Data on professors’ campaign contributions from
“Which side are the faculty on?”
Below you will find links to folders containing the data and statistical analysis files referenced in “Which Side Are the Faculty On?: Professors, the 2019-20 Democratic Presidential Primary, and the Politics of Redistribution in the United States,” published by Sociological Forum in 2025.
Professor-Donors to 2019-20 Democratic Party Presidential Primary Candidates- This folder contains Federal Election Commission (FEC) records of all contributions made via ActBlue to candidates who competed in the 2019-20 Democratic Party presidential primary. Additionally, you will find all the spreadsheets and Stata files underlying my analysis of the data. Note that I compiled the ActBlue “master” donations file by merging multiple spreadsheets exported from the FEC’s “Browse Individual Contributions” page, rather than by using the FEC’s “Bulk Data.” My analysis of the latter indicated that it was missing a significant number of records contained the separately exported spreadsheets. Moreover, the overall number of records in the merged spreadsheets from the FEC’s “Browse Individual Contributions” page closely tracked ActBlue’s public statements about the total number of donations passing through its platform during 2019 and 2020. The data cover the period from January 1, 2019 to April 8, 2020 (the latter date marking Joe Biden’s official victory in the primary contest).
Redistribution Index- This folder contains primary sources used to construct the “Redistribution Index,” which measures 2019-20 Democratic Party presidential primary candidates’ support for economically redistributive policies. It also includes a spreadsheet that records each candidate’s support—or lack thereof—of the forty-eight policy proposals accounted for by the index. If there is no document recording a candidate’s support for a particular policy but the Redistribution Index spreadsheet in the folder indicates support, that means the author found the information on the candidate’s campaign website. Links to the campaign websites are included in the spreadsheet.
Professor-Donors to 2019-20 Republican Party Presidential Primary Candidates- This folder contains FEC records of professors who donated to candidates in the 2019-20 Republican Party presidential primary, including Donald Trump, Joe Walsh, and Bill Weld. While other candidates competed in the GOP presidential primary, the FEC does not have records of professors donating to their campaigns. These data include contributions made directly to candidate committees and through the online Republican donation platform WinRed, and cover the period from January 1, 2019 to March 18, 2020 (the latter date marking Trump’s official victory in the primary contest).