{"part":"task","text":"# Datasets\nPass a dataset's id as the `dataset` argument.\n{\n \"id\": \"ds_0012\",\n \"rows\": 833,\n \"description\": \"| Variable Name | Description |\\n| --- | --- |\\n| index | Sequential row identifier from the file export; included for reference and not used as a substantive measure. |\\n| Republican | Binary indicator (0/1) for unified Republican control of state government in a given year. Equals 1 when the governorship and both legislative chambers were held by Republicans; 0 otherwise (including divided or other control). Compiled from state partisan balance data with updates from legislative tracking organizations. |\\n| state | U.S. state name (50 states). |\\n| year | Calendar year of observation (2000\u20132016). |\\n| democracy_mcmc | Continuous State Democracy Index score for the state-year, estimated via Bayesian factor analysis (MCMC) from 51 state-level indicators of electoral rules, administrative performance, districting metrics, and related practices. The scale is approximately standardized across the panel (values can be negative or positive around zero); higher values indicate stronger electoral-democracy performance. Sources feeding the indicators include election administration data (e.g., MIT Election Lab), legislative policy compilations (e.g., NCSL), gerrymandering diagnostics, and measures of policy\u2013opinion congruence. |\\n\\nDataset Context:\\nThis file is a state\u2013year panel that assembles administrative records, policy codings, and quantitative diagnostics to summarize how U.S. states structure and administer electoral democracy. The period 2000\u20132016 spans consequential developments in state election law and administration, including reforms that expanded access (e.g., early voting, online and same\u2011day registration, and the beginnings of automatic voter registration late in the period) and policies that increased participation costs for some voters (e.g., voter ID requirements). It also covers the 2010 redistricting cycle and subsequent evaluations of district plans using established gerrymandering metrics. During these years, federal\u2013state relations affecting elections shifted as well, including changes to Voting Rights Act oversight after 2013, which altered how and where states implemented election-law changes.\\n\\nThe State Democracy Index (reported here as democracy_mcmc) is constructed by combining 51 indicators into a single latent score using Bayesian factor analysis designed for mixed data types (binary, ordinal, and continuous). Indicator families include: election access rules (registration and voting modalities), administrative performance (e.g., wait times, provisional ballot handling, data completeness), post\u2011election audit requirements, districting fairness diagnostics (efficiency gap, partisan symmetry, declination, compactness), and measures of policy\u2013opinion alignment. Indicator inputs draw on sources such as the MIT Election Lab\u2019s compilations of election administration statistics, the National Conference of State Legislatures\u2019 inventories of state election laws, quantitative assessments of district plans, and state policy\u2013opinion datasets. Scores are standardized to facilitate comparison across states and years, with higher values reflecting stronger performance on these electoral-democracy dimensions.\\n\\nThe unified-party-control variable is built from long\u2011running state partisan balance datasets and contemporary updates that track which party simultaneously held the governorship and majorities in both legislative chambers in each year. Together with state names and calendar years, these fields allow analysts to align institutional configurations with contemporaneous features of election law, administration, and districting captured in the index.\",\n \"columns\": {\n  \"Republican\": \"float64\",\n  \"state\": \"str\",\n  \"year\": \"int64\",\n  \"democracy_mcmc\": \"float64\"\n }\n}\n{\n \"id\": \"ref_panel\",\n \"rows\": 76,\n \"description\": \"State rows of 2002 and 2004: the 2003 switchers (0 then 1) and the controls (0 and 0)\",\n \"columns\": {\n  \"Republican\": \"float64\",\n  \"state\": \"str\",\n  \"year\": \"int64\",\n  \"democracy_mcmc\": \"float64\",\n  \"syear\": \"float64\",\n  \"r_pre\": \"float64\",\n  \"r_post\": \"float64\",\n  \"Tgroup\": \"int64\",\n  \"Post\": \"int64\",\n  \"DID\": \"int64\"\n }\n}\n{\n \"id\": \"ref_post\",\n \"rows\": 49,\n \"description\": \"Each state's Republican in 2004 (r_post)\",\n \"columns\": {\n  \"state\": \"str\",\n  \"r_post\": \"float64\"\n }\n}\n{\n \"id\": \"ref_pre\",\n \"rows\": 49,\n \"description\": \"Each state's Republican in 2002 (r_pre)\",\n \"columns\": {\n  \"state\": \"str\",\n  \"r_pre\": \"float64\"\n }\n}\n{\n \"id\": \"ref_switch\",\n \"rows\": 24,\n \"description\": \"Each state's first year whose Republican is 1 after a row (in year order) with 0\",\n \"columns\": {\n  \"state\": \"str\",\n  \"syear\": \"int64\"\n }\n}"}