CQ VoteWatch Methodology

CQ combines its comprehensive database of congressional floor votes with unmatched analytic coverage of legislative activity to produce a new way of examining voting patterns. What had been, for decades, an annual review of which members back their party, and the president is now updated daily, allowing unprecedented analysis of lawmakers' voting habits.

How can I access Vote Watch : Research > Members Info - New section CQ VOTE WATCH

Who has access to Vote Watch : all users (standard & IP) for have access to the Members page.

CQ Vote Watch Methodology

CQ Roll Call (previously Congressional Quarterly) has analyzed voting patterns of members of Congress since 1945. The three current studies — presidential support, party unity, and voting participation — have been conducted consistently since 1953. This is how they are done:

Selecting votes

CQ Roll Call bases its vote studies on all floor votes for which senators and House members were asked to vote "yea" or "nay."

Party Unity

Party unity votes are any "yea" or "nay" roll call votes that have a majority of one party opposing a majority of the other party.

Presidential Support

 CQ Roll Call editors select presidential support votes yearly based on the president's or authorized spokespeople's explicit statements. Support scores show the percentage of roll call votes on which members of Congress voted in agreement with the president's position.

Individual scores:

Member scores are based only on the votes each cast. This makes individual support and opposition scores total 100 percent. The same method is used to identify the leading scorers.

Overall scores

To be comparable to individual member scores, calculations of average scores by chamber and party are similarly based on all relevant votes cast. Members of the chamber or caucus missing votes do not lower the average, and the support and opposition scores will total 100 percent. This breaks from the magazine's longstanding tradition of basing the chamber and party averages on all eligible votes. So, the overall scores here are not comparable to those found in CQ Weekly or CQ Almanac.

Rounding

Rounding does not raise any score to 100 percent or reduce any score to zero.