congress is a dataset of individuals who have served in the US Congress since 1945. Each row is an individual’s spell in a Congressional term in some elected office: US Representative, US Senator, President, or Vice-President.
Installation
The congress package contains term-level data on every US Congressional Representative (House, Senate, Presidency, Vice-Presidency) between 1945 (the 79th Congress) and 2019 (the 116th Congress). The data includes information on the representative’s demographic characteristics and political affiliation.
Installation
congress is a data package. The relatively large size of the data in the package means it is not suitable for hosting on CRAN, the core R package repository. There are two ways to install it.
Install direct from GitHub
You can install the beta version of congress from GitHub with:
devtools::install_github("kjhealy/congress")
Installation using drat
While using install_github() works just fine, it would be nicer to be able to just type install.packages("congress") or update.packages("congress") in the ordinary way. We can do this using Dirk Eddelbuettel’s drat package. Drat provides a convenient way to make R aware of package repositories other than CRAN.
First, install drat:
if (!require("drat")) { install.packages("drat") library("drat") }
Then use drat to tell R about the repository where congress is hosted:
drat::addRepo("kjhealy")
You can now install congress:
install.packages("congress")
To ensure that the congress repository is always available, you can add the following line to your .Rprofile or .Rprofile.site file:
drat::addRepo("kjhealy")
With that in place you’ll be able to do install.packages("congress") or update.packages("congress") and have everything work as you’d expect.
Note that the drat repository only contains data packages that are not on CRAN, so you will never be in danger of grabbing the wrong version of any other package.
Loading the data
The data is stored as a tibble and works best with (but does not strictly require) the tidyverse libraries.
library(tidyverse) #> ── Attaching packages ─────────────────────────────────────── tidyverse 1.3.0 ── #> ✔ ggplot2 3.3.0 ✔ purrr 0.3.3 #> ✔ tibble 3.0.0 ✔ dplyr 0.8.5 #> ✔ tidyr 1.0.2 ✔ stringr 1.4.0 #> ✔ readr 1.3.1 ✔ forcats 0.5.0 #> ── Conflicts ────────────────────────────────────────── tidyverse_conflicts() ── #> ✖ dplyr::filter() masks stats::filter() #> ✖ purrr::is_null() masks testthat::is_null() #> ✖ dplyr::lag() masks stats::lag() #> ✖ dplyr::matches() masks tidyr::matches(), testthat::matches()
Load the data:
library(congress)
To look at the tibble that contains the data, do this:
congress #> # A tibble: 20,598 x 32 #> congress pid last first middle suffix born death sex position #> <dbl> <dbl> <chr> <chr> <chr> <chr> <date> <date> <chr> <chr> #> 1 79 1 Aber… Thom… Gerst… <NA> 1903-05-16 1953-01-23 M U.S. Re… #> 2 79 2 Adams Sher… <NA> <NA> 1899-01-08 1986-10-27 M U.S. Re… #> 3 79 3 Aiken Geor… David <NA> 1892-08-20 1984-11-19 M U.S. Se… #> 4 79 4 Allen Asa Leona… <NA> 1891-01-05 1969-01-05 M U.S. Re… #> 5 79 5 Allen Leo Elwood <NA> 1898-10-05 1973-01-19 M U.S. Re… #> 6 79 6 Almo… J. Linds… Jr. 1898-06-15 1986-04-14 M U.S. Re… #> 7 79 7 Ande… Herm… Carl <NA> 1897-01-27 1978-07-26 M U.S. Re… #> 8 79 8 Ande… Clin… Presba <NA> 1895-10-23 1975-11-11 M U.S. Re… #> 9 79 9 Ande… John Zuing… <NA> 1904-03-22 1981-02-09 M U.S. Re… #> 10 79 10 Andr… Augu… Herman <NA> 1890-10-11 1958-01-14 M U.S. Re… #> # … with 20,588 more rows, and 22 more variables: party <chr>, state <chr>, #> # district <chr>, start <date>, end <chr>, religion <chr>, race <chr>, #> # education <chr>, occ1 <chr>, occ2 <chr>, occ3 <chr>, mil1 <chr>, #> # mil2 <chr>, mil3 <chr>, start_year <date>, end_year <date>, #> # start_age <int>, poc <chr>, days_old <dbl>, entry_age <int>, #> # end_career <date>, yr_fac <fct>
