United States Congressional Roll Call Voting Records, 1789-1990: Reformatted Data (ICPSR 9822)

Version Date: Aug 17, 2026

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Principal Investigator(s):
Howard L. Rosenthal, Carnegie Mellon University; Keith T. Poole, Carnegie Mellon University

Series:

https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR09822.v4

Version V4 ()

  • V4 [2026-08-17]
  • V2 [2006-01-12] unpublished
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Summary

This study consists of roll call voting records from the United States Congress, including both the House of Representatives and Senate, from 1789 to 1990. The data is organized by distinct sessions of Congress, from 1st to 100th session of Congress. The units of analysis are individual members of Congress. Each record contains a member's voting action on every roll call vote taken during that session. The data also includes information associated with each record such as name, state, party code, ICPSR ID, member and occupancy codes, and Congress session number. The codebook files also contain supplemental information such as legislative citation codes, the voting date, the outcome tally, the relevant location, and a description of the voting issue.

Citation

Rosenthal, Howard L., and Poole, Keith T. United States Congressional Roll Call Voting Records, 1789-1990: Reformatted Data. Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2026-08-17. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR09822.v4

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Subject Terms

Geographic Coverage

Smallest Geographic Unit

City

Distributor(s)

Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research
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Time Period(s)

1789 -- 1990

Date of Collection

1990 -- 1991

Data Collection Notes

  1. This collection is derived from United States Congressional Roll Call Voting Records, 1789-1998 (ICPSR 00004), and differs from that collection in several ways. Codebooks have been standardized in format across all Congresses, and a number of discrepancies in members' identifying information (member identification number, party, etc.) have been corrected.
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Study Purpose

The purpose of this study is to document the roll call voting outcomes of various bills, resolutions, and legislative actions introduced within each session of the United States Congress from 1789 to 1990.

Study Design

This study is designed to include the result of every member's vote for a given legislative action within a session of the United States Congress, and include additional contextual information to allow for analysis.

Sample

Each data sample is derived from individual members of Congress within a session.

Time Method

Longitudinal: Cohort / Event-based, Longitudinal: Trend / Repeated Cross-section

Universe

All roll call votes in the United States Congress.

Unit(s) of Observation

Individual

Data Source

Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. United States Congressional Roll Call Voting Records, 1789-1998 (ICPSR 00004).

Data Type(s)

Description of Variables

The variables included in the data for this study consist of roll call voting results from individual members of Congress (both House of Representatives and Senate), the name of the Congress members, their state, party code, ICPSR ID, member and occupancy codes, and the particular Congress in which they resided. Codebooks included in this study also contain variables such as legislative citation codes, dates, vote tallies, and descriptions of the legislative action up for vote.

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Original Release Date

1992-10-31

Version History

2026-08-17 This study update includes a reformatting of the previously released data. The data has been converted from unparsed text files into tabular data. Variables have been labeled according to the associated documentation available. Some variables remain unnamed as no additional information was provided. A sequential identifier has also been added to the data files for analytical purposes. The original ASCII codebooks are now available in Excel .xlsx format, the user guide in PDF format, and the data are now available in the full ICPSR product suite.

2018-02-15 The citation of this study may have changed due to the new version control system that has been implemented. The previous citation was:

  • Rosenthal, Howard L., and Keith T. Poole. United States Congressional Roll Call Voting Records, 1789-1990: Reformatted Data. ICPSR09822-v4. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2026-08-17. http://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR09822.v4

2006-01-12 All files were removed from dataset 201 and flagged as study-level files, so that they will accompany all downloads.

2000-07-27 Replacement data files for the House, 1st through 99th Congresses (Parts 1-197, odd) have been provided by the principal investigators. For details on the specific corrections made to this version of the data, users should consult the User Guide. In addition, data for the House's 100th Congress (Part 199) and the entirety of the Senate votes from the 1st-100th Congresses (Parts 2-200, even) have been added, making the collection complete through 1990. Also, a User Guide for All Parts (Part 201) has been added. While the previous version of this collection was available only on diskette, the entire collection is now available online for downloading from the ICPSR Website.

1992-10-31 ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:

  • Performed consistency checks.
  • Created variable labels and/or value labels.

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Notes