No description was included in this Dataset collected from the OSF

The Record of American Democracy (ROAD) data provide election, socioeconomic summaries, and demographic details about thepublic at unusually low levels of geographic aggregation.NSF-supported ROAD project spans every state in the country1984 through 1990 (including some off-year elections). Theseenable research on topics such as electoral behavior, thecharacteristics of local community context, electoral, the role of minority groups in elections and legislative, split ticket voting and divided government, andunder federalism. This study comprises allof the publicdtat files for this study. Documentation and frequently asked questions are available online at the ROAD Website. A downloadable PDF codebook is also available in the files section of this study.

Abstract What do Americans know about their local judges and how do they know it? One of the central arguments in the debate over judicial elections is whether voters know enough about judicial candidates to make an informed democratic choice. The vast majority of criminal and civil matters in the U.S. begin with and filter through the local state courts. But judicial scholars know little about what explains the variance in voters’ knowledge of their courts and judges. This paper draws on survey data from the 2012 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) to investigate the origins of voter knowledge of local judges. A central finding of this study is that rural voters are a lot more knowledgeable about their local judges than are urban voters, ceteris paribus. This finding has significant consequences for the debate over the ways in which states structure their elections for local judges.

The Record of American Democracy (ROAD) data provide election returns, socioeconomic summaries, and demographic details about the American public at unusually low levels of geographic aggregation. The NSF-supported ROAD project spans every state in the country from 1984 through 1990 (including some off-year elections). These data enable research on topics such as electoral behavior, the political characteristics of local community context, electoral geography, the role of minority groups in elections and legislative redistricting, split ticket voting and divided government, and elections under federalism. Another set of files has added to these roughly 30-40 political variables an additional 3,725 variables merged from the 1990 United States Census for 47,327 aggregate units called MCD Groups. The MCD Group is a construct for purposes of this data collection. It is based on a merging of the electoral precincts and Census Minor Civil Divisions (MCDs). An MCD is about the size of a city or town. An MCD Group is smaller than or equal to a county and (except in California) is greater than or equal to the size of an MCD. The MCD Group units completely tile the United States landmass. This particular study contains the files for the State Level MCD Group Data for the state of Kansas. Documentation and frequently asked questions are available online at the ROAD Website. A downloadable PDF codebook is also available in the files section of this study.

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)

We posit that autocrats introduce local elections when their bureaucratic capacity is low. Local elections exploit the citizens' informational advantage in keeping local officials accountable, but they also weaken vertical control. As bureaucratic capacity increases, the autocrat limits the role of elected bodies to regain vertical control. We argue that these insights can explain the introduction of village elections in rural China and the subsequent erosion of village autonomy years later. We construct a novel dataset to document political reforms, policy outcomes and de facto power for almost four decades. We find that the introduction of elections improves popular policies and weakens unpopular ones. Increases in regional government resources lead to loss of village autonomy, but less so in remote villages. These patterns are consistent with an organizational view of local elections within autocracies.

The Record of American Democracy (ROAD) data provide election returns, socioeconomic summaries, and demographic details about the American public at unusually low levels of geographic aggregation. The NSF-supported ROAD project spans every state in the country from 1984 through 1990 (including some off-year elections). These data enable research on topics such as electoral behavior, the political characteristics of local community context, electoral geography, the role of minority groups in elections and legislative redistricting, split ticket voting and divided government, and elections under federalism. Another set of files has added to these roughly 30-40 political variables an additional 3,725 variables merged from the 1990 United States Census for 47,327 aggregate units called MCD Groups. The MCD Group is a construct for purposes of this data collection. It is based on a merging of the electoral precincts and Census Minor Civil Divisions (MCDs). An MCD is about the size of a city or town. An MCD Group is smaller than or equal to a county and (except in California) is greater than or equal to the size of an MCD. The MCD Group units completely tile the United States landmass. This particular study contains the files for the State Level MCD Group Data for the state of Pennsylvania. Documentation and frequently asked questions are available online at the ROAD Website. A downloadable PDF codebook is also available in the files section of this study.

What makes politicians respond to civil society organizations’ demands? I use new data on government transfers to French associations and exploit close elections to show that politicians grant more funds to ideologically close organizations when the local incumbent is a political ally and was elected by a small margin. The results are consistent with politicians and organizations exchanging financial support for electoral support. Organizations secure funding because of the votes they can deliver, not because of their campaign contributions; however the fact that transfers appear to be conditioned on support may undermine their ability to help hold politicians accountable. The present archive contains the data and code supporting the article.

