Library Guides: Statistics & Data for the Social Sciences: A Guide: Political Data

U.S. Elections Data

American National Election Studies
The ANES produces high quality data from its own surveys on voting, public opinion, and political participation. ANES is a collaboration of Stanford University and the University of Michigan, with funding by the National Science Foundation.
CQ Press Voting & Elections
Integrates a wealth of data, authoritative analyses, concise explanations, and historical material to provide a powerful research and reference tool on the American voter.
Electionary
Try this iPad app to view elections data back to 1976.
Federal Election Commission (FEC) - Campaign Finance Reports and Data
Published reports filed by Senate, House of Representatives and Presidential campaigns that list how much each campaign has raised and spent. Includes lists of all donors over $200, along with each donor's home address, employer and job title.
Clerk of the House : Election Statistics
Since 1920, the Clerk of the House has collected and published the official vote counts for federal elections from the official sources among the various states and territories. These documents, out of print for many years, have been collected and scanned in a format to make them once again available to researchers and students.

Louisiana Elections Data

Louisiana Secretary of State
Election results and statistics available 1982-present.

Political Science Data Sets

Correlates of War
A standard source of information on global conflict dynamics, human rights abuses, and geo-political issues. Coverage of individual countries varies. Data collection began in 1963.

ICPSR (Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research) This link opens in a new window
ICPSR maintains a data archive of more than 250,000 files of research in the social and behavioral sciences. It hosts 21 specialized collections of data in education, aging, criminal justice, substance abuse, terrorism, and other fields. NOTE: off-campus access to some materials may require creating an account, login, and password with ICPSR.

Policy Agendas Project
The Policy Agendas Project collects and organizes data from various archived sources to trace changes in the national policy agenda and public policy outcomes since the Second World War. Data sets include federal legislative, executive, and Supreme Court activity, as well as public opinion, media, and budgets.
Polity Project
The Polity IV Project continues the Polity research tradition of coding authority characteristics of states in the world system for purposes of comparative, quantitative analysis. The Polity IV dataset covers all major, independent states in the global system over the period 1800-2013
World Values Survey
WVS is an opinion survey similar to the GSS in questions and topics addressed, but includes representative samples from about 90 countries ranging from post-industrial democracies to developing nations.
Cross-National Time-Series Data Archive
The Cross-National Time-Series (CNTS) Data Archive provides ranges of annual data from 1815 to the present for all countries for many variables of use to the social scientist researcher.

US Political Ads

"The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal is the ultimate indignity to the democratic process."
-Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson, 1956

The Living Room Candidate
Contains more than 300 commercials, from every presidential election since 1952, when television ads were first used in a presidential campaign.
Political Communication Lab
Includes presidential campaign ads from 2000 to 2012, as well as ads from presidential primaries.
Stanford University

2012 Election Stats

Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections
Data compiled from published elections data and presented online by David Leip.
Presidential Election Results
Elections results from presidential elections, 1789-2012. Granularity of data varies considerably over time and by state.
Also see campaign documents and press releases from the primaries and general election.
more...less...
Part of the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara.