County Voting Patterns - Data Sources

back to County Voting Patterns in US Presidential Elections, 1976-2000

Data Sources

This project required two main pieces of data: ArcView shapefiles for the counties of the contiguous United State at as many points in time as was relevant, and election returns by county for multiple presidential elections.

County shapefiles

Historical United State County (HUSCO) Boundary files
http://www.ga.lsu.edu/husco.html
(Earle, Carville, Changyong Cao, John Heppen, and Samuel Otterstrom. 1999. The Historical United States County Boundary Files 1790 - 1999 on CD-ROM. Geoscience Publications. Louisiana State University.)
(Source: UW Map Library) - "The Historical United States County Boundary Files (HUSCO) CD contains ArcView shapefile format county boundary files for the contiguous United States for each decade from 1790 through 1990 (also 1999). Files include county and state names as well as FIPS identification numbers and county area estimates. Territories enumerated by the U.S. Census are also included."

Election Results:

ICPSR Study No. 13: General Election Data for the United States, 1950-1990
http://www.icpsr.umich.edu:8080/ABSTRACTS/00013.xml?format=ICPSR
(Source: UW Center for Social Science Computation and Research) - "national files containing county-level returns for elections to the offices of president." ICPSR Study No. 7757: Candidate and Constituency Statistics of Elections in the United State, 1788-1990
http://www.icpsr.umich.edu:8080/ABSTRACTS/07757.xml?format=ICPSR
(Source: UW Center for Social Science Computation and Research) used to decode the Party field in the ICPSR Study No. 13 data. Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections
http://www.uselectionatlas.org Source used for the results of the 1992, 1996 and 2000 Presidential elections.

Other Sources

ICPSR CANDIDATE AND CONSTITUENCY STATISTICS OF ELECTIONS IN THE UNITED STATES, 1788-1990
[Computer file]. 5th ICPSR ed. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [producer and distributor], 1994

ICPSR GENERAL ELECTION DATA FOR THE UNITED STATES, 1970-1988 [Part 14: National, 1988]
[Computer file]. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [producer and distributor], 1990.

Disclaimer: "Some of the data utilized in this Project were made available by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. The data for GENERAL ELECTION DATA FOR THE UNITED STATES, 1970-1988 [Part 14: National, 1988] were originally collected by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. Neither the collector of the original data nor the Consortium bears any responsibility for the analyses or interpretations presented here."