POLS 402: Methods of Policy Analysis

Survey of voting behavior in the United States, conducted biennially since 1956. Basic questions on religious identification and attendance at religious services have been asked throughout the time series, but the religion module was widened starting in 1990. Contains links to download all the data.

The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) is a collaborative program of cross-national research among election studies conducted in over fifty states.

Detailed data on campaign contributions and expenditures by candidates, parties, and committees.

The purpose of this data series was to provide large-scale scientific surveys and make possible in-depth investigation of the political attitudes, perceptions, and electoral behaviors of a large, representative national sample of adult Black Americans. The studies permit analyses and change in the Black community on a scale that had not been possible before the series began.

The Pew Research Center’s Hispanic Trends Project, launched in 2001 as the Pew Hispanic Center, seeks to improve public understanding of the diverse Hispanic population in the United States and to chronicle Latinos’ growing impact on the nation.
The project conducts public opinion surveys that aim to illuminate Latino views on a range of social matters and public policy issues, including its annual National Survey of Latinos. It also publishes demographic studies and other social science research on a wide range of topics, including economics and personal finances, Hispanic/Latino identity, education, health care, immigration trends, the Latino vote, technology adoption, youth and work and employment.

This study contains data on 6,754 political instability events in 84 selected nations in the period 1948-1965. These data, which permit measurement of political instability and the correlates of internal conflict behavior, are concerned with conflict directed by groups and individuals in the prevailing political system against other groups or persons, and with uncovering the determinants of stability within all national political systems.

The Polity IV dataset covers all major, independent states in the global system over the period 1800-2018 (i.e., states with a total population of 500,000 or more in the most recent year; currently 167 countries). With the support of the Political Instability Task Force, the Polity IV Project has been transformed into a living data collection effort, meaning that it constantly monitors regime changes in all major countries and provides annual assessments of regime authority characteristics, changes and data updates.

The United States Historical Election Returns series was developed by ICPSR and was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. ICPSR's holdings of historical election data cover the years 1788-1990 and consist of several discrete datasets that contain county- and state-level returns for all elections to the offices of president, governor, United States senator, and United States representative.