| readKH {pscl} | R Documentation |
Creates a rollcall object from the flat file format for roll
call data used by
Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal.
readKH(file,
dtl=NULL,
yea=c(1,2,3),
nay=c(4,5,6),
missing=c(7,8,9),
notInLegis=0,
desc=NULL,
debug=FALSE)
file |
string, name of a file or URL holding KH data |
dtl |
string, name of a file or URL holding KH dtl file
(information about votes); default is NULL, indicating no
dtl file |
yea |
numeric, possibly a vector, code(s) for a Yea vote in the
rollcall context (or a correct answer in the educational testing
context). Default is c(1,2,3), which corresponds to Yea,
Paired Yea, and Announced Yea in Poole/Rosenthal data files. |
nay |
numeric, possibly a vector, code(s) for a Nay vote in the
rollcall context (or an incorrect answer in the educational testing
context). Default is c(4,5,6), which corresponds to
Announced Nay, Paired Nay, and Nay in Poole/Rosenthal data files. |
missing |
numeric and/or NA, possible a vector, code(s)
for missing data. Default is c(0,7,8,9,NA); the first four
codes correspond to Not Yet a Member, Present (some Congresses),
Present (some Congresses), and Not Voting. |
notInLegis |
numeric or NA, possibly a vector, code(s) for
the legislator not being in the legislature when a particular roll
call was recorded (e.g., deceased, retired, yet to be
elected). Default is 0 for Poole/Rosenthal data files. |
desc |
string, describing the data, e.g., 82nd U.S. House
of Representatives; default is NULL |
debug |
logical, print debugging information for net connection |
Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal have gathered an impressive collection of roll call data, spanning every roll call cast in the United States Congress. This effort continues now as a real-time exercise, via a collaboration with Jeff Lewis (109th Congress onwards). Nolan McCarty collaborated on the compilation of roll call data for the 102nd through 108th Congress.
This function relies on some hard-coded features of Poole-Rosenthal
flat files, and assumes that the file being supplied has the following
structure (variable, start-end columns):
This function reads data files in that format, and creates a
rollcall, for which there are useful methods such as
summary.rollcall. The legis.data component of the
rollcall object is a data.frame which
contains:
stateicpsrStatecdicpsrLegispartyNameparty
The rownames attribute of this data frame is a
concatenation of the legislators' names, party abbreviations (for
Democrats and Republicans) and state, and (where appropriate), a
district number; e.g., Bonner (R AL-1). This tag is also
provided in the legis.name component of the returned rollcall
object.
Poole and Rosenthal also make dtl files available for
Congresses 1 through 106. These files contain information about the
votes themselves, in a multiple-line per vote ascii format, and
reside in the dtl director of Poole's web site, e.g.,
ftp://pooleandrosenthal.com/dtl/102s.dtl is the dtl file for
the 102nd Senate. The default is to presume that no such file exists.
When a dtl file is available, and is read, the
votes.data attribute of the resulting rollcall
object is a data.frame with one record per vote, with
the following variables:
dateDate, date of the
rollcall, if available; otherwise NULLdescriptioncharacter, descriptive
text
The dtl files are presumed to have the date of the rollcall in
the first line of text for each roll call, and lines 3 onwards contain
descriptive text.
Finally, note also that the Poole/Rosenthal data sets often include the U.S. President as a pseudo-legislator, adding the announced positions of a president or the administration to the roll call matrix. This adds an extra “legislator” to the data set and can sometimes produce suprising results (e.g., a U.S. Senate of 101 senators), and a “legislator” with a surprisingly low party loyalty score (since the President/administration only announces positions on a relatively small fraction of all Congressional roll calls).
an object of class rollcall, with components created
using the identifying information in the Poole/Rosenthal files. If
the function can not read the file (e.g., the user specified a URL and
the machine is not connected to the Internet), the function fails with
an error message (set debug=TRUE to help resolve these issues).
Simon Jackman jackman@stanford.edu
Poole, Keith and Howard Rosenthal. 1997. Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll Call Voting. New York: Oxford University Press.
Poole, Keith. http://voteview.ucsd.edu
Rosenthal, Howard L. and Keith T. Poole. United States Congressional Roll Call Voting Records, 1789-1990: Reformatted Data [computer file]. 2nd ICPSR release. Pittsburgh, PA: Howard L. Rosenthal and Keith T. Poole, Carnegie Mellon University, Graduate School of Industrial Administration [producers], 1991. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2000. http://webapp.icpsr.umich.edu/cocoon/ICPSR-STUDY/09822.xml
## Not run:
h107 <- readKH("ftp://voteview.com/hou107kh.ord",
desc="107th U.S. House of Representatives")
s107 <- readKH("ftp://voteview.com/sen107kh.ord",
desc="107th U.S. Senate")
## Jeff Lewis has quasi-real-time roll call data on his site
## in the Poole/Rosenthal format
s110 <- readKH("http://adric.sscnet.ucla.edu/rollcall/static/S110.ord",
desc="110th U.S. Senate (2007-08)",
debug=TRUE)
## End(Not run)