The short version
The datasets are licensed CC BY 4.0. You may copy them, republish them, chart them, feed them to a model, or build a product on them. You do not need to ask. The one condition is credit.
How to credit it
Political Grades, politicalgrades.com, methodology v3.0, data generated 2026-09-11. Licensed CC BY 4.0.
The credit must include the words “Political Grades” in text — a bare link is not enough. A link alongside it is welcome and appreciated, but the name has to appear as words a reader can see. Naming the methodology version matters more than it looks: the rules change, every change is dated in the changelog, and a number quoted without its version cannot be checked later.
What the license covers — and what nobody can license
Covered: the compiled datasets, the selection and arrangement of categories, the computed scores, ranks and standardized figures, and the written methodology.
Not covered, because this licence does not grant it: the site’s editorial writing — including the rundown paragraphs beneath each card and the headlines — the page design and layout, the Political Grades name and wordmark, and the source code. Those are reserved. If you want to reuse the writing rather than the numbers, ask; the answer is usually yes.
Also not covered, because it is not ours to license: the underlying government data. Unemployment rates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, mortality data from the CDC, budget totals from OMB — none of that belongs to this site. In the United States facts are not copyrightable at all, and works of the federal government are public domain by statute. You already have the right to use every source number here, from the source, with or without this page.
Also not ours to license — third-party analytics embedded in the files: congress.json carries each member’s Legislative Effectiveness Score, which is the Center for Effective Lawmaking’s published research. That figure is quoted here with attribution; this site’s CC BY grant does not and cannot relicense it. If you redistribute that field, credit its producer and follow their terms — or drop the field, which the license fully permits. Every score this site computes itself (the grades, ranks and σ figures) remains CC BY.
The voting statistics ARE ours to license, and they were not before: each member’s missed-vote and party-line figures are no longer another organisation’s analytics. They are computed by this site, for one Congress at a time, from the roll calls the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives and the United States Senate publish themselves. The underlying roll calls are federal government works and are nobody’s property — you can take them from the source, as we did. The counting on top of them (the denominators, the medians, the ranks) is this site’s own work and is CC BY like every other score here. The GovTrack ideology figure that used to ship in congress.json has been withdrawn rather than relicensed: it was a private model’s output, it cannot be reproduced from the public record, and this site does not republish numbers it cannot derive.
Also not ours to license — the UK edition: the /uk/ pages republish Parliament’s own records — the Commons and Lords rosters, recorded division results, and bill progress. That material is used, and remains reusable, under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0, not this site’s CC BY grant. If you reuse the parliamentary records from those pages, follow that licence and credit Parliament; devolved-nation statistics on the UK pages carry Office for National Statistics attribution on the page that uses them.
That distinction is not a technicality. A site that claimed ownership of public facts while asking to be trusted about public facts would be arguing against itself.
The files
- governors.json — every governor score, with the inputs behind it
- congress.json — all sitting members of Congress
- cities.json and city_scores.json — the 50 largest cities
One thing this license is not
CC BY covers the data. It does not grant permission to use the Political Grades name or wordmark to suggest that this site endorses, produced or checked your work. Republish the numbers freely; just do not imply we vouched for what you did with them.
Found a mistake in something you reused? That is worth more to us than the citation — see disputes & corrections.