Lijphart Elections Archive: Lijphart Country Catalog: United States

The Lijphart Elections Archive is a static research collection of district level election results for approximately 350 national legislative elections in 26 countries that was maintained through 2003. When Arend Lijphart began his comparative study of electoral systems in the early 1980s, he discovered that no library anywhere in the world had a collection of the detailed statistics of national elections in democratic countries -- although such statistics were being collected by many government and non-government agencies and, at least in principle, obtainable from these agencies. This was the origin of the Elections Archive in the University Library of the University of Calif ornia, San Diego. The objective of the Archive is to systematically collect election statistics in as much detail as possible, including, as a minimum, the results at the level of the individual election districts in which votes are converted into seats. The original scope of the Archive was the national election results in hard-copy format for the lower or only house of the legislature and for any directly elected upper house in the twenty-seven older democracies from 1945 on (the West European democracies plus the United States, Canada, Costa Rica, India, Israel, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand). The scope has expanded in several directions: more countries, a longer time span, sub-national as well as national elections, and d ata in machine-readable format. Arend Lijphart is Research Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Electoral Systems and Party Systems: A Comparative Study of Twenty-Seven Democracies, 1945-1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) and many articles on elections and electoral systems in Electoral Studies and other journals. The Archive Director is Gary W. Cox, Department of Political Science, University of Califor nia, San Diego