Students of political science have long been interested in evaluating the dynamics of legislative behavior. A primary data source for these investigations has been the roll call votes of legislators in the U.S. Congress. This project involves the preparation of cleaned versions of the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research's (ICPSR, University of Michigan) roll call data files for both Houses of Congress from 1789 to 1985. In a prior research project the investigators discovered numerous errors in the coding of legislators' party codes, state codes, identification numbers, etc. Further evaluation of these data indicates that the data set is replete with additional data errors. The investigators will prepare a version of the tapes for public use in which the errors have been corrected. In addition, the tapes will be reformatted in a form that makes the data more accessible to use on personal computers. The ICPSR tapes are ordered by roll call. Frequently, however, scholars are interested in identifying the voting record for a given individual. The investigators will use the supercomputers at the Princeton Supercomputer Center to transpose the entire data set (consisting of some 15,000,000 vote choices). The researchers will produce data tapes on which the vote choices are arranged by individual legislator. These cleaned data tapes will be made available to the ICPSR for use by scholars interested in legislative behavior.
