Abstract
High-quality historical data about US Congressional elections has long provided common ground for electoral studies. However, advances in geographic information science have recently made it efficient to compile, distribute, and analyze large spatio-temporal data sets on the structure of US Congressional districts. A single spatio-temporal data set that relates US Congressional election results to the spatial extent of the constituencies has not yet been developed. To address this, existing high-quality data sets of elections returns were combined with a spatiotemporal data set on Congressional district boundaries to generate a new spatio-temporal database of US Congressional election results that are explicitly linked to the geospatial data about the districts themselves.
Highlights
Background & SummaryLongitudinal study of Congressional elections in the United States is not new
With the publication of King[1], high-quality data on US Congressional elections at constituency level was made available for various studies of redistricting, voter behavior, and electoral system analysis
Later studies of elections have not provided data to extend King[1] directly. These studies both extend and enrich the original data set, providing a superset of the original Congressional elections data. These analyses focused on sociodemographic study of redistricting’s impact on various aspects of the electoral system[4,5,6] or are general studies of the social and demographic structure of American Congressional geography[7,8]
Summary
Longitudinal study of Congressional elections in the United States is not new. With the publication of King[1], high-quality data on US Congressional elections at constituency level was made available for various studies of redistricting, voter behavior, and electoral system analysis. These studies both extend and enrich the original data set, providing a superset of the original Congressional elections data Often, these analyses focused on sociodemographic study of redistricting’s impact on various aspects of the electoral system[4,5,6] or are general studies of the social and demographic structure of American Congressional geography[7,8]. I have constructed a general-purpose spatial database that extends King[1] forward in time using data from the CLEA and novel data on incumbency With this extended dataset, I connect the individual district geometries compiled by Lewis et al.[32] to yield a single spatio-temporal database of US Congressional elections. I discuss the process for constructing this data set, compare the relative values of the source data sets, and briefly discuss potential use cases or novel analyses that this new data may provide
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