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，助长了个人主义和现任政治的兴起；尽管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一部分党派选民的支持，然后才有资格参加大选。因为目前还没有关于美国初选结果的全面数据库，所以即使是最基本的关于这个两阶段过程的问题也很难解决。这个项目收集了一个关于州和联邦办公室初选的数据库。对于每个州，我们收集从第一次初选举行的那一年到现在的各州和联邦主要政党初选的选举结果。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，各种媒体上的出版物，向州选举委员会和/或州级秘书提供的数据集，三大教育机构之间的研究合作，指导和雇用女性和少数族裔的研究助理，与主要研究人员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 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.