Political Science: State and Local Politics

Includes 150 in-depth tables, charts, and figures comparing all 56 states, commonwealths, and territories of the US on all branches of state government, policies, administration, elections, finance, and federal-state relations. In PDF or Excel; 1935-present.

Compiled by Carl Klarner. Data by state for personal income, disposable income, gross state product, unemployment, and state government finance (including revenue, multiple tax categories, expenditures, budget surplus / deficit, and debt). Data in tab delimited format. Includes annual and quarterly data; temporal coverage varies, 1929-2015.

Top 10%, Top 5%, Top 1%, Top 0.5%, Top 0.1% and Top 0.01% income share measures compiled by Mark Frank. Data in Excel and Stata.

Dataset compiled by John Voorheis from the American Community Survey and the Current Population Survey covering states (1977-2012) and MSAs (1968-2012). Includes the Gini Coefficient and the Theil index as well as income ratios (90-10, 99-median), and Lorenz ordinates (including the top 1% share). Data in .csv and R.

Age, sex, and race breakdowns, annually, for all United States counties from 1969 on. NBER took the National Cancer Institute files and put them in SAS, Stata, and CSV forms.

Health and Human Services (HHS) dataset that collects a wide range of annual health-related but also demographic and economic variables from government sources at the state and county level in the United States. Many variables go back to 2000 or earlier.

Annotated list of databases created by various state agencies, maintained by the Government Documents Round Table of the American Library Association.

State Blue Books, or legislative manuals, are useful compilations of statistics and information about states and state government. In addition to this list of current blue books, Firestone has long historical runs of many state manuals. Our most recent print editions are in the Trustee Reading Room; older editions are in the stacks or ReCAP.

Related guide with links to tax and government finance sources

Multiple series of budgetary reports on the 50 states: Budget Processes in the States, State Expenditure Report, and Fiscal Survey of the States. 1980s-present.

Compilation by Ballotpedia of both official and unofficial transparency websites for state budgets and spending.

Includes number and percent of state legislators who are Democrats and Republicans, party control of state legislatures and governor’s offices, and different measures of party control of state institutions for the years 1937 to 2011. Also includes variables that indicate what percentage of legislators are up for election in a year and whether there is a gubernatorial election. Data in Excel.

Current and historic party control of state legislatures and government compiled by the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL). Detailed figures for 2009-present; less detailed timelines for 1978-present.

This data collection provides information on the number of seats held by the major and minor parties in both houses of the state legislatures, as well as the party identification of the state's governor during the term of each legislature in the United States in the period 1834-1985. Data are presented annually and biennially for every legislature.

STATA and Excel files contain variables representing 1) the Ranney Index (measuring partisan control of state government) for 1940-2010 period and 2) the Holbrook and Van Dunk index (measuring the overall competitiveness of individual state legislative elections) for 1970-2010. Two, four, six, eight, and ten year moving averages computed. See Shufeldt and Flavin 2012 for details on the measures.

Measures of the ideology of individual state legislators and annual scores for legislative chambers on a liberal-conservative continuum (-2 most liberal to +2 most conservative). Scores are based on roll call voting data in the state legislatures and a recurring survey of state legislative candidates to enable comparisons of ideology and polarization across time, chambers, and states as well as with the U.S. Congress. Data in Stata; 1993-2016.

Annual state-level measures of the average location of a state's voters and elected officials on a liberal-conservative continuum (0 most conservative, 100 most liberal), based on interest group ratings of roll call votes by state congressional delegations, the outcomes of congressional elections, the partisan division of state government, and assumptions about state legislators and voters. Data in Stata and Excel, 1960-2017.

Estimates annual state-level measures of the public's policy mood (a measure of support for more or less government) and partisanship from 1956 to 2010 and state-level political ideology from 1976 to 2010 using pooled responses from over 500 surveys and 740,000 respondents.

Measures the political liberalism/conservatism of states, congressional districts, state senate and assembly districts, and cities using responses to survey questions by 275,000 Americans who participated in the Annenberg National Election Study and the Cooperative Congressional Election Study from 2000 to 2011. Data is coded using district boundaries from both before and after the 2010 Census redistricting. Data in .csv format.

Project by Daniel Coffey collecting state party platforms and coding based on a taxonomy of issue codes. Data on the site covers 2010-12, but 2000-2016 available upon request. Data in Excel.

