DU Portfolio

Legislative Research

Mat McCubbins' Political Science Experimental Lab Data Archive

http://www.mccubbins.org/Tommy's%20Work/dataarchive.html This page includes a wealth of datasets on the U.S. budget, presidential vetoes, and the Supreme Court. It specializes, however, in datasets on congressional behavior, and contains some very comprehensive data on committee assignments, roll call votes, and congressional biographies.

Charles Stewart's Congressional Data Page

http://web.mit.edu/17.251/www/data_page.html This up-to-date web site includes detailed information on congressional roll call votes and committee assignments.

Keith Poole's NOMINATE Data

http://voteview.com/dwnl.htm This page provides the data used by Poole and Rosenthal in their spatial modeling studies. NOMINATE scores for members of the 1st through the 108th Congresses are available.

Project Vote-Smart

http://www.vote-smart.org/ Biographies, issue positions, and interest group ratings for federal and state officeholders and candidates throughout the U.S. These folks run the famous National Political Awareness Test (NPAT) and publish the results for all the candidates who respond to it.

Smart Voter

http://www.smartvoter.org/ The League of Women Voters of California's web service providing detailed information -- vote shares, endorsements, biographies, platforms -- on candidates for federal, state, and local office.

Electoral Behavior

Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections

http://www.uselectionatlas.org/ If you need presidential elections data, this is the site for you. David Leip makes votes and turnout available by state, and even (for a fee) by county.

State Level Election Returns

http://www.leinsdorf.com/secsofstate.htm This web site is managed by a fellow named Josh Leinsdorf. He calls himself the Chief Psephologist of the Institute for Election Analysis. However, as far as I can tell, he's the only employee. His philosophies run toward the paranoid, but he's compiled a rather healthy collection of electoral data and links. This page has links to the Secretaries of State of all the fifty states, plus electoral data on Canada, India, and the U.K.

Record of American Democracy (ROAD)

http://www.hmdc.harvard.edu/ROAD/ This web site, by Gary King et al, contains electoral and demographic information for the U.S. down to precinct level. It also includes data for GIS imaging.

Lijphardt Election Archive

http://dodgson.ucsd.edu/lij/index.html Lijphart has compiled data sets on elections for various countries. Includes very specific electoral data on U.S., including candidate names and characteristics and county-level returns.

Federal Elections Commission: Federal Elections and Voting Statistics

http://www.fec.gov/pages/pubrec.htm This is fairly comprehensive collection of electoral data. This page includes information on voter turnout in state and federal elections since 1960, and has recent state level data on presidential and congressional elections, including primaries.

Maps of County-Level Presidential Election Returns, 1840-1984

http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/james/election.htm Professor Scott James at UCLA put together these maps using History Machine, a fairly simple Windows-based GIS program.

Polling and Survey Research

ICPSR Data on Mass Political Behavior and Attitudes

http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/access/index.html This site provides detailed descriptions of ICPSR datasets on election results, mass public opinion, and political history for the U.S. and many other nations.

Polling Report

http://www.pollingreport.com/ A nice, nonpartisan compendium of recent polls on candidates and issues.

Index of Historical Documents

http://www.nationalcenter.org/HistoricalDocuments.html This is a rather comprehensive collection of political texts, from the Magna Carta to the U.S. Constitution to JFK's inaugural address. The Center is a rather conservative group, which is why modern Republicans (Goldwater, Reagan, Gingrich) are somewhat over represented in this index.

Economics and Demographics

Bureau of Economic Analysis

http://www.bea.doc.gov/ This page includes current and historical U.S. economic indicators. Large datasets can be downloaded if necessary, but one can also look as small sets of tables describing specific indicators. The page provides access to the up-to-date Survey of Current Business.

United Nations Statistics Division

http://unstats.un.org/unsd/ This web site emphasizes vital population indicators while providing some information on world economies and political structures.

Statistical Abstract of the United States

http://www.census.gov/prod/www/statistical-abstract-us.html The U.S. Census operates this service, which allows one to view any table in the past six annual Statistical Abstracts in PDF file format.

CIA World Factbook

http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/ Convenient data on every country in the world, from their population size to what their flag looks like.

Political News Sources

ABC's The Note

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/politics/TheNote/TheNote.html A handy daily guide to what journalists are saying.

Slate