State Legislative Elections, 1967–2003: Announcing the Completion of a Cleaned and Updated Dataset

More than 15 years—nine election cycles—have passed since a comprehensive set of state legislative election data was compiled and made available to researchers and practitioners: the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research's (ICPSR) State Legislative Election Returns in the United States dataset (Study #8907) collected by Malcolm Jewell (Jewell 1991) and containing observations from 1967 to 1988. With this hiatus in mind, we set out at various times initially—in three independent efforts (Berry and Carsey; Niemi, and Powell; Snyder)—to gather legislative election data for all states and elections since 1988. In addition, Berry and Carsey (2005) cleaned the original dataset to make it more accurate and usable; their corrections led to the release of a revised ICPSR dataset (Study #3938). The culmination of these efforts is a dataset containing information about general elections for state legislative seats from 1967 to 2003, now available through ICPSR (Study 21480).