I’m pleased to say that the Princeton Gerrymandering Project has just published a new dataset of state legislative elections from 1972 to 2016. This database covers over 500 election/state/year combinations, and contains over 80,000 elections. The election results can be downloaded here, and the code can be viewed on github. The dataset is based on Carl Klarner’s candidate-level state legislative data, cleaned to remove multi-member elections and other issues, as well as Ballotpedia’s 2013 – 2016 election results.
For us, it’s a resource to analyze redistricting and gerrymandering. For you, it’s whatever you want to use it for. If you need technical assistance, please write to gerrymander@princeton.edu.
We’ll eventually combine these with information about the district maps under which each election was held. Stay tuned!
Would you mind specifying a license for this dataset? I assume it’s in the public domain, in which case the CC0 license would make that explicit.
https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
Thank you!
Thanks for catching that – I’ve added a license to the repo.
Interesting piece on partisanship/geography correlation:
http://web.stanford.edu/~jrodden/wp/shadow.pdf
I was shocked by the graphs on page 7 ….
Do you have a dataset for State Senate/Upper chamber results?
We didn’t pull results for upper chamber elections, but they’re available at the same sources we used for the lower chamber results, namely the SLER (https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=hdl:1902.1/20401), it’s 2011-2012 extension (https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=hdl:1902.1/21549) and ballotpedia.org.
I’m sorry if I missed it somewhere but is there a codebook for the variables? I thought that the incumbent variable was binary, but noticed that many of the entries had a -1 for incumbency and I wasn’t sure what that meant
Christian, if you don’t have any luck then please write to gerrymander@princeton.edu for help. Thank you and good luck!
How much hubris would I have if I thought about creating a fundamentals-based forecast model for state-level lower and upper house elections?
When I look at the link to where the data can be downloaded I get
https://github.com/PrincetonUniversity/historic_state_legislative_election_results/raw/master/state_legislative_election_results_1971_2016.csv
Which is a 404 page not found notice.
Where did it go?
poke around gerrymander.princeton.edu please? we’ll investigate too
Hi Mark,
Sorry about the inconvenience. You can find a newer version of that file here:
https://github.com/PrincetonUniversity/historic_state_legislative_election_results/blob/master/state_legislative_election_results_post1971.csv
fixed now