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

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The emergence of the primary election process during the 20th Century is widelythought to have transformed American politics. For example, primary electionsallegedly weakened political parties and fueled the rise of personalistic, incumbencyoriented politics; and primary elections are though to have made politicians much moreideologically extreme than the electorate as a whole, because candidates must first winapproval of a partisan subset of the electorate before they can even qualify for thegeneral election.Addressing even the most basic questions about this two-stage process is difficultbecause no comprehensive database on primary election results in the U.S. currentlyexists. This project assembles a database on primary elections for statewide andfederal offices. For each state, we collect election returns for every statewide andfederal office for major-party primary elections from the year the first primaries wereheld to the present.Our project yields broad educational and social benefits including useful digitaldatabases archived at the ICPSR and on our own websites, publications in a variety ofmedia, data sets made available to state election boards and/or secretaries of state,research collaboration between three major educational institutions, mentoring andemploying research assistants who are women and under-represented minorities, andprofessionalization of undergraduates and graduate students who co-author with theprincipal investigators.