Atlas of the 2012 Elections

摘要

The Atlas of the 2012 Elections explores the 2012 US elections from a geographical perspective. The authors collected "final", "official" or "certified" election results at the county level from each state's website and compiled it into a standard format to analyse. There is no national source for such county-level election return information. The last chapter of the book describes in detail the work done to compile the data and create the maps. The editors explain that two pieces of data are necessary to create the thematic maps in this atlas: attribute data (the election results) and locational data (county boundaries). The locational data needed to define accurate county boundaries was collected from the US Bureau of the Census. Some of the other data sources include (in no particular order) the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, Federal Election Commission, the American Presidency Project at the University of California Santa Barbara, the Initiative and Referenda Institute at the University of Southern California, the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies, and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. There is a full list of references in the final chapter of the book along with the specific data retrieved from each source.