Congressional election data
congress.RdData on congressional election outcomes in the United States between 1948 and 1990, based upon the paper "Do Voters Affect or Elect Policies? Evidence from the U.S. House" by David S. Lee, Enrico Moretti, Matthew J. Butler, 2004, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 119: 807-859. This sample is restricted to elections where (i) the incumbent is running for re-election and (ii) are not running unopposed. There are 9,788 observations available, and demographic variables are available for 6,774 of the observations.
Format
congress
A data frame with 9,788 rows and 15 columns:
- state
State code (ICPSR coding)
- district
District code
- demvote
Number of votes for Democrat candidate
- repvote
Number of votes for Republican candidate
- year
Year of election
- demvoteshare
Percentage of vote for Democrat candidate
- lagdemvoteshare
Percentage of vote for Democrat candidate in last election
- totpop
Population of Congressional district
- medianincome
Median (nominal) income of Congressional district
- pcturban
Percentage of Congressional district that is urban
- pctblack
Percentage of Congressional district that is black
- pcthighschl
Percentage of Congressional district that is HS graduates
- votingpop
Voting population of Congressional district
- democrat
1 if Democrat wins election (demvoteshare>0.5), 0 otherwise
- lagdemocrat
1 if Democrat won last election (lagdemvoteshare>0.5), 0 otherwise