The Record of American Democracy, 1984-1990
(Documentation)
Gary King and
Bradley Palmquist
With Contributions From Project Leaders: Greg
Adams,
Micah
Altman,
Kenneth
Benoit,
Claudine Gay,
Jeffrey B. Lewis,
Russ Mayer,
and Eric
Reinhardt
The Record Of American Democracy
(ROAD) data includes election returns, socioeconomic summaries, and
demographic measures of the American public at unusually low levels of
geographic aggregation. The NSF-supported ROAD project covers every
state in the country from 1984 through 1990 (including some off-year
elections). One collection of data sets includes every election at
and above State House, along with party registration and other
variables, in each state for the roughly 170,000 precincts nationwide
(about 60 times the number of counties). Another collection has added
to these (roughly 30-40) political variables an additional 3,725
variables merged from the 1990 U.S. Census for 47,327 aggregate units
(about 15 times the number of counties) about the size one or more
cities or towns. These units completely tile the U.S. landmass. The
collection also includes geographic boundary files so users can easily
draw maps with these data.
A PDF version of this documentation (omitting several large tables),
as well as all the data, are available from the ICPSR and on-line from
the our data page. Our data page also allows dynamic variable subsetting, descriptive statistics, and format
conversion.