The National Conference of State Legislatures provides databases on a variety of topics—campaign finance, education, elections, immigration, transportation, economic development, the environment, and more—for tracking state legislation (bills and enacted laws) across the 50 states. Search by subtopics, year, status (e.g., pending, enacted, to governor, etc.) or enter keywords to identify bills.

Provides access to proposed and enacted legislation and regulations as well as some legislative news and statistics for all state legislatures in the United States.

Contains all U.S. state ballot measures attempted from 1902– 2016 compiled directly from the National Conference of State Legislatures’ (NCSL) “Ballot Measures Database” (see NCSL's up-to-date database). The database includes all types of ballot measures (e.g., legislative referendum, initiative, popular referendum), type of election (e.g., general, primary, special), whether a measure passed or failed, the percentage yes votes for the measure, and the category of topic area (as coded by NCSL). Data in Excel, .csv, and Stata formats.

Detailed coverage of individual ballot measures grouped by topic, state, and year, providing info on supporters and opponents, their arguments, campaign finance, lawsuits, and lots of additional context.

Sunlight Foundation project scrapes data from official websites of the 50 states (plus D.C. and Puerto Rico) to provide bill tracking, legislation, voting on legislation, contact info, and hearings and other event details. Data available for bulk download in CSV or JSON; 2009-present.

The Law Librarians' Society of Washington, D.C. hosts this collection of links to official state legislative information sites.

CRL and LLMC Digital digitized the complete collection of state legislative journals (more than 8000 volumes) from all 50 states. For most states, the coverage starts in the early to mid-nineteenth century and ends in the late twentieth century.

LID draws on more than 500,000 state bills (collected by the Sunlight Foundation) and 2,400 pieces of model legislation written by lobbyists, searches for similarities, and flags them for review. LID users can then investigate the matches to look for possible lobbyist and special interest influence. Separate datasets comparing bills to bills and bills to model legislation available in .csv and JSON format. Dates vary, but typically 2011–mid-2015

Bulk download of bills and legislative tracking information for Congress and the 50 states. Requires free registration. Downloads in JSON, XML, and CSV. Generally, late 2000s-present.

Searchable database of the texts of the state constitutions of the United States. There have been almost 150 state constitutions, they have been amended roughly 12,000 times, and the text of the constitutions and their amendments comprises about 15,000 pages of text. Constitutional texts can be reconstructed at any point in time, using the "as of" search method. Full coded texts can be downloaded in .txt format. 1776-2000.

Roll call voting data from the California Assembly and Senate. Zip archives are provided for each two-year session. Each zip file contains two files: 1) a matrix of all votes cast by every member of both chambers in committee and on the floor; 2) a tab separated file describing the location, sponsor, content, and outcome of each vote taken. Includes an R file for manipulating the data.

See this guide by our Law Librarian for other sources to find U.S. statutes at the federal and state level, including historical.

Directory information on state legislators and executives, 2005-present (1 year lag). Includes committee assignments, biographical information, staff, and more from KnowWho. Each year is a zipped excel file with multiple tables linked by unique person IDs.

Compiled by Carl Klarner. Contains names of governors, whether gubernatorial elections were held, tenure and term limits of governors, whether a budget was passed in a year, personal characteristics of governors (gender, whether they served in the state legislator or Congress), and more. Data in Excel; covers 1960-2010 (back to 1936 for some variables).

Aggregates more than 5000 polls at the state level measuring approval ratings for governors across all 50 states. Given the diversity of sources, responses are collapsed into % positive and negative. Data collected by Thad Beyle, Lee Sigelman, and Richard Niemi; in .xls format.

Lists current state legislative and other elected officials. Includes contact info, biographical attributes, key votes, interest group ratings, policy positions, speeches/press releases, and funding.

NCSL data on legislative leaders as well as women, African-Americans, and Hispanics serving in state legislatures.

The Directory includes the names and addresses of the nation’s Latino elected officials; their geographic distribution; the levels of government they represent; and their political affiliation. Data in Excel; 2005-present.

Directory of county and some city election officials with website, phone, fax, email, and mailing address compiled by the U.S. Vote Foundation. Also provides statewide voter information (eligibility and ID requirements, dates, registration info, state elections websites, etc.). For a similar list of local election officials for all counties in a table format, see the Federal Voting Assistance Program's Local Election Office Directory.