Collaborative Research: Primary Elections for U.S. State and Federal Offices: A Comprehensive Database and Analysis

人们普遍认为，20世纪初选程序的出现改变了美国政治。例如，初选据称削弱了政党，助长了个人主义的、以在位为导向的政治崛起；初选使政客在意识形态上比整体选民更加极端，因为候选人必须首先获得一部分选民的批准，才有资格参加大选。即使是关于这两个阶段的最基本的问题也很难回答，因为目前美国没有关于初选结果的全面数据库。该项目为全州和联邦办公室汇编了一个初选数据库。对于每个州，我们收集从第一次初选到现在的每个主要政党初选的全州和联邦办公室的选举申报单。我们的项目产生了广泛的教育和社会效益，包括在人权委员会和我们自己的网站上存档的有用的数字数据库，各种媒体的出版物，向州选举委员会和/或国务卿提供的数据集，三大教育机构之间的研究合作，指导和雇用妇女和代表性不足的少数群体的研究助理，以及与主要调查人员共同撰写报告的本科生和研究生的职业化。

The emergence of the primary election process during the 20th Century is widely thought to have transformed American politics. For example, primary elections allegedly weakened political parties and fueled the rise of personalistic, incumbency oriented politics; and primary elections are though to have made politicians much more ideologically extreme than the electorate as a whole, because candidates must first win approval of a partisan subset of the electorate before they can even qualify for the general election.Addressing even the most basic questions about this two-stage process is difficult because no comprehensive database on primary election results in the U.S. currently exists. This project assembles a database on primary elections for statewide and federal offices. For each state, we collect election returns for every statewide and federal office for major-party primary elections from the year the first primaries were held to the present. Our project yields broad educational and social benefits including useful digital databases archived at the ICPSR and on our own websites, publications in a variety of media, data sets made available to state election boards and/or secretaries of state, research collaboration between three major educational institutions, mentoring and employing research assistants who are women and under-represented minorities, and professionalization of undergraduates and graduate students who co-author with the principal investigators.