The 1956 presidential election in the United States saw a rematch of the two main candidates who contested the 1952 election. Incumbent President Dwight D. Eisenhower was seeking re-election for the Republican Party, while Adlai E. Stevenson was again on the ballot for the Democratic Party. Eisenhower maintained his considerable popularity from the Second World War, by keeping his campaign promise of ending the Korean War, as well as growing the economy and being an effective and charismatic leader. Despite a heart attack in 1955, Eisenhower faced no competition for the Republican Party's re-nomination, with Richard Nixon returning as his running mate. The Democratic primaries were not as certain however, yet Stevenson was re-nominated in due course, as his campaign was better funded and organized than any of his opponents. The Democratic National Convention nominated Stevenson on the first vote (future-President Lyndon B. Johnson was also on the ballot), but then Stevenson made an unprecedented move by allowing the DNC to also choose his running mate. Estes Kefauver was eventually named as Stevenson's running mate, with John F. Kennedy and Al Gore Sr. coming in second and third place respectively. Eisenhower's campaign boost In 1954, during Eisenhower's first term, his administration had supported the Supreme Court's ruling in the Brown v Board of Education, which ended the racial segregation of schools. While this angered many white voters in the Deep South (where segregation was deeply entrenched in daily life), it did earn Eisenhower the support of almost forty percent of black voters, which was the last time a Republican candidate received such support from the African-American community. In the weeks before the election, Eisenhower's response to the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the British-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt also increased his popularity at home. Eisenhower condemned both invasions while speaking at the UN, and even pressured the withdrawal of troops from Egypt. Results Eisenhower won by yet another landslide, increasing his margins of victory in the 1952 elections. Eisenhower carried 41 states, taking 84 percent of the electoral vote, and 57 percent of the popular vote. Stevenson won a majority in just seven states, taking 42 and 14 percent of the popular and electoral votes respectively. A faithless elector in Alabama also cast one electoral vote for Walter Jones (a local judge) instead of giving it to Stevenson. This was the final election to be contested in just 48 states, with Hawaii and Alaska being represented from 1960 onwards.

Supplementary Empirical Teaching Units in Political Science (SETUPS) for American Politics are computer-related modules designed for use in teaching introductory courses in American government and politics. The modules are intended to demonstrate the process of examining evidence and reaching conclusions and to stimulate students to independent, critical thinking and a deeper understanding of substantive content. They enable students with no previous training to make use of the computer to analyze data on political behavior or to see the results of policy decisions by use of a simulation model. The SETUPS: AMERICAN POLITICS modules were developed by a group of political scientists with experience in teaching introductory American government courses who were brought together in a workshop supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation in the summer of 1974. The American Political Science Association administered the grant, and the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research was host to the workshop and provided data for most of the SETUPS. The modules were tested and evaluated during the 1974-1975 academic year by students and faculty in 155 classes at 69 universities and colleges. Appropriate revisions were made based upon this experience. This collection comprises 15 separate modules: (1) Political Socialization Across the Generations, (2) Political Participation, (3) Voting Behavior, The 1980 Election, (4) Elections and the Mass Media, (5) The Supreme Court in American Politics, Court Decisions, (6) The Supreme Court in American Politics, Police Interrogations, (7) The Dynamics of Political Budgeting, A Public Policy Simulation, State Expenditures, (8) The Dynamics of Political Budgeting, A Public Policy Simulation, SIMSTATE Simulation, (9) The Dynamics of Political Budgeting, A Public Policy Simulation, SIMSTATE II Simulation, (10) Fear of Crime, (11) Presidential Popularity in America, Presidential Popularity, (12) Presidential Popularity in America, Advanced Analyses, (13) Campaign '80, The Public and the Presidential Selection Process, (14) Voting Behavior, The 1976 Election, and (15) Policy Responsiveness and Fiscal Strain in 51 American Communities. Parts 8 and 9 are FORTRAN IV program SIMSTATE sourcedecks intended to simulate the interaction of state policies. Variables in the various modules provide information on respondents' level of political involvement and knowledge of political issues, general political attitudes and beliefs, news media exposure and usage, voting behavior (Parts 1, 2, and 3), and sectional biases (15). Other items provide information on respondents' views of government, politics, Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter as presidents, best form of government, government spending (Part 3), local police, the Supreme Court (Parts 4 and 15), the economy, and domestic and foreign affairs. Additional items probed respondents' opinions of prayer in school, abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment Law, nuclear energy, and the most important national problem and the political party most suitable to handle it (Part 3). Also included are items on votes of Supreme Court judges (Part 5), arrest of criminal suspects and their treatment by law enforcement agencies (Part 6), federal government expenditures and budgeting (Part 7), respondents' feelings of safety at home, neighborhood crime rate, frequency of various kinds of criminal victimization, the personal characteristics of the targets of those crimes (Part 10), respondents' opinions of and choice of party presidential candidates nominees (Part 13), voter turnout for city elections (15), urban unrest, and population growth rate. Demographic items specify age, sex, race, marital status, education, occupation, income, social class identification, religion, political party affiliation, and union membership.

