The new Voteview.com: preserving and continuing Keith Poole’s infrastructure for scholars,students and observers of Congress

For the last 40 years, Keith Poole has developed and curated a trove of basic data and measurements related to the United States Congress. He has made these resources freely available through his widely-used Voteview.com website since 1995. At Poole’s Voteview.com, scholars, students, journalists, and the broader public could download gold-standard historical and current roll-call voting data, member rosters, NOMINATE scores, and measures and visualizations of party cohesion and polarization, among many other useful things. In this article, we describe how we are preserving and continuing these vast public-goods contributions through the new Voteview.com. Developed and housed at UCLA, the new Voteview.com carries on the creation of basic roll-call data infrastructure, including the assignment of Poole’s widely-used ICPSR number-like identifiers to new members, data on every roll-call vote ever taken, NOMINATE scores and other standard roll-call vote-based measures such as party-loyalty scores. In addition to serving as a platform for the continuation and dissemination of this basic data infrastructure, the new Voteview.com also provides powerful tools for exploring the history of roll-call voting, the US Congress, and American politics and political history through a simple search interface and interactive visualizations.