Data
Data
Datasets produced or co-produced for this research program, made available for replication and reuse.
Guns vs. Butter? The Most Important Problem Dataset
Public opinion researchers depend on certain questions as essential public opinion barometers, like presidential job approval or Bud Roper's right-direction/wrong-track measure. Perhaps no other question is as often used to determine what is foremost in the minds of the public than the open-ended "What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?" Respondents offer their concerns in their own words, unaffected by potential bias introduced by limited lists of answers.
Access the Most Important Problem dataset →Compared to What? Media-guided Reference Points Dataset
How do voters evaluate the state of the economy when making a choice at the polls? Conventional economic voting literature suggests a simple answer: a good economy helps incumbents, a bad economy hurts them. How, then, do voters differentiate a "good" economy from a "bad" one? Are all positive growth-rate numbers (0.1%, 2%, 5%, etc.) understood as "good," while negative ones are "bad"? Since the data does not speak for itself, people tend to base their assessments on comparisons between their own absolute performance and reference points.
By examining domestic media coverage from Lexis-Nexis, I identify spatial reference points across elections in 33 democracies since the 1980s. This dataset accompanies the article "Compared to What? Media-guided Reference Points and Relative Economic Voting" in Electoral Studies (2019).
View the article and dataset →