propublica-congress-api

Analysis of Congressional Activity

Overview

Using the Congress API, you can retrieve legislative data from the House of Representatives, the Senate and the Library of Congress. The API, which originated at The New York Times in 2009, includes details about members, votes, bills and other aspects of congressional activity.

Goals

Use the Congress API to examine voting patterns of local representatives and comparing trends at a state and national level.

Project Roadmap

None at this point

Data Source

Data obtained through Propublica Congress API NOTE: You must get the API Key to use this API. Contact [email protected] for the key and instructions to use.

Getting Started with R

This project has been created and initialized with Packrat (a package management system for enhanced reprodicibility in R). This means that if you need additional libraries, just run install.packages() and the resulting packages will be installed in the packrat library so that other users will have exactly the same configuration as you! Plus, this won't mess with your existing set of installed packages on your personal computer. Here is a simple workflow with Packrat:

> install.packages('xml2')
> packrat::snapshot(prompt = FALSE)
Adding these packages to packrat:
         _      
    xml2   1.0.0