Caucus membership? about congress-legislators

[konklone]

The Senate has just one "caucus", which is basically a committee, the Caucus on International Narcotics Control, and it functions as a committee (it's contained in our committees-current.yaml file).

The House' caucuses are legion, and I don't know of an official house.gov source for them. Even the Wikipedia article that attempts to list them has no central source among its references, just tons of individual caucus websites and other things.

[dwillis]

House caucuses and other "member organizations" have to be approved by the House Administration Committee, which publishes a lovely PDF listing them each year, sans URLs: http://cha.house.gov/sites/republicans.cha.house.gov/files/documents/113th%20Congress%20Congressional%20Member%20Organizations_1.pdf

But more to Chris' original point - we could add caucus_party to current legislators, which would identify King and Sanders as caucusing with the Dems in the Senate.

[konklone]

Oh man, I didn't even catch Chris' request for independents' caucusing party.

Yeah, a caucus_party field is a solid idea - but let's only add it for people whose caucus_party would differ from their party. So the client logic is - assume the party field is who they caucus with, unless the caucus_party field is present to override.

[JoshData]

Fascinating.

What if someone is elected from a strange party name like Democratic-Labor? (Does that still exist?) Would that mean we could list their party as Democratic-Labor but their caucus_party as Democrat?

[dwillis]

We could, but but this potentially opens up other cans of worms, particularly in New York where candidates often run on multiple party lines (Democratic and Working Families or Republican and Conservative). I think the difference between independent and caucusing with the Dems/GOP is a different case than DFL is.

[konklone]

I think you mean the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party? I think this is a different case, though - Al Franken is technically a member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party (according to Wikipedia), but the Bioguide considers him a Democrat.

[JoshData]

Makes sense! (And even more fascinating!)

[schmod]

DFL is the Democratic Party's affiliate in Minnesota. The two are synonymous for virtually all intents and purposes.

[JoshData]

Closing due to inactivity. :)

[sbma44]

Reopening: Jen Victor of GMU dropped by the office today and pointed out that she's collected and released caucus membership information for the 109, 110 and 111th. She's got earlier data, too, but needs to publish some papers before she releases it.

http://mason.gmu.edu/~jvictor3/Data/

Caveats: her data doesn't include members who didn't serve a full term, for reasons related to her specific research project. Still, seems like a decent way to start this effort/give it some structure.

[konklone]

That PDF Derek linked to by the CHA for the 113th is totally scrape-able, too, here's the extracted text with layout preserved:

https://gist.github.com/konklone/6783321

I found the 112th Congress PDF, too, and here's the text.

[nickom]

Whoa, so Jen has the actual membership of the caucuses! That's a really valuable addition and much more than what CHA releases in their data. Did she contact every caucus to get their membership list?

[sbma44]

Yeah, I'm interested in doing that, the trick is that you'd then need to
use a search API to find documents or sites associated with that caucus,
then sift through them for member names. And then presumably do some hand
verification. Definitely going to be lossier than Prof. Victor's research,
I think, but probably still worth doing.

On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 3:00 PM, Eric Mill [email protected] wrote:

That PDF Derek linked to by the CHAhttp://cha.house.gov/sites/republicans.cha.house.gov/files/documents/113th%20Congress%20Congressional%20Member%20Organizations_1.pdffor the 113th is totally scrape-able, too, here's the extracted text with
layout preserved:

https://gist.github.com/konklone/6783321

I found the 112th Congress PDFhttp://cha.house.gov/sites/republicans.cha.house.gov/files/documents/cmo_cso_docs/cmo_112th_congress.pdf,
too, and here's the text https://gist.github.com/konklone/6783358.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/49#issuecomment-25477993
.

[sbma44]

@nickom yeah, I think she had undergrads code this stuff. I don't recall her saying she contacted individual caucuses, though -- I think it might have been via the Congressional Yellowbook?