Historical American Political Finance Data at the National Archives: A Preface to the INET Edition

Thomas Ferguson ()
Additional contact information
Thomas Ferguson: University of Massachusetts, Boston

No inetwp242, Working Papers Series from Institute for New Economic Thinking

Abstract: Narratives in American history, politics, and economics — even those by the most accomplished researchers — often resemble donuts: at their core lies a hole that no amount of sweet speculation can truly fill. They say almost nothing about the financing behind even the most pivotal American political campaigns and elections. Both history and the social sciences suffer greatly when facts are missing and wild guesses take their place. INET's new data archive of historical political finance records at the National Archives marks a major step toward filling this factual void. It assembles all campaign finance reports filed by political parties and presidential candidates up to 1974, the year before the Federal Election Commission was established. A few additional files, including one from the FEC for 1976, are also included, as detailed below. This INET Working Paper outlines what users need to know to navigate the archive effectively and locate the data they require. The files themselves can be found here.

Keywords: political finance; elections; regulation; state and business (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 K20 L13 L14 L38 L51 N12 N42 P14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 10 pages
Date: 2025-09-30
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-pke and nep-pol
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.36687/inetwp242 First version, 2025 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:thk:wpaper:inetwp242

DOI: 10.36687/inetwp242

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers Series from Institute for New Economic Thinking Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Pia Malaney ().