VoteView International Rollcall Database Project Underway

The aim of the VoteView project is to build a central website which would archive, maintain, and distribute datasets of roll-call voting from legislative bodies throughout the international community. The nucleus of the website contains data for the United States House of Representative and Senate (assembled by Keith Poole of Houston and Howard Rosenthal of Princeton) and from the European Parliament (assembled by Simon Hix of LSE, Abdul Noury of ULB and Gerard Roland from UC Berkeley). The United States data covers the entire history of Congress from 1789 until the present. VoteView International will be a project of the Institute for European Studies at Berkeley with the support of the Institute of Governmental Studies.

Not only will researchers from all over the world be able to access this unique website to download data, but also upload their own datasets and papers. Such supplimentary material available to the website may include United Nations General Assembly data compiled by Erik Voeten of George Washington University, data on the Czech and Polish Parliaments assembled by Noury and Roland, and data on Latin American Parliaments assembled by John Carey and his collaborators.

The main challenge is to create some "open source" software standards to allow other datasets projects from other legislatures to be available on the same website. Without such standards, maintenance of such a website would be cumbersome. Keith Poole is currently doing a great service to the research community by maintaining his website for the US Congress but given the growth of research, it has become necessary to develop a common platform allowing all researchers to easily upload their databases on roll call data. Such a database would make an enormous contribution to the development of scientific knowledge relating to a wide variety of fields in the social sciences. Howard Rosenthal, one of the designers of VoteView, is in the process of retiring from Princeton and has become a Visiting Scholar at Berkeley. He will actively participate in the development of the software and the Berkeley website.

A "narrow" mission for the website would be to provide a mirror site for current website and software standards for future developments. The VoteView platform could be improved with an eye to improved access for the current user base, which is largely academic faculty and graduate students in the social sciences and historians. A more ambitious mission would be to improve the VoteView interface to where it could be used actively by undergraduates at small colleges and by high school students. (VoteView is currently used in introductory American politics courses including those taught by Nolan McCarty at Princeton and Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey at the London School of Economics).

The website will also serve an important archival purpose. After the development of the Nominate scaling method by Poole and Rosenthal in the 1980s, the assembly of large legislative roll call datasets "took off." These datasets have permanent value to the research community. It is important to find a means of institutionalizing their availability in order that access will transcend the research careers of the scholars who have assembled them. This involves not only keeping the existing datasets on the web but in keeping the datasets current. For example, the United States Congress now spans 1789 through 2000. Keeping it current will, at some point, require institutional support.

Comparative data on legislative voting can be widely used not only by political scientists but also by economists, sociologists and historians. It will also allow non-academics -- specifically high-school and middle-school students -- to look at roll call votes the day after (or as soon as they are posted) they occur. This educational potential for VoteView is tremendous.