This data is from the paper "Longevity Returns to Political Office" by Barfort, Klemmensen & Larsen (2019). The purpose of the study (pdf) was to explore how winning an election influences the lifespan of a candidate. The data set includes all the candidates in U.S. gubernatorial elections from 1945 to 2012 who were deceased as of 2012.
governorsA tibble with 1,092 observations and 11 variables:
character variable indicating the state in which an election took place
integer variable indicating the year in which an election took place
character variable indicating the first name of a candidate
character variable indicating the last name of a candidate
character variable indicating a candidate's party
character variable indicating a candidate's gender
date variable indicating the candidate's date of death
character variable indicating whether a candidate was the challenger or incumbent
double variable indicating the percentage margin by which the election was won (positive values) or lost (negative values)
number of people living in the state at the time of the election
years a candidate lived
years a candidate lived before the election took place
years a candidate lived after the election took place
First, for a given election, only the two candidates who received the highest number of votes were included. Second, candidates with unknown dates of death were excluded, resulting in fewer observations for elections in recent years, since most recent candidates are still alive. Third, in a few instances, only the year of birth or death could be determined; in these cases, the date was taken to be July 1 of that year.