Abstract: The Database on Ideology, Money in Politics, and Elections (DIME) is intended as a general resource for the study of campaign finance and ideology in American politics. The database was developed as part of the project on Ideology in the Political Marketplace, which is an on-going effort to perform a comprehensive ideological mapping of political elites, interest groups, and donors using the common-space CFscore scaling methodology (Bonica 2014). Constructing the database required a large-scale effort to compile, clean, and process data on contribution records, candidate characteristics, and election outcomes from various sources. The resulting database contains over 130 million political contributions made by individuals and organizations to local, state, and federal elections spanning a period from 1979 to 2014. A corresponding database of candidates and committees provides additional information on state and federal elections. The DIME+ data repository on congressional activity extends DIME to cover detailed data on legislative voting, lawmaking, and political rhetoric. (See http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/BO7WOW for details.) The DIME data is available for download as a standalone SQLite database. The SQLite database is stored on disk and can be accessed using a SQLite client or queried directly from R using the RSQLite package. SQLite is particularly well-suited for tasks that require searching through the database for specific individuals or contribution records. (Click here to download.) Overview: The database is intended to make data on campaign finance and elections (1) more centralized and accessible, (2) easier to work with, and (3) more versatile in terms of the types of questions that can be addressed. A list of the main value-added features of the database is below: Data processing: Names, addresses, and occupation and employer titles have been cleaned and standardized. Unique identifiers: Entity resolution techniques were used to assign unique identifiers for all individual and institutional donors included in the database. The contributor IDs make it possible to track giving by individuals across election cycles and levels of government. Geocoding: Each record has been geocoded and placed into congressional districts. The geocoding scheme relies on the contributor IDs to assign a complete set of consistent geo-coordinates to donors that report their full address in some records but not in others. This is accomplished by combining information on self-reported address across records. The geocoding scheme further takes into account donors with multiple addresses. Geocoding was performed using the Data Science Toolkit maintained by Pete Warden and hosted at http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/. Shape files for congressional districts are from Census.gov (http://www.census.gov/rdo/data). Ideological measures: The common-space CFscores allow for direct distance comparisons of the ideal points of a wide range of political actors from state and federal politics spanning a 35 year period. In total, the database includes ideal point estimates for 70,871 candidates and 12,271 political committees as recipients and 14.7 million individuals and 1.7 million organizations as donors. Corresponding data on candidates, committees, and elections: The recipient database includes information on voting records, fundraising statistics, election outcomes, gender, and other candidate characteristics. All candidates are assigned unique identifiers that make it possible to track candidates if they campaign for different offices. The recipient IDs can also be used to match against the database of contribution records. The database also includes entries for PACs, super PACs, party committees, leadership PACs, 527s, state ballot campaigns, and other committees that engage in fundraising activities. Identifying sets of important political actors: Contribution records have been matched onto other publicly available databases of important political actors. Examples include: Fortune 500 directors and CEOs: (Data) (Paper) Federal court judges: (Data) (Paper} State supreme court justices: (Data) (Paper} Executives appointees to federal agencies: (Data) (Paper) Medical professionals: (Data) (Paper)

Courts of last resort in the American states offer researchers considerable leverage to develop and test theories about how institutions influence judicial behavior. One measure critical to this research agenda is the individual judges’ preferences, or ideal points, in policy space. Two main strategies for recovering this measure exist in the literature: Brace, Langer, and Hall’s (2000) Party-Adjusted Judge Ideology (PAJID) and Bonica and Woodruff’s (2015) judicial CFscores. Here we introduce a third measurement strategy that combines CFscores with item response (IRT) estimates of judicial voting behavior in all 52 state courts of last resort from 1995–2010. We show that leveraging two distinct sources of information (votes and CFscores) yields a superior estimation strategy. Specifically, we highlight several key advantages of the combined measure: (1) it is estimated dynamically, allowing for the possibility that judges’ ideological leanings change over time and (2) it maps judges into a common space. In a comparison against existing measurement strategies, we find that our measure offers superior performance in predicting judges’ votes. We conclude that it is a valuable tool for advancing the study of judicial politics.

Names column in Campain Finance Scores (CF-Scores) is messy: some entries are lastname firstname, others firstname lastname, yet others middlename, lastname, firstname. Others have a still weirder structure. The script at: https://github.com/soodoku/Clean-Names was used to produce columns for firstname, lastname, suffixes, middle name/initial. Original data by Adam Bonica. http://data.stanford.edu/dime

Bonica’s (2014) campaign finance-based ideology scores, or CFscores, create an ideological common space that allows researchers to compare a wide variety of actors. Because relatively few citizens donate to candidates, however, the public is not well represented in this common space. This paper addresses that gap. It uses random forest machine learning on data from the 2012 Cooperative Congressional Election Study to impute CFscores for respondents who did not donate to candidates, based on how their policy views compared to those who did. These new scores are robust to differences in issue importance between donors and non-donors, and they outperform other ideological measures in predicting vote choice. The scores are then applied to a substantive exercise. Past research shows that extreme candidates for governor are penalized more by voters than those in lower-profile races. The implied mechanism—that vote choice for governor is more ideologically-driven—can be directly tested with imputed CFscores, since they uniquely allow comparisons between voters and candidates across races. An analysis of voting behavior in 2012 confounds expectations. Ideology appears to factor no more into vote choice for governor than for US House. These novel findings underscore the value of extending CFscores to non-donating survey respondents, and while current efforts are limited by data availability, this study offers encouragement and a roadmap to that end.