Via email, Tom Lee of Sunlight Labs:
bq. I’m writing to let you know about Sunlight’s Open States project, which is an effort to capture, store and distribute state-level legislative data in a unified format. The data are freely available to all, and although the project is ongoing we already have substantial support for 17 states.
Here is “the site”:http://openstates.sunlightlabs.com/. Here is “a post”:http://sunlightlabs.com/blog/2011/open-states-present-and-future/ from Lee about the project.
Courtesy of Sunlight’s developers, “here”:http://mikej.st/2011/02/06/ideal-point-estimation-of-state-legislators.html#disqus_thread is an application of the W-NOMINATE ideological scaling algorithm to their data. See especially what the 2009-2010 CA State Senate looks like.
Tom also writes with this request:
bq. I’d also be very glad to hear any concerns or requests that come to mind about the project; or any suggestions for soliciting such feedback from the larger political science community. We are working with governmental and archival institutions at both the state and national level to create a draft data schema that American state legislatures will be encouraged to follow. I’m eager to make sure that we consider the needs of the research community as we do this work.
Please feel free to leave comments to this post or contact Sunlight Labs “here”:http://sunlightlabs.com/contact/. They are doing important work.