Early U.S. Election Returns from 1788 to 1823

General election returns for President, Governor, and U.S. Representative from 1788 to 1823, recorded primarily at the county level with town-level data for New England states. The data includes variables such as state code, county/town code, congressional district codes, candidate names, office codes, and party codes. It is an archival extension of a larger historical election returns series.

Use Cases

• Analyze party code distributions across different state codes and office codes to study early U.S. political party development.
• Map candidate name vote counts by county code and congressional district codes to visualize regional political support.
• Study the evolution of election returns over time by linking office codes and candidate names to the 1788-1823 period.

Strengths

• Covers a foundational 35-year period (1788-1823) in U.S. political history.
• Provides data at both county and town levels for several states, offering granular geographic detail.
• Includes specific variables for candidate names, party codes, and office codes, enabling multi-faceted analysis.

Limitations

• The collection is described as 'much less complete' than post-1824 data, with only approximately half of possible returns recovered.
• Data availability and time ranges vary significantly by state, as shown in the 34 dataset parts.
• The archival nature and fragmented recovery from fugitive sources may lead to gaps and inconsistencies.

Provenance

Source

Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR).

Collection Method

Data collected and processed from historical sources, supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.

Time Range

1788 to 1823.

Freshness

null

Geography

United States, with specific state-level datasets including Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Missouri, Virginia, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and North Carolina.