The central goal of this project, the Federal Elections Project, is to mesh the 2000 United States federal election results at the precinct level with the demographic data from the 2000 U.S. census. The investigators will gather data for all federal elections, specifically for president and vice president, senator, and representative. Although the focus is on federal offices, the data set will also include results from the eleven states holding gubernatorial elections in 2000. The merging of election and demographic data are especially critical now that new techniques of ecological inference allow the study of numerous political questions unitizing aggregate data.
The Federal Elections Project allows the researcher and other scholars to carry out a number of studies on several different topics. Continuing their current research on racial redistricting and realignment, they will use data to estimate and explain the level of racial polarization in 2000 around the nation. In a related vein, they will study the evolution of participation and partisanship of Latino voters - - the fastest growing segment of the electorate. They will also launch a much more thorough study of the geographical basis of partisanship. And they will develop a measure of the underlying partisanship for each precinct, county, congressional district in America.
These data will be of immense value to scholars interested in elections and political behavior.
