Preparation and Archiving of Roll Call Data; 1789-1985

政治学专业的学生长期以来一直对评估立法行为的动态感兴趣。这些调查的主要数据来源是美国国会议员的唱名表决。该项目涉及为1789年至1985年期间的国会两院编制大学间政治和社会研究联盟(ICPSR，密歇根大学)的点名数据文件的清理版本。在先前的一项研究项目中，调查人员发现立法者的党号、州代码、身份证号等的编码存在许多错误。对这些数据的进一步评估表明，数据集充满了额外的数据错误。调查人员将准备一个版本的磁带供公众使用，其中的错误已被更正。此外，磁带将被重新格式化，以使数据更容易在个人计算机上使用。ICPSR磁带是以点名方式订购的。然而，学者们经常对确定特定个人的投票记录感兴趣。研究人员将使用普林斯顿超级计算机中心的超级计算机来调换整个数据集(由大约1500万张选票组成)。研究人员将制作数据磁带，由个别立法者在磁带上安排投票选择。这些经过清理的数据磁带将提供给ICPSR，供对立法行为感兴趣的学者使用。

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.