Spatiotemporal Database of U.S. Congressional Elections, 1896-2014

High-quality historical data about U.S. Congressional elections has long provided common ground for electoral studies. However, advances in geographic information science have recently made it efficient to compile, distribute, and analyze large spatio-temporal data sets on the structure of U.S. Congressional districts. A single spatio-temporal data set that relates U.S. Congressional election results to the spatial extent of the constituencies has not yet been developed. To address this, existing high-quality data sets of elections returns were combined with a spatiotemporal data set on Congressional district boundaries to generate a new spatio-temporal database of U.S. Congressional election results that are explicitly linked to the geospatial data about the districts themselves.