Congressional Toolbox
Congressional Toolbox is a set of reports you can create from the data in our congressional database. The database is updated about three times a year. The last update date is shown on our List of Available Votes page. Please report any missing or incorrect data. See also Custom Reports at the end of this page.
VIS membership is required to access the Toolbox reports. Please read our Disclaimer before using the Toolbox.
Congress Members Report
This is a list all Congress members with their DC contact information in
tab-delimited or XML format. By default, you get the currently serving
members. Or you can specify a date between now and 1989
and get the members who were in office on that date. The DC contact information
for all members is checked at the beginning of each Congress. See also our
alphabetical Congress Members Index.
Group Unity Scores Report
Define a group of Congress members, and then get a score for any other
member indicating whether he or she voted "with" or "against" the
group. If the group consists of the leaders of one party, the
score is sometimes referred to as the party unity score.
More information.
To find out who the leaders of each political party are, visit www.house.gov and www.senate.gov.
Missed Votes Report
Find how many votes each Member of Congress "missed" during a year. Tab-delimited
and XML output format for easy import into MS Excel, Access,
etc.
More information.
Position Report
Make your own congressional scorecard. Enter a number of roll call votes and/or bills
introduced in Congress and get a report that will show how each Congress member
voted during the votes or whether he or she was
an official cosponsor of the bills.
Optionally, you can specify a "preferred" position on each vote or bill
and our system will calculate the percentage of the "correct"
actions for each member. The report can be saved in a tab-delimited
or Excel spreadsheet format.
You can also enter your own
comments about each vote or legislation. These comments will then be
included in the final report.
The source of the votes and cosponsorship data
used on our Web site and in the above reports is Congressional Record (the official record of everything that
happens in the U.S. Congress).
Custom Reports
Can't find the report you need? Request
a custom report. We have supplied custom data sets to a number of
academic institutions including The Colorado College, Clemson University,
University of Iowa, and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.