U.S. State Legislative Election Returns, 1967-2016, Restructured for Analysis

State Legislative Election Returns from 1967 to 2016 have been restructured so the contest is the unit of analysis. The dataset was created by Carl Klarner, and the restructuring code is provided alongside a one-hour explanatory video. The original data covers elections for state legislative bodies across the United States over a 50-year period.

Use Cases

• Analyze electoral competition and party performance based on state legislative contest data.
• Model incumbency advantage and candidate success based on historical election returns.
• Study long-term political trends and realignment based on a 50-year time series of state elections.

Strengths

• Covers a 50-year time span (1967-2016) of U.S. state legislative elections.
• Includes the restructuring code for reproducibility and transparency of the analysis-ready format.

Limitations

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

Provenance

Source

Carl Klarner

Collection Method

Restructured from the original State Legislative Election Returns dataset.

Time Range

1967-2016

Geography

United States (state-level)