Voting data

Source: R/FFTreesdata_doc.R

A dataset of votes for each of the U.S. House of Representatives Congressmen on the 16 key votes identified by the CQA.

voting

Format

A data frame containing 435 rows and 16 columns.

handicapped

handicapped-infants, logical (TRUE, FALSE)

water

water-project-cost-sharing, logical (TRUE, FALSE)

adoption

adoption-of-the-budget-resolution, logical (TRUE, FALSE)

physician

physician-fee-freeze, logical (TRUE, FALSE)

elsalvador

el-salvador-aid, logical (TRUE, FALSE)

religionschool

religious-groups-in-schools, logical (TRUE, FALSE)

satellite

anti-satellite-test-ban, logical (TRUE, FALSE)

nicaraguan

aid-to-nicaraguan-contras, logical (TRUE, FALSE)

mxmissile

mxmissile, logical (TRUE, FALSE)

immigration

immigration, logical (TRUE, FALSE)

synfuels

synfuels-corporation-cutback, logical (TRUE, FALSE)

education

education-spending, logical (TRUE, FALSE)

superfund

superfund-right-to-sue, logical (TRUE, FALSE)

crime

crime, logical (TRUE, FALSE)

dutyfree

duty-free-exports, logical (TRUE, FALSE)

southafrica

export-administration-act-south-africa, logical (TRUE, FALSE)

party.crit

Criterion: Where the voters democratic (or republican) congressmen?

Values: TRUE (democrat) / FALSE (republican) (61.52% vs. 38.48%).

Details

The CQA lists nine different types of votes: Voted for, paired for, and announced for (these three simplified to yea), voted against, paired against, and announced against (these three simplified to nay), voted present, voted present to avoid conflict of interest, and did not vote or otherwise make a position known (these three simplified to an unknown disposition).

We made the following enhancements to the original data for improved usability:

  • Any missing values, denoted as "?" in the dataset, were transformed into NAs.

  • Binary factor variables with exclusive "y" and "n" values were converted to logical TRUE/FALSE vectors.

  • The binary character criterion variable with exclusive "democrat" and "republican" values was converted to a logical TRUE/FALSE vector.

Other than that, the data remains consistent with the original dataset.

References

Congressional Quarterly Almanac, 98th Congress, 2nd session 1984, Congressional Quarterly Inc., Volume XL. Washington, D.C., 1985.