U.S. County-Level Election and Trade Data, 1870-1900

A new county-level dataset covers presidential, congressional, and gubernatorial elections in the United States from 1870 to 1900. Assembled by Ze Han for a study published in the British Journal of Political Science, it links electoral outcomes to a port market access index measuring counties' connectivity to international trade. The data was last updated in April 2026.

Use Cases

• Modeling the relationship between trade exposure and populist vote share based on the port market access index.
• Analyzing economic mechanisms by linking agricultural price declines to county-level crop portfolio price indices.
• Investigating heterogeneous treatment effects by comparing counties with different initial crop specializations.
• Training models to predict historical electoral outcomes using economic and geographic variables.

Strengths

• Covers a specific 30-year historical period from 1870 to 1900.
• Includes multiple election types: presidential, congressional, and gubernatorial.
• Integrates novel constructed indices for port market access and crop portfolio prices.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data may reflect geographic and temporal bias inherent to the historical period studied.

Provenance

Source

British Journal of Political Science Dataverse

Collection Method

Assembled by the author for a specific research paper.

Time Range

1870 to 1900

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04 23 15:44:16; freshness should be verified.

Geography

United States, county-level