DOI: 10.3886/icpsr07645
title: Voting Scores for Members of the United States Congress, 1945-1982
title: Archival Version

description: This data collection contains voting scores taken from the
 CONGRESSIONAL QUARTERLY ALMANAC, a publication of Congressional
 Quarterly, Inc. (CQ) for the years 1945 to 1982 (79th-97th
 Congresses). Part 1 contains voting scores for members of the United
 States Senate, and Part 2 contains such scores for the members of the
 United States House of Representatives. In both parts, the unit of
 analysis is the individual member of Congress. The identification
 variables in each file include member name, member's state, and
 member's party. In most instances a set of scores is presented for
 each member of Congress, for each session of the Congress, and for the
 Congress as a whole (both sessions). For the 96th and 97th Congresses
 (1979-1980, 1981-1982) scores for both sessions combined are not
 provided. The major types of CQ voting scores in the data collection
 are: (1) "voting participation score," indicating member's attendance
 (not to be confused with the CQ "on the record" score which shows how
 often the member has taken a stand on all issues), (2) "partisan
 voting score," calculated on a subset of the total roll calls that CQ
 designated as "party unity" roll calls, e.g., roll calls in which a
 majority of voting Democrats opposed a majority of voting Republicans
 (with exceptions in the 83rd and 88th Congresses when a "party voting"
 score was released), (3) "bipartisan voting score," consistently
 figured by CQ on a subset of the total bipartisan roll calls, i.e.,
 those in which a majority of Democrats and a majority of Republicans
 voted the same way (until 1978 when the score was no longer reported),
 (4)"conservative coalition score," based on a subset of roll calls in
 which a majority of voting Southern Democrats and a majority of voting
 Republicans opposed the position of a majority of voting Northern
 Democrats, (5) "presidential issues score," which rates members on
 those roll calls dealing with issues on which the president has
 clearly and previously stated a personal position (from 1955 to 1970,
 this score was further subdivided into support scores for foreign and
 for domestic policies of the president), (6) "federal role score,"
 which gauges the Congressperson's support and opposition of moves for
 a larger or smaller federal role (in earlier Congresses, CQ used a
 similar process to figure "economy support," opposition scores that
 were designed to represent a member's position on moves to limit or
 increase federal spending), and (7) a set of interest group scores
 taken from the CQ WEEKLY REPORTS and added to the two data files (for
 the years 1960 to 1982) that score each Congressperson's support of
 interest groups, i.e., Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), the
 Americans for Constitutional Action (ACA), the Committee on Political
 Education (COPE), and the National Farmers Union (NFU). Interest
 group ratings are included only for each session, not for the entire
 Congresses. (Beginning with the 1978 session, NFU rating scores were
no longer included.)
description: Datasets: 
DS0: Study-Level Files
DS1: Senate
DS2: House of Representatives
description: United States Congresspersons who were in office between
1945 and 1982.
description: (1) The data were prepared, keypunched, and processed
 from published CONGRESSIONAL QUARTERLY ALMANACs by the ICPSR
 staff. (2) The major types of voting scores were not tabulated by CQ
 for every session and every Congress. Especially in the first years of
 its release, Congressional Quarterly had not yet standardized its
 voting studies feature. It is possible to find a variety of scores
 that occur only once. (In the Senate file for the First Session of the
 82nd Congress there is a unique variable for bipartisan voting on
 military issues and veterans' affairs.) There are also instances in which
 CQ offered only the raw totals normally used to compute its standard
 voting scores. Users will note that for the 79th Congress, Second
 Session, there are three variables related to voting participation:
 number of times voted "yea" or "nay" on all roll calls, number
 of times answered "present," and number of times absent for all roll
 calls. No standard voting participation score was calculated by CQ for
 that session. Scholars are also advised to check the original
 CONGRESSIONAL QUARTERLY ALMANAC and CONGRESSIONAL QUARTERLY WEEKLY
 REPORT for discussions of the methods used to derive particular
 voting scores. It should be noted, for instance, that absences did not
 usually affect a member's scores in the first years of the CQ voting
 studies. Beginning in 1955, failures to vote were calculated as
 negative responses, thus lowering all types of scores except for the
 federal role support scores and some of the interest group
 scores. Such changes in the derivation of the voting scores may
 influence the user's analysis of the data. (3) The data map is
 provided as an ASCII text file, and the codebook is provided by ICPSR
 as a Portable Document Format (PDF) file. The PDF file format was
 developed by Adobe Systems Incorporated and can be accessed using PDF
 reader software, such as the Adobe Acrobat Reader. Information on how
 to obtain a copy of the Acrobat Reader is provided on the ICPSR Web
site.