Database on Ideology, Money in Politics, and Elections (DIME): Public version 2.0

The database is intended to make data on campaign finance and elections (1) more centralized and accessible, (2) easier to work with, and (3) more versatile in terms of the types of questions that can be addressed. A list of the main value-added features of the database is below:

Data processing: Names, addresses, and occupation and employer titles have been cleaned and standardized.

Unique identifiers: Entity resolution techniques were used to assign unique identifiers for all individual and institutional donors included in the database. The contributor IDs make it possible to track giving by individuals across election cycles and levels of government.

Geocoding: Each record has been geocoded and placed into congressional districts. The geocoding scheme relies on the contributor IDs to assign a complete set of consistent geo-coordinates to donors that report their full address in some records but not in others. This is accomplished by combining information on self-reported address across records. The geocoding scheme further takes into account donors with multiple addresses. Geocoding was performed using the Data Science Toolkit maintained by Pete Warden and hosted at http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/. Shape files for congressional districts are from Census.gov (http://www.census.gov/rdo/data).


Ideological measures: The common-space CFscores allow for direct distance comparisons of the ideal points of a wide range of political actors from state and federal politics spanning a 35 year period. In total, the database includes ideal point estimates for 70,871 candidates and 12,271 political committees as recipients and 14.7 million individuals and 1.7 million organizations as donors.

Corresponding data on candidates, committees, and elections: The recipient database includes information on voting records, fundraising statistics, election outcomes, gender, and other candidate characteristics. All candidates are assigned unique identifiers that make it possible to track candidates if they campaign for different offices. The recipient IDs can also be used to match against the database of contribution records. The database also includes entries for PACs, super PACs, party committees, leadership PACs, 527s, state ballot campaigns, and other committees that engage in fundraising activities.

Identifying sets of important political actors: Contribution records have been matched onto
other publicly available databases of important political actors. Examples include:

Fortune 500 directors and CEOs: (data) (Paper)

Federal court judges: (Data) (Paper}

State supreme court justices: (Data) (Paper}

Executives appointees to federal agencies: (Data) (Paper)

Medical professionals: (Data) (Paper)

Validation: The ideological measures have been extensively validated across several studies spanning a variety of institutional settings and types of actors. A compendium of these validation results can be accessed here.