Updating and Cleaning ICPSR's State Legislative Election Returns Data and a Study of State Legislative Redistricting

Florida State University, Tallahassee FL

Investigators

Abstract

Research on American legislative elections focuses predominantly on Congress, with far less attention given to state legislatures. This is unfortunate because the large number of state legislative elections, the variation across states in the character of legislative bodies and election rules, and the increased importance of states and state legislatures in policy making in the U.S. make state legislative elections especially well suited for testing theories about the nature of elections. Probably the greatest impediment to such research is the lack of readily accessible data about elections in the fifty states. Part I of the ICPSR data set, State Legislative Election Returns in the United States, 1968-1989 overcomes this obstacle, as it contains, among other things, a range of political and election outcome measures for each candidate running in every state legislative general election during the period. However, scholars have been unable to fully exploit these data because, for candidates for whom there are multiple observations, the name recorded frequently varies across observations (e.g. with and without a middle initial, with and without nickname, typographical errors). These errors make it impossible to reliably trace a particular candidate from one election to the next, thereby greatly limiting the utility of the data set. It has been estimated that among incumbents running in general elections for whom there were more than one observation included in this data set, 35% had at least one case in which their name was recorded differently - an error rate of 35%. The PIs, under a recent grant from NSF, have developed and implemented a procedure to "clean" the candidate names by creating an adjusted name variable that is consistent across multiple instances of the same candidate, and should have an error rate of 2% or less. The procedure includes a series of computer algorithms followed by the human review of records using a set of formal decision rules. This current investigation updates the State Legislative Elections Returns data through the 2002 elections and applies the name cleaning process to the extended data set. The result will be one seamless data set including information on every state legislative general election candidate from 1968 to 2002 in which scholars can accurately trace the electoral history of each candidate. ICPSR has agreed to archive this updated and cleaned version of the data set which will include the original candidate name variable, the adjusted name variable, and all of the remaining twenty-seven substantive variables included in the original data set for the entire time period. To enhance the scholarly value of this data set, two companion data sets will be created - one containing numerous state-level variables for 1968-2002, and one including measures of district demographic characteristics for the 1992-2002 period. Several scholars have already expressed interest in using the enhanced State Legislative Election Returns data set. When completed, this data set will facilitate research on a diverse range of topics, including: partisan realignment in the South, the behavior and impact of minor party candidates, the determinants of electoral success of incumbents over the course of their careers, and the linkage between elections and the public policy choices of politicians. Importantly, for various reasons discussed in the proposal, systematic fifty-state analysis of such topics as the impact of term limits, the link between elections and roll call voting across states, and redistricting is feasible only if the data set is extended past 1989. Indeed, this research has a plan for the PIs to employ these data to study how the interaction of strategic candidates and legislative institutions affects the partisan and incumbency electoral pressures present in legislative redistricting. Beyond the basic research value of this research, the project has the potential for broader impacts by informing public debate on a broad range of issues, including redistricting, term limits, the incumbency advantage, and the operation of representative democracy in the American states.