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I'm working on an app to provide an easy way for people to track the status of a bill [and various other political information]. I love the idea of OpenCongress, for instance, which surfaces summary information on legislation as it navigates the political process, but I'd like it if it had a tag-based search system and some other rich search options, as well as more conveniently accessible voting history and term information. And while they now have JavaScript widgets which show the current status of bills you select, I think more could be done in this regard.

I don't know where they get their data, though, and while they have an API of their own, I don't know whether sticking a wart onto it is the best way of implementing what I envision. For all its touting of transparency, it's not at all obvious to me what data the government makes available, or even how to find that out!

So, does anyone know any good APIs for obtaining information on the status of American legislation, legislators (such as voting histories), agencies and/or upcoming elections? (Or, if you think it's really interesting, feel free to post any other APIs that are relevant to U.S. politics.)

rook
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Arkaaito
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    I have thought it'd be nice to have an easy way to query the voting histories of congressmen. – AaronLS Jan 28 '10 at 03:40
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    InRe: close votes. The question seems to be of the category "Is there an API for Foo and if so where do I get it?" Is there a history of closing such questions as NPR? – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten Jan 28 '10 at 03:54
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    Yes, I'm a little confused as well. Is it not clear that I'm looking for these APIs because I intend to make a website and/or application and/or mobile application using them? Or is it not programming-related because I haven't gotten to the programming stage yet? Also, +1 to aaronls's comment, that's another thing it would be excellent to have. – Arkaaito Jan 28 '10 at 04:00
  • @Arkaaito: The borderlands can be a little murky, and web-programming even more so. Sometimes web related questions are better addressed to doctype.com, though I would hold off on re-asking this question there. I have not paid close attention to this the treatment of "What API?" kinds of questions and don't know where the acknowledged boundaries lie. – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten Jan 28 '10 at 04:04
  • Like this place? http://www.opencongress.org/ – Wayne Conrad Jan 28 '10 at 04:22
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    In the absence of comments from the people who voted to close (three after I posted the above) I am voting to reopen. The question is at least reasonably about programming, and has good, responsive answers. – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten Jan 28 '10 at 16:53
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    OK, this is not strictly a technology question, but data sources are IMO a valid question, if we think about programming as "creating experiences/applications" and not just "transforming bits from a to b". My vote: this IS programming related. – Jaanus Jan 28 '10 at 17:58
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    There are other API questions here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2145303/resources-for-programs-teaching-natural-languages , for example. I'll ask about the allowability of "is-there-an-x-for-y" questions on Meta. – Arkaaito Jan 28 '10 at 18:00

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Although they aren't APIs, www.data.gov provides official data sets, which can be mined. For now, I think this is the closest you're going to get to an official, centralized source of data.

Check out ProgrammableWeb's list of government-related APIs. Not all of them are the US federal government, so you might need to sift through it a bit. Also, they're not all provided directly by the government.

There's also an open source project that provides an API for thomas.loc.gov.

Jeff
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We publish feeds of all legislative information for the New York State Senate, with an API, at: http://open.nysenate.gov/legislation/developers

Andrew Hoppin
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I'm not sure if it addresses exactly your concerns but the Watchdog site tries to do something like this. Their source is available online and they extract a lot of information from public records. A lot of the published stuff is in rather antiquated formats (huge zipped XML files) and so the whole process is not totally straightforward.

Noufal Ibrahim
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You should check out the collection civic APIs that are listed here:

https://live.temboo.com/library/keyword/civic/

Cormac Driver
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