The datasets contain a summary of the election results for general municipal elections sorted by each election year. By-election results are not included.

We examine the effect of community-designed electoral codes on Canadian First Nation communities. Adopting a custom code for local elections allows for changes such as increasing term duration, creating appeal and supervisory bodies, and incorporating traditional governance elements. To reduce biases due to selective opt-in, we exploit the timing of the electoral reform and a rich set of controls. We find that bands using the custom system pay lower remunerations to their chiefs, spend more on education and training and less on band development, and have better waste-water services. These results are consistent with increased accountability and less short-termism.

Databases were used for the "Rewarding Performance in Disaster Response: Evidence from Local Governments in Latin America" research, which seeks to determine the electoral impact of disasters in Peru and Chile. For both countries, we created a similarly structured dataset containing municipal-level information on elections and participation, disasters, budgets and spending, socioeconomic outcomes, and geography. Each observation in the dataset corresponds to a municipality per year.

In the case of Peru, we included the municipal elections of 2010 and 2014, and for Chile, we analyzed the local elections of 2008, 2012, and 2016. Additionally, the datasets contain socioeconomic information, such as poverty and education. Our municipal-level treatment variable is defined as having experienced at least one disaster during the mayor's term in office.

In both countries, we utilized all available information on disasters, ensuring the inclusion of only large-scale public emergencies. For Peru, we included all disasters that occurred between 2007 and 2014, such as earthquakes, floods, landslides, and frosts. To ensure that only large-scale disasters were included, we identified a public emergency using two criteria: that it was officially declared a disaster area by the central government and that it received additional funds or emergency management. Our binary measure of the occurrence of a disaster combines these two indicators: whether the disaster occurred and whether it was accompanied by an additional budget transfer from the central level to address the crisis and mitigate its effects. Using these criteria, we identified 854 disasters across 532 municipalities.

For Chile, our dataset includes 243 disasters, such as earthquakes, floods, and volcanic eruptions, occurring in 220 municipalities between 2008 and 2016. We included all floods and volcanic eruptions that were officially declared emergencies by the National Disaster Prevention and Response Service (SENAPRED). For earthquakes, we used the Modified Mercalli Intensity Scale to identify and include only the most affected municipalities. Since Chile is a country prone to earthquakes, there are many small-scale seismic movements that do not cause significant impacts. To ensure that only municipalities where the earthquake was strong enough to cause significant damage requiring major mayoral intervention were included, we coded as a disaster only those municipalities where the Mercalli scale intensity exceeded 7 out of a maximum of 10. In the case of earthquakes in Peru, we had already identified the most significant events because we included only those that received additional disaster-related funding from the national government.

Our performance measures focus on mayors' spending. For both Chile and Peru, we used total per capita municipal spending at the local level. Rather than only tracking funds earmarked specifically for disasters, we prefer to capture total spending to account for the use of various budget lines at mayors' disposal. We used inflation-adjusted values to compare results across years. We standardized the municipal expenditure variable (mean of zero and standard deviation of 1) to compare results across the two countries and included socioeconomic variables as controls.

Runoff systems allow for a reversion of the first-round result: the most voted candidate in the first round may end up losing the election in the second. But do voters take advantage of this opportunity? Or does winning the first round increase the probability of winning the second? We investigate this question with data from presidential elections since 1945, as well as subnational elections in Latin America. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that being the most voted candidate in the first round has a substantial positive effect on the probability of winning the second round in mayoral races – especially in Brazil –, but in presidential and gubernatorial elections the effect is negative, though not statistically significant at conventional levels. The positive effect in municipal races is much stronger when the top-two placed candidates are ideologically close – and thus harder to distinguish for voters – but weakens considerably and becomes insignificant when the election is polarized. We attribute these differences to the disparate informational environment prevailing in local vs. higher-level races.

Context

This is a dataset that I built by scraping the United States Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics. I was looking for county-level unemployment data and realized that there was a data source for this, but the data set itself hadn't existed yet, so I decided to write a scraper and build it out myself.

Content

This data represents the Local Area Unemployment Statistics from 1990-2016, broken down by state and month. The data itself is pulled from this mapping site:

https://data.bls.gov/map/MapToolServlet?survey=la&map=county&seasonal=u

Further, the ever-evolving and ever-improving codebase that pulled this data is available here:

https://github.com/jayrav13/bls_local_area_unemployment

Acknowledgements

Of course, a huge shoutout to bls.gov and their open and transparent data. I've certainly been inspired to dive into US-related data recently and having this data open further enables my curiosities.

Inspiration

I was excited about building this data set out because I was pretty sure something similar didn't exist - curious to see what folks can do with it once they run with it! A curious question I had was surrounding Unemployment vs 2016 Presidential Election outcome down to the county level. A comparison can probably lead to interesting questions and discoveries such as trends in local elections that led to their most recent election outcome, etc.

Next Steps

Version 1 of this is as a massive JSON blob, normalized by year / month / state. I intend to transform this into a CSV in the future as well.

The Record of American Democracy (ROAD) data provide election returns, socioeconomic summaries, and demographic details about the American public at unusually low levels of geographic aggregation. The NSF-supported ROAD project spans every state in the country from 1984 through 1990 (including some off-year elections). These data enable research on topics such as electoral behavior, the political characteristics of local community context, electoral geography, the role of minority groups in elections and legislative redistricting, split ticket voting and divided government, and elections under federalism. Another set of files has added to these roughly 30-40 political variables an additional 3,725 variables merged from the 1990 United States Census for 47,327 aggregate units called MCD Groups. The MCD Group is a construct for purposes of this data collection. It is based on a merging of the electoral precincts and Census Minor Civil Divisions (MCDs). An MCD is about the size of a city or town. An MCD Group is smaller than or equal to a county and (except in California) is greater than or equal to the size of an MCD. The MCD Group units completely tile the United States landmass. This particular study contains files for the State Level MCD Group Data for the state of Alaska. Documentation and frequently asked questions are available online at the ROAD Website. A downloadable PDF codebook is also available in the files section of this study.

Under what conditions can citizens hold government officials accountable for their behavior? I examine accountability over the police, a pervasive face of the state as experienced by most people. Like elected politicians, police enjoy significant discretion, limited oversight, power, and corruptibility. Continued problems of police violence and disparate treatment, especially against Black Americans, have shown the importance of accountable policing. Using calls for service records, election returns, survey data, and case studies, I explore challenges of political accountability across the highly varied 18,000 police department in the United States. The police are both a nationally salient social group – evaluated differently by partisans in a national media environment – as well as a locally-provided government function that tens of millions of Americans encounter regularly. This decentralization complicates improvements to policing policies by limiting the impacts of reform activism to particular cities and by misaligning activism with local conditions (Chapter 1). Millions of Americans regularly call the police to manage a swathe of urgent problems. Examining whether citizens punish street-level bureaucrats for misbehavior by withdrawing from demands for police intervention, I find that daily demands for policing services remain steady after well-publicized police abuse (Chapter 2). Absent exit, change requires political action. One manifestation of the varieties of American policing is between elected and appointed police leadership. I show that each approach has problems: elected sheriffs seem too steady in their offices – over which they enjoy almost unfettered control and significant incumbency advantage – while appointed police chiefs are constrained by unions, politicians, and the public (Chapter 3). Drawing on case studies of immigration enforcement in county jails, I show that nationally salient issues can impinge on the domains of county Sheriffs and increase interest and energy in local elections – aligning policies with preferences through a process I term “redirected nationalization” (Chapter 4). An additional problem is that police officers are themselves political agents who can resist change. By analyzing their nearly universal support for Donald Trump in the 2016 election, and the status of police as a salient cleavage in American electoral politics, I show a strong affinity between police union and right-wing politics rooted in the sense that police are “under siege” by Black Lives Matter and calls for reform (Chapter 5). This uniform conservative orientation of police culture clashes with the array of problems the police manage, which frequently include homelessness and mental illness (Chapter 6, co-authored with Jacob Brown). I conclude that, where possible, it is better to unbundle the multifaceted police role, with specialized civil servants responding to classes of problems (Chapter 7). However, the decentralization of policing in the United States and the ambiguity of many calls for services will complicate unbundling. Hence, there remains a need to cultivate a police culture sensitive to the range of problems police encounter and, longer term, to ameliorate the social conditions which drive reliance on police services.