Further Reading: The Political Data Ecosystem

  1. Hersh, Eitan. Hacking the Electorate: How Campaigns Perceive Voters. Cambridge University Press, 2015. The most rigorous academic study of how campaigns use voter files and data infrastructure to construct their understanding of the electorate. Hersh shows that the data available to campaigns---particularly voter file fields like party registration and voting history---shapes not just campaign tactics but the way campaigns perceive and prioritize different communities. Essential for understanding the voter file's role in the ecosystem.

  2. Anderson, Margo J. The American Census: A Social History. 2nd ed. Yale University Press, 2015. A comprehensive history of the U.S. Census from its origins in 1790 to the modern era. Anderson shows how Census categories, questions, and methods have been shaped by political interests throughout American history, making the Census as much a political document as a statistical one. Directly relevant to the chapter's theme that measurement shapes reality.

  3. Kreiss, Daniel. Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracy. Oxford University Press, 2016. Examines how the two major parties built their data and technology infrastructures, including the voter file enrichment and data vendor ecosystems. Kreiss demonstrates that the partisan data arms race has deep institutional roots and significant consequences for democratic competition.

  4. Pasquale, Frank. The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information. Harvard University Press, 2015. While not exclusively about political data, Pasquale's book provides the most accessible analysis of the data broker industry and the opacity of algorithmic systems. His concept of "black box" systems---where inputs and outputs are visible but the internal processes are hidden---applies directly to the enriched voter file and modeled score systems described in this chapter.

  5. Bowie, Blair, and Adam Lioz. "Billion Dollar Democracy: The Unprecedented Role of Money in the 2012 Elections." Demos, 2013. An analysis of campaign finance data and its political implications, demonstrating how FEC data can be used to trace the influence of money in elections. Useful for understanding the campaign finance data layer of the ecosystem and the analytical possibilities it enables.

  6. Kitchin, Rob. The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences. SAGE, 2014. A broad overview of data infrastructure, open data, and the social consequences of datafication. Kitchin's framework for analyzing data ecosystems---including questions of ownership, access, and power---provides a theoretical foundation for the concepts in this chapter.

  7. U.S. Census Bureau. "Understanding and Using American Community Survey Data: What All Data Users Need to Know." 2020. The Census Bureau's own guide to using ACS data, including explanations of sampling methodology, margins of error, and the differences between ACS estimates and decennial Census counts. Essential for anyone who plans to use ACS data for political analysis, as you will in Chapter 5.

  8. Ansolabehere, Stephen, and Eitan Hersh. "Validation: What Big Data Reveal About Survey Misreporting and the Real Electorate." Political Analysis 20, no. 4 (2012): 437-459. A landmark study that used voter file data to validate (and often contradict) survey respondents' self-reported voting behavior. The paper demonstrates both the power of voter file data as a research tool and the limitations of survey data---a key theme in understanding the ecosystem's different data types.

  9. Tactical Tech Collective. "Personal Data: Political Persuasion---Inside the Influence Industry." 2019. An accessible report on how personal data is used for political targeting, including the roles of data brokers, voter files, and digital advertising platforms. Includes international examples and provides a useful overview of the data flows between the commercial and political sectors.

  10. Gutierrez, Cierra, and Christopher Warshaw. "The Nationalization of State and Local Elections: A Data Infrastructure Perspective." State Politics and Policy Quarterly, forthcoming. An analysis of how the data infrastructure available for studying state and local politics differs from (and is generally inferior to) the infrastructure for national politics. Directly relevant to the chapter's discussion of the national-versus-local data gap and its consequences for political analysis and representation.

  11. Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. PublicAffairs, 2019. A sweeping analysis of how tech companies and data brokers harvest personal data and transform it into behavioral predictions for commercial and political use. While Zuboff's focus is broader than political data, her analysis of "surveillance capitalism" provides critical context for understanding the data broker layer described in this chapter.

  12. Open Elections Project (openelections.net). An ongoing civic technology project that collects, standardizes, and publishes certified election results from all fifty states. The project exemplifies the kind of data infrastructure work that ODA performs and provides a practical example of the challenges involved in standardizing fragmented government data. Exploring the website is a useful complement to the chapter's discussion of ODA's Open Election Data Repository.