The Democratic Evolution: From Slavery to Equality, 1828-2024
Kenneth Janda Codebook for a database of 3,392 Democratic Platform Planks
This data file was prepared for The Democratic Evolution: From Slalvery to Equality: 1828-2024 (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming). My book analyzes changes in Democratic planks over time as the party evolved across three epochs: States-Rights (1828-1896), Cooperative Federalism (1900-1948), and National Authority (1952-2024). Click here for more information about the SPSS file, which requires statistical software..
A political party "platform" is a metaphor for the party's announced principles, and a "plank" is a metaphor for a specific platform statement that supports those principles. This website is the gateway to 3,392 planks culled from all 45 U.S. Democratic Party platforms adopted in quadrennial national party contentions from 1840 to 2016. (Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Democrats did not hold a convemtion in 2020 to adopt a new platform.)
The Democratic platforms grew in length from about 500 words in 1840 to a peak of more than 38,000 words in 1980. Most words in a party platform spout political verbiage, praising the party and denouncing the opposition. I read through the verbiage to select specific segments that (a) had action implications, and (b) implied the party's position on the issue. If the original wording was short (under 100 characters), it was captured in the plank; otherwise it was rephrased and shortened to fit the alloted space in the database.
Identifying planks among the political verbiage is a subjective process. I found 9 planks among the 536 words in the 1840 platform and 267 planks among the 26,058 words in its 2016 platform. Other researchers might have identified different planks in each platform and almost certainly would have found more, or fewer, than the 3,392 planks in this database. However, fifferent sets of planks collected by other researchers are unlikely to differ from the profile and content of this database. Alternative collections are likely to reflect very similar distributions of planks based on their content.
I coded the planks into a framework containing over 100 categories. The primary set of four category classes characterized planks that promoted/inhibited the core political values of Freedom, Order, and Equality and government's provision of Public Goods. A secondary set of four category classes embraced planks concerning Government, Military, Foreign Policy, and Symbolic issues. Only about one-third of the planks were involved in the book's primary coding categories, but appendices accounted for all 3,392 planks.
The Democratic Evolution demonstrated that the party's planks varied enormously across time. Scholars who choose to use these data should consider when the planks were adopted.That makes a real differnece in party politics.
The list of variables in the data file. Click on the name of the variable for more information
Variable`
Position
Label
Data Tpe
1
Year the platform was adopted
Scale
2
Four Republican Epochs, 1856-2020
Scale
3
Seven eras from 1956-2016, with 2016 treated separately
Scale
4
Topics associated with coding categories
Scale
5
Topics associated with coding categories
Nominal
6
First digit of three digits in the coding categories
Ordinal
7
All three digits in the coding categories
Ordinal
8
Short descriptions of the platform planks in spreadsheet format
Noinal