U.S. House Roll Call Votes with Vote and Issue Types, 1953-2004

Roll call votes from the 83rd to the 108th Congress (1953-2004) for the U.S. House of Representatives, coded for vote type and issue type. The data was compiled by David W. Rohde and the Political Institutions and Public Choice Program at Michigan State University and last updated in July 2005.

Use Cases

• Modeling legislative voting patterns based on vote type (e.g., rule, amendment, final passage).
• Analyzing party cohesion and polarization trends based on recorded vote margins.
• Training classifiers to predict vote outcomes based on issue type metadata.
• Studying the evolution of specific policy areas over a multi-decade period.

Strengths

• Covers 52 years of legislative history across 26 Congresses.
• Includes coded metadata for vote type and issue type for each roll call.
• Provides vote margins, which can be used to calculate support levels.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Last update date is from 2005; data is not current.

Provenance

Source

David W. Rohde and the Political Institutions and Public Choice Program, Michigan State University.

Collection Method

Compiled from official U.S. House of Representatives roll call records.

Time Range

1953 to 2004 (83rd to 108th Congress).

Freshness

Last updated in July 2005; historical dataset with no recent updates indicated.

Geography

United States federal government.