experience
To help users get the best information about past and future elections, we've worked with BallotReady to build a crosswalk between our datasets. This table includes proprietary data on the past experiences of past and current candidates from BallotReady, which we've linked to our districts and voters tables.
The Experience Dataset, one of the many datasets available through BallotReady’s Data Packages, is used to explore the work, elected office, and military history of candidates and officeholders at all levels of government across the country, from congress to local school boards. This dataset serves as an addendum to either our Candidacies or Officeholders dataset, to provide a more holistic view of the person’s background. You can easily filter this dataset to identify people who have previous military or elected office experience, and you can search for certain backgrounds using keywords.
Whether you are looking to contact candidates or officeholders with specific backgrounds, such as teachers, engineers, or military veterans; identify people with specific experience relevant to local positions; or decide which candidates your organization wants to support this election year, the Experience Dataset helps you hone in on your specific goals.
This dataset includes one record per role per person. For example, a person will have one record for each role they held at a company, if they provide those details. These records will be accurate as of the most recent candidacy for the person.
Information on the person's experience is provided as presented on their campaign website(s) or social media using the candidate's own words. Some records may be more generic if that is how the candidate chooses to communicate their experience, such as “Teacher” or “10 years at the Department of Justice.” We attempt to capture as much relevant information as possible within the given fields.
Various ID fields can be used to track people and positions between this dataset and our Candidacies or Officeholders datasets.
- Candidate_id can be used to join this dataset to the Candidacies or Officeholders datasets, and to find all of the experience records held by the same person
- Position_id can be used to track the candidates that have all run for the same position across multiple cycles
Field | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
position id | integer | A unique identifier for each position on a ballot in the BallotReady database. A person's experience records may be repeated for each position they ran for, because our experience records are associated with the candidate record. |
candidate id | integer | A unique identifier for the person in the BallotReady database |
experience id | integer | A unique identifier for the experience record in the BallotReady database |
entry type | character varying | A classification for the type of experience (elected_office, employment, or military). Information on the person's employment, elected office, and military experience is provided as presented on their campaign website(s) or social media using the candidate's own words. Volunteer experience is not included in our coverage . This information is only provided where BallotReady covered the person's candidacy. |
company | character varying | The employer or branch of the military where the person has experience. For experience in elected office, this represents the body or government entity that the person served on. |
position | character varying | The title of the position that the person held |
start year | character varying | The year that the person started in this specific position |
end year | character varying | The year that the person ended their experience in this specific position. When the person is still working in a position at the time of their candidacy, the end_year value will be "Present." This information is valid at the time of research, indicated by the timestamp in the experience_created_at field. |
duration | integer | The total number of years that the person held this specific position, if exact years are not given. We return values for the start_year and end_year fields where available. However, this duration field is used when candidates report information such as "I was an elementary school teacher for 12 years" without specifying the dates. |
experience created at | timestamp | A timestamp of when the experience record was created |
experience updated at | timestamp | A timestamp of when the experience record was most recently updated |