Download Congressional Bills Project data

Recent updates

4/162017 - The 93-114th file has been updated. We have corrected numerious errors related to the ReportH, ReportS, PassH, PassS, MRef and Majority variables.

We have also added variables providing specific information about the committees of referral (ReferArr lists committees of referral) and committee assignments (SubCArr lists a member's committee assignments). Please contact jwilker@uw.edu with questions.

To be more specific, we discovered errors or omissions in some of the original json files used to create these variables

1. Incorrect committee code. Example: 94-HR-12972. The json file (https://www.govtrack.us/data/congress/94/bills/hr/hr12972/data.json) indicates that the bill was “Reported to House from the Committee on Public Works and Transportation with amendment,” but the committee code is incorrect: SSEV (code for the Senate Environment and Public Works).

2. Missing PASS_OVER information. Example: 98-HR-2464 (https://www.congress.gov/bill/94th-congress/house-bill/12972/all-actions). Usually the json file indicates when a bill passes a chamber by specifying “status”:PASS_OVER:. However, for bills that pass the House by Unanimous Consent, status does not indicate that it passed.

The Congressional Research Service has also informed us that there may be errors for the PassS and PassH variables for the 93rd Congress.

**If you see something, say something! Thanks (jwilker@u.washington.edu).

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Citation: E. Scott Adler and John Wilkerson, Congressional Bills Project: (years of data), NSF 00880066 and 00880061. The views expressed are those of the authors and not the National Science Foundation.

Codebooks are here

1. Congressional Bills 80 through 113th Congresses.

These are large zipped tab delimited .txt files

80th through 92 (House and Senate)

(updated 4/27/2015)

2. Congressional Bills and Resolutions 93 through 114th Congresses.

93rd through 114th (House and Senate)

(updated 8/11/2018)

The above file includes bills AND resolutions through the 114th Congress. The resolutions are not labeled for topic. Please note that the topic system has changed slightly (see the codebook page for details)

115th-116partial (House and Senate)

(updated 9/8/2020 - Added committee referral information and sponsor committee membership information)

The above file includes bills AND resolutions through May 2020. The resolutions are not labeled for topic.

To view the csv files, unzip then open a recent version of Excel, select 'data' from the dropdown menu, then 'from text' (on the left). Choose the csv file you downloaded, then choose 'my data has headers,' 'next,' and then the delimiter is semi-colon. (The 80-92 file is tab delimited .txt.)

The 80-92 file has 229,317 records. The 93-114 file has 294,524 records.

Please confirm that the row numbers are correct and that the columns have lined up properly. In addition, we strongly recommend computing frequencies or crosstabs for variables of interest.

Credits

Funding