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

世纪初选程序的出现被广泛认为改变了美国政治。 例如，初选据称削弱了政党，助长了个人主义和以任职为导向的政治的兴起;初选使政客们在意识形态上比全体选民更加极端，因为候选人必须首先赢得选民中一部分党派的认可，然后才有资格参加大选。解决这两个最基本的问题-由于目前美国还没有关于初选结果的全面数据库，因此阶段性过程是困难的。 该项目为全州和联邦办公室建立了一个初选数据库。 对于每个州，我们收集从第一次初选举行到现在的每个州和联邦办公室的主要政党初选选举结果。我们的项目产生了广泛的教育和社会效益，包括在ICPSR和我们自己的网站上存档的有用的数字数据库，在各种媒体上的出版物，提供给州选举委员会和/或国务卿的数据集，三个主要教育机构之间的研究合作，指导和雇用女性和代表性不足的少数民族的研究助理，以及与主要研究者合作的本科生和研究生的专业化。

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.