Intended as a general resource for the study of campaign finance and ideology in American politics. Developed as part of the project on Ideology in the Political Marketplace, which is an on-going effort to conduct a comprehensive ideological mapping of political elites, interest groups, and donors using the common-space Cfscore scaling methodology (Bonica 2013). Constructing the database required a large-scale effort to compile, clean, and process data on contribution records, candidate characteristics, and election outcomes from various sources. The resulting database contains over 130 million political contributions made by individuals and organizations to local, state, and federal elections spanning a period from 1979 to 2014. A corresponding database of candidates and committees provides additional information on state and federal elections.
