Data and social networks
Does anyone know of a free source of county level presidential results going back to the 19th century? I want to compare correlations in voting across time. I did find some data from Pennsylvania, and noted that the Great Flip seems not to be evident in that state for the 1856 or 1860 election (that is, the correlation between Democrat and Republican voting patterns by county between 2008 and those years is around zero). Here’s a map of the 1960 presidential election results by county, red for Nixon and blue for Kennedy:
The Yankee dominated regions of northern New England remained Republican strongholds in 1960, just as they were during the ascendancy of Franklin Roosevelt. In Albion’s Seed David Hackett Fischer argues for a “First Settler Effect” which echoes down across the centuries. This sort of paradigm would ask us what substantive similarities underpin the common support of Vermonters for Hoover in 1932 and liberal Democrats and Republicans in the 2000s (remember that northern New England still has a much larger fraction of Yankees). But I wonder if what is really maintaining regional coherency across time are social networks which share ideas and evolve together over time. It is peculiar to imagine it now, but during the early republic the Yankees were the segment of the population most fixated on Christian orthodoxy (evident by the fact that New England states were last to disestablish their churches), and were the driving forces of the Second Great Awakening (which did spread across the country). Today Yankees are the most secular segment of settler descended subcultures. Conversely, in 1800 the South was relatively lax in matters of religion, republican in politics, and pro-French in sympathy. John C. Calhoun was a Unitarian.
So that’s why I want to get county-by-county data sets.
Labels: data
The Great Flip seems to be located in the parties themselves, not in the voters. The voters merely select the party closest to their beliefs. In 1860, the Republicans were liberal by the standards of the day, and the Democrats were pro-slavery and reactionary. It seems the map indicates the regions have kept their original tendencies, although there has been some evolution of content. Church-based liberalism of 1860 becomes secular liberalism in 2008. Pro-slavery evolves into social conservatism with a tinge of racism.
i can see where that sort of evaluation comes from, but really i think it’s pretty misleading and useless as a framework. sean wilentz in the rise of american democracy and daniel walker howe in what god hath wrought outline the disparate coalitions of the pre-1860 era, and it is really confusing.
On the flip, it might be better to use a later election for comparison. The 1860 election was a rare multi-party election with major issues actually at stake and represented an unstable situation. Because of reconstruction, the first normal election after the war was 1880, Garfield vs. Hancock.
The two party system tends to flatten out significant issues in favor of a mushy consensus dressed up with dog and pony show debates about prohibition or abortion or some other hot button issue of no central importance.(Read Karp’s “Indispensable Enemies” for more.) When real issues come into play it’s a failure of the system, and third parties are usually in play.
This may seem counterintuitive based on recent history, but all Democratic candidates since Eisenhower have been hawks except for McGovern, and almost all have been neoliberals except Mondale. There definitely was a change in 1968 (foreshadowed in 1948) and another one in 1932 (up until then the Democrats had been as conservative as Republicans). Perot, on the other hand was a blip.
I guess I’m saying that you should also look at instabilies besides stable two-party patterns. Much of the West and Midwest was ready to leave the two party system between 1890 and 1940, with a lot of mavericks, indeopendents, and third parties.
Just looking at the 1860 map. Only two border state counties voted Republican, and no Southern counties. A number of PA counties voted Breckenridge (Southern Democrat). Breckenridge got 18% of the vote, and the two “centrist” parties got a plurality.
Well, the map you added appears to be the very same as uploaded by “Tilden76: at Wikipedia, so perhaps you could leave a request on his (or her) talk page for the source of data sets used to make the maps. I don’t know a good data source myself, but I’ll let you know if I find one. I wouldn’t mind looking at the data myself.
pler1024.png
I think that you should also keep in mind when comparing elections that different candidate match-ups will bring together different coalitions, so the . For instance, you can compare
http://www.flickr.com/photos/34457952@N00/2553604762/
I did of the 2008 Democratic primary with
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2008/countymappur
of the subsequent general election (from Mark Newman’s page. If there’s any question of the colors, Obama=blue, Clinton/McCain=red, and Edwards=green. While there are some similar patterns in both maps, they certainly don’t have the same character.
Obviously, some of that comes from the simple fact that the Democratic primary involves a highly selected subset of the population that is represented in the general election, which is a major contributor to the variance in results, though I suspect that a larger contributor is the fact that the choice between Obama and Clinton was fundamentally different than the choice between Obama and McCain.
Now, as you can see from the maps I’ve made, my color-coding preference is not the same as Tilden76′s. Specifically, I used the percentage of the vote won by a candidate to determine the value of the color assigned to the candidate in the hex value independently of the vote percentage of the other candidates, which allows me to show the patterns vote patterns for the sub-plurality candidates in each county. Tilden76′s method only shows the strength of the plurality winner’s plurality.
However, I have to admit that my preference is difficult to implement with the 1860 election as there were four major candidates, and surely there were other candidates that received votes at the margins, which means that the only way to use my method to show the whole picture would be to make multiple maps. Though, if there aren’t any significant other candidates beyond the big four from that election, the fourth candidate (probably Bell) could just be designated by darkness.