Welcome to the Southern Voting Project. The project, led by Dr. William Terry of the University of Oregon political science department in conjunction with the University of Oregon Library’s Digital Scholarship Center, presents the most comprehensive dataset to date pertaining to the politics of the US South. On this site you will find links to the data and a set of interactive mapping tools hosted by GeoCommons.
Description of data
The data cover three levels of analysis: (1) state, (2) US Congressional district, and (3) county level. Data for each level is available on this site in .csv and .dta format with a codebook and a pdf of the original source material.
There are three broad categories of variables in our datasets: (a) political outcomes, (b) policy outcomes, and (c) demographic variables. Category (a) includes variables dealing directly with politics, e.g., election results and the number of voters in the focal jurisdiction. Category (b) contains information about policy outcomes, such as county-level education expenditures, the state corporate income tax rate, and the roll call voting record of the district’s member of Congress. Category (c) contains standard demographic information about the focal jurisdiction, e.g., its racial composition, per capita income, percent of the population elderly, incarceration rates, etc.
Our datasets currently contains 220 variables at the state level, 97 variables at the US Congressional district level, and 101 variables at the county level. The data include a vast number of previously undigitized information on election returns and voter registration rates in addition to numerous data we collected from previous scholarship. We have also made available miscellaneous scanned documents regarding voter registration from the Voter Education Project (VEP) archives at the Atlanta University Center — the consortium of HBCUs in Atlanta.