This page contains recent roll call voting data from the California Assembly and Senate. The data are culled from
webpages of the California legislature. Zip archives are provided for each two-year session. Each zip file
contains two files:
caYY-YYvotes.dat: A matrix of all votes cast by every member of both chambers in committee and
on the floor. Votes are recorded as:
| Value | Vote |
|---|
| 1 | 'Yea' |
| 6 | 'No' |
| 9 | 'Not voting/not present' |
| 0 | 'Not in chamber or on committee' |
caYY-YYdesc.dat: A tab separated file describing the location, sponsor, content, and outcome of each vote taken. The fields are the following:
| Column Number | Variable |
|---|
| 1 | Vote column in the vote matrix |
| 2 | Bill number |
| 3 | Sponsor/Author |
| 4 | Topic |
| 5 | Date |
|
| Column Number | Variable |
|---|
| 6 | Location |
| 7 | Motion |
| 8 | Yeas |
| 9 | Noes |
| 10 | Pass/Fail |
|
The rollcall data matrices are large as they include every vote
taken in both chambers including both committee and floor votes. The R
language functions included in calrollcall.R
can be used to create subsets of these large vote matrices based on
given criteria allowing the user to pull votes from a given chamber or
committee or from given dates, and so forth.
These data are provided without guarantee of their accuracy. Please feel free to point out any problems that you might find. Please attribute these data to me if you use them in your work and send links to the working papers and publications that use these data.