Ballotpedia:Scope
December 30, 2015
Ballotpedia began life as a neutral compendium of U.S. ballot measures. The organization’s coverage expanded to include candidates and general U.S. political information. Ballotpedia’s original scope was information about what is on voters’ ballots, with emphasis on neutral data, to assist them in their voting decisions. Though we have expanded our coverage, we continue to excel in that original scope. For some candidates, Ballotpedia is the only place online where voters can find a general informational article about a candidate not published by the candidate.
Our coverage of candidates, incumbents, and other, appointed political figures includes executives, legislators, and judges from the federal, state, and local levels of government. Three of our bigger desks are devoted to the three levels of government. We cover all elected federal and state officials. At the local level, we have articles about politicians from the 100 largest cities in the country and from the school boards of the 1,000 largest school districts. We also document all state ballot measures, as well as some local ballot measures.
We have gradually expanded our scope beyond the ballot. We detail many of the institutions and topics surrounding our elected officials and ballot measures. We have added some articles on broad topics about U.S. civics, government, and law. Some of these topics are handled by two of our editorial desks, Public Policy and Influencers, and our new fact-check desk, Verbatim. We also publish a variety of serious political studies and news articles.
Ballotpedia’s editorial desks
Our articles are managed through a system of six editorial desks. Responsibility for articles about candidates and incumbents, other election information, news articles, and other media are spread across these desks as appropriate. Each and every one of Ballotpedia’s more than 220,000 articles is maintained and owned by one of our editorial desk teams:
Our full scope
In 2015, Ballotpedia officially adopted both the name and the mission to build “The Encyclopedia of American Politics.” Accordingly, we aim to develop, in the fullness of time, a complete encyclopedia of all aspects of U.S. political life. This is admittedly ambitious, yet it is our guiding mission.
There are many ways to carve up the enormous subject of American politics, in no small part because its many subareas intersect in many ways.
In the following, the context is the United States; we mean U.S. government, U.S. political history, etc.
Current politics: We cover political candidates and incumbents, ballot measures, election results, and redistricting—