This NSF-sponsored project will examine the effects of state-level electoral institutions on the responsiveness of elections to national forces from 1840 through 1940. In addition to pulling together data bases of state and federal elections, the project has required the collection of two formidable data sets – laws and practices governing state elections (laws governing national elections and laws governing state elections) and the state legislative election returns (for sample see Wisconsin's Excel files for Assembly, Senate).

This latter data set has involved entering nearly 200,000 election results from state publications and primary sources. In summer, 2003, the first pass at data entry was completed.  By fall, 2005, data entry should be complete. Fall, 2006, is the target date for archiving at ICPSR the district/county level returns and merging statewide legislative election returns with existing ICPSR data sets on party composition of state legislatures.

In addition to the electoral data a key feature of this project involves systematically culling through primary and secondary sources for information on electoral laws that shaped 19th and early 20th century elections. These include ballot form, the electoral calendar, office term length and limits, district forms and the occurrence of redistricting, among other features of the offices and election rules. These are summarized in several tables in Election Law Summary. Some of these provisions were extracted from an inspection of state constitutions from statehood to 1940. The relevant constitutional characteristics can be found in State Constitution Summaries. (This remains a partial listing; contact me in fall of 2005 for update.) Finally, one of the trickiest and most obscure institutional variables of importance is state legislative redistricting. In addition to straightforward redistricting events, this era’s legislators routinely expanded and contracted membership, staggered terms and introduced other imaginative practices (such as floterial districts). Our findings from state constitutions, laws and secondary sources remain a work in progress. What I have so far (May 2005) can be found in State Legislative Redistricting (data in .xls,  codebook in .doc).

Scott MacKenzie looks over the data like a hawk.  Without his sharp eyes and remarkable memory, the project would have sunk under the weight of massive and complex data.