Thomas M. Carsey at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill collected 259,000 observations on candidates for state legislative office from 1967 through 2003. The data includes primary election candidates for some states before 1990 and general election candidates after 1989. Each observation refers to an individual candidate.
Use Cases
- Analyzing historical trends in state legislative elections based on candidate-level observations
- Studying candidate competition patterns based on the inclusion of primary and general election data
- Modeling electoral outcomes at the state level based on the multi-decade time series
Strengths
- 259,000 candidate-level observations provide a substantial sample size
- Data spans a 36-year period from 1967 to 2003
- Includes primary election data for some states before 1990
Limitations
- Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download
- Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified
Provenance
- Source
- Thomas M. Carsey, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- Time Range
- 1967-2003
- Geography
- United States (state-level)