CongressData

I am overseeing the development and expansion of CongressData and SenateData, a comprehensive open-source data initiative designed to democratize access to U.S. legislative data. By aggregating over two centuries of disparate datasets into a unified, machine-readable format, we have created a “one-stop shop” for academics, policy analysts, and students researching the U.S. Congress. These build on our Correlates of State Policy Project.

• Scientific Impact: Co-authored the peer-reviewed Scientific Data paper, “Introducing CongressData and Correlates of State Policy,” which formalized the dataset’s contribution to the social sciences. The project harmonizes over 1,000 unique variables tracking district demographics, member characteristics, and policymaking behavior from 1789 to the present.

• Strategic Expansion: Helped lead the 2025 launch of SenateData, scaling our data infrastructure to cover the U.S. Senate. This expansion introduces 960+ new variables spanning 1789–2025, enabling researchers to analyze state-level representation and senatorial behavior with the same granularity as our House data.

• Technical Innovation: The projects use user-friendly R packages (ippsr/CongressData and ippsr/SenateData) that lower the barrier to entry for complex quantitative research. These tools feature automate citation generation to ensure credit for original data sources and subsetting, allowing users to dynamically build custom panels by state, year, and policy topic.