Volume 1Labels, sorting and partisan feeling

Party identification and ideological labels drew closer together in American surveys. The volume asks what the labels contain, in the United States and about 100 countries, how the alignment changed across birth cohorts, and how it differs from partisans' feelings toward the other party.

Volume 2Coalitions and political differences

Participation, group coalitions, issues and attitudes toward institutions and democracy, 1948 to 2024. Party gaps on these measures differ in size and timing, and some reverse with control of the presidency, so no single trend describes them.

Volume 3Votes, giving and places

Election returns, donor records and county data count different populations at different scales. The volume follows the vote from counties to precincts and down the ballot, compares donors with voters, and returns from places to the people who live in them.

Reference

For programs

Where a program finds a chapter's report and its numbers, and how to quote them.

Every written chapter has a report beside its reading page. The report is generated from the chapter's data files and its findings text, and nothing in it is written separately, so it is the form of a chapter a program should read.

Where the report is

/<slug>/report is the report as HTML and /<slug>/report.md is the same report as Markdown, served as text/markdown. The chapter on party and ideology, for example, has a report and its Markdown copy. The chapter page and the report page each carry a <link rel="alternate" type="text/markdown"> that points at the Markdown.

/llms.txt lists one line per written chapter: its label, its title, the URL of its Markdown report and its dek with the numbers resolved. /llms-full.txt is every report's Markdown in one file.

Sections a program can link to

Each section of a report has a stable id: #identification, #principal-estimates, #findings, #tables, #estimates, #definitions, #methods, #limits, #references, #provenance and #formats. The principal estimates are the facts the dek and the opening prose cite, and they are the answer to quote first. Each figure's table is #table-<figure id> and each estimate's row is #fact-<fact id>.

Table n of a report is figure n of the chapter: "Table 3" in a report holds the data behind the chapter's third figure.

Machine copies

/report/<slug>/facts.json is a byte-for-byte copy of the chapter's facts file, and /report/<slug>/figures/<id>.json is a copy of each figure's data. The #formats section of every report links to them.

What a fact holds

A fact record carries a value and a display, the value as the prose prints it. Where they apply it also carries a unit, a population, a period, a source (a dataset id from the data sources page), an estimand, the weights, a ci (the 95% interval as a pair of bounds), n (the sample size) and a note.

No number in the prose is typed by hand. Each one prints from a fact, and a figure's title, caption and table draw on the same file, so a value quoted from the report equals the value in the chart.

Indexing

A draft chapter carries a noindex rule, and its report follows it. Whether the site as a whole may be indexed is a deployment setting, SITE_INDEXABLE; while it is unset, robots.txt disallows every path.

Citing and quoting

The how to cite page gives BibTeX for the book, and the identification section of each report gives the chapter's citation key and its published and updated dates. The methods page describes how the estimates are made.

An estimate in this book has an interval and a sample size wherever the data supply them. A program that quotes the estimate should quote both beside it, as the report prints them, and should name the chapter and the date of its last update.