CampaignView, a database of policy platforms and biographical narratives for congressional candidates

Abstract

Thousands of candidates run for the U.S. Congress each election season, yet we lack systematic information on the vast majority of these contenders. Consequently, fundamental questions about polarization, agenda-setting, and representation remain unanswered. We introduce CampaignView, a database of campaign platforms and biographical narratives drawn from congressional campaign websites. Our corpus covers 5,228 candidates, representing 86.9% of major-party, ballot-eligible contenders who ran for the U.S. House of Representatives between 2018 and 2022. Our text data was collected in real-time during each election cycle, parsed into relevant units of aggregation, and manually annotated for topical coverage. In sum, our data includes 43,465 platform points and 5,114 biographical narratives. We provide auxiliary information on candidates and their electoral contexts to supplement our data. We host data for public dissemination at https://campaignview.org. Information is crucial to a well-functioning democracy; the open-access tools and data we produce have broad utility for journalists, advocacy groups, voters, and researchers seeking information on congressional campaigns.