Members of Congress with District Offices

This project is a repository of members of Congress and their contact information. Most notably, it contains addresses, phone numbers, and latlngs for district offices.

This project was created specifically because no database of district office information seemed to exist, since while Washington DC office information is available through official Senate and House XML feeds, district office info is strewn about as unstructured data on Congressional websites.

Usage

Data are intended to be ready-to-use as much as possible. A variety of formats containing the same data are provided for convenience.

JSON

The master file is members.json, containing basic information about each member of Congress and attached to each member is a list of their offices, including both Washington DC and district offices.

CSV

For spreadsheet use, the same data have been split into members.csv and offices.csv. The bioguide_id field, the seemingly official id assigned by Congressional clerk websites, can be used as a join key between member and office.

SQL

For populating a SQL database, members.sql contains ready-to-execute SQL commands for creating a schema and filling rows for both members and their offices, once again using bioguide_id as the join key. The SQL syntax is basic and should be compatible with sqlite, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

sqlite

# Create and populate the DB
cat members.sql | sqlite3 members.sqlite
# Connect to the DB
sqlite3 members.sqlite

PostgreSQL

# Create the DB
createdb members
# Populate the DB
psql -d members -f members.sql
# Connect to the DB
psql members

PostGIS

Since office locations have been pre-geocoded into latitudes and longitudes, an additional SQL file is provided to those who wish to use PostGIS with PostgreSQL so that geospatial queries can be done on office locations. For that, do the same as above with a regular SQL database but make sure PostGIS is installed first, and then use members.postgis.sql instead.

# Create the DB
createdb members
# Populate the DB
psql -d members -f members.postgis.sql
# Connect to the DB
psql members

GeoJSON

Since there are coordinates for each office, an alternate JSON file containing GeoJSON has been provided, that is ready to be imported in any compatible GIS program or Google Maps or perhaps client-side geospatial libraries like Turf.

The Data

The data were initally collected from individual Congressional websites the week of January 9, 2017. Washington DC offices are included for all 541 members. At least one district office is included for 527 members, currently totaling 1331 district offices; 14 newly-elected members have yet to publish district office information on their still-being-constructed websites.

This repository will be updated as soon as information for the remaining offices is available.

How Was It Collected?

A clipping tool was built, capable of parsing most standard, multi-line address blocks, that possibly contained an office name and phone number. Office addresses were then copy-pasted from Congressional websites into the tool. In the ~10% of cases where the parser did not work, addresses were manually cleaned/adjusted until they could be parsed. Addresses were then sanity-checked and geocoded.

Contributing

If data seems to be incorrect or incomplete, please help contribute! The master file is members.json, please make changes to that file and submit a pull request. You can optionally convert from the master JSON file to all other formats in a single command:

python tools/json_to_all_other_formats.py members.json

I am currently working on a public-facing version of the clipping tool to make contributing easier and to help with updates after future elections.