data repository for Congressional bill text and status from the 113th Congress (2013-2014) to present. Data can be retrieved in either XML or JSON formats.

Nonprofit dedicated to tracking legislation and legislators in the US. Pulls in bills and resolution data and text from THOMAS and GPO (103rd Congress/1993-present; selected historical data), provides voting records of representatives and senators back to 1789 (THOMAS for recent and VOTEVIEW data for older votes), and biographical (1789-present) and committee data (93rd Congress/1973-present) from various sources.

Bulk download of bills and legislative tracking information for Congress and the 50 states. Requires free registration. Downloads in JSON, XML, and CSV. Generally, late 2000s-present.

Interactive visualization for exploring patterns of lawmaking in Congress from the 93rd Congress (1973)- 114th Congress (2015-16). Includes information about the legislative histories, topics and sponsors of more than 250,000 bills and resolutions. Can be filtered by individual member, by party, by topic, and more. Bulk data downloads available.

Measures the political liberalism/conservatism of states, congressional districts, state senate and assembly districts, and cities using responses to survey questions by 275,000 Americans who participated in the Annenberg National Election Study and the Cooperative Congressional Election Study from 2000 to 2011. Data is coded using district boundaries from both before and after the 2010 Census redistricting. Data in .csv format.

Presidential Support Tables listed yearly in the CQ Almanac. Lists all the roll calls on which the president took a stand and how members of Congress voted relative to his position. PDF tables and analysis; 1953+.

Biographical directory of all members of Congress from 1774 to present. Can search by name, position, state, party, year, or Congress number. For bulk download of data, see Govtrack's github page. 1774-present.

Compiled by the House Clerk, various tables about women in Congress. Includes a full list of all female representatives and senators by Congress and by state; committee assignments (by committee); female committee chairs; women of color; and more. 1917-present.

Compiled by the House Clerk, various tables about Black Americans in Congress. Includes a full list of all Black Representatives and Senators by Congress and by state; committee assignments (by committee); committee chairs; Black Caucus leaders, and more. 1870-present.

Contains over two hundred pieces of information about each case decided by the Court, including variables about background and identification (e.g., docket numbers, originating court, chronology), substance of the case (e.g., legal provisions at issue), outcomes (e.g., winning party, alteration of precedent), and voting by the justices (e.g., size of winning coalition, who dissented). Currently covers 1946-2014 terms. Data available in multiple formats. Site also supports various kinds of online analysis.

These datasets contain the Martin-Quinn scores for the October 1937 through the October 2019 term of the U.S. Supreme Court. The Justices dataset contains the ideal point estimates and other quantities of interest for each justice in each term. The Court dataset contains court-specific quantities, including the estimated location of the median justice. All datasets are provided as ASCII text files, Stata DTA files, Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, and SPSS SAV files. We ask that if you use these scores in your work, please cite the following article:

Project by Keith Whittington catalogs all the cases in which the U.S. Supreme Court has substantively reviewed the constitutionality of a provision or application of a federal law, both those upholding and invalidating provisions of federal statutes. Currently includes 1308 cases decided by the Court from its founding through its October 2017 term and related pieces of information about those cases. Data in Excel.

Provides statistical data and analysis on the business of the federal judiciary, including appellate, district, and bankruptcy courts; the probation and pretrial services systems; and other components of the U.S. courts. Download in Excel and PDF, 1990-present.

95% of all cases in the U.S. are filed in state courts. CSP collects and publishes state court caseload data from the courts of the fifty states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and Guam. In addition to caseload statistics, it also has data on how state courts are organized and administered. Annual data from 2012 on; download in Excel.

Puts international statistical databases within easy reach of users through a single-entry point. Users can search and download a variety of statistical resources compiled by the United Nations (UN) statistical system and other international agencies. The numerous databases or tables contain over 60 million data points and cover a wide range of statistical themes including agriculture, crime, communication, development assistance, education, energy, environment, finance, gender, health, labour market, manufacturing, national accounts, population and migration, science and technology, tourism, transport and trade.

Eurostat is the statistical office of the European Union.

Provides links to country statistical yearbooks or similar collections (census, "facts and figures," etc.) for 154 countries worldwide.

This is a dataset of roll-call votes in the UN General Assembly 1946-2017. It also contains Affinity of Nations scores and ideal point estimates derived from these votes but only until 2015 (I will update these shortly). The Bailey, Strezhnev, and Voeten article cited below explains why ideal point estimates rather than Affinity scores should be used. Please check back frequently for updates on the ideal point estimates as we are performing some sensitivity tests. (2017-03)