DIME: U.S. Campaign Finance and Ideology Data, 1979-2014

From 1979 to 2014, the Database on Ideology, Money in Politics, and Elections (DIME) contains over 130 million political contributions to local, state, and federal elections. It was developed by Adam Bonica at Stanford University as part of the Ideology in the Political Marketplace project. The data includes cleaned records of donors, candidates, and committees, with unique identifiers and geocoding.

Use Cases

• Tracking individual donor behavior across election cycles based on unique contributor IDs.
• Analyzing ideological alignment between donors and candidates using the CFscore scaling methodology.
• Mapping political contributions geographically based on geocoded records and congressional district placement.
• Studying campaign finance trends over time from 1979 to 2014.

Strengths

• Contains over 130 million contribution records, providing significant scale for analysis.
• Data spans 35 years (1979-2014), enabling longitudinal studies of campaign finance.
• Includes cleaned and standardized names, addresses, and employer information.
• Uses entity resolution to assign unique identifiers, allowing donor tracking across cycles.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.
• Row count for candidate and committee tables is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

Stanford University, compiled from various campaign finance and election sources.

Collection Method

Compiled, cleaned, and processed from contribution records, candidate characteristics, and election outcomes.

Time Range

1979 to 2014

Freshness

Data covers up to 2014; last update date is unknown.

Geography

United States (local, state, and federal elections)