Early U.S. Election Returns for President, Governor, and Congress 1788-1823

Containing general election returns for president, governor, and U.S. representative from 1788 to 1823, recorded chiefly at the county level with town-level data for New England states. The data was compiled by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The description notes the collection is less complete than later periods, with only approximately half of possible returns recovered.

Use Cases

• Analyze party code and candidate name distributions across state code and office code to study early U.S. political party development.
• Map election outcomes by county code and congressional district code to visualize regional political patterns in the Early National period.
• Compare town-level and county-level returns for New England states to study granularity differences in historical election data.

Strengths

• Covers a long historical time range from 1788 to 1823, capturing the first elections under the U.S. Constitution.
• Includes data at both county and town levels for several states, providing multiple geographic granularities.
• Contains returns for three major offices: president, governor, and U.S. representative, enabling cross-office analysis.

Limitations

• The collection is described as 'much less complete' than later periods, with only about half of possible returns recovered due to fugitive and nonextant sources.
• Data availability and time ranges vary significantly by state and dataset, as shown in the detailed list of 34 component datasets.
• The sample data and specific row counts, column definitions, and file formats are unavailable in the input, limiting initial assessment.

Provenance

Source

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

Collection Method

Collection and processing of historical election returns from fugitive and extant sources, supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.

Time Range

1788-1823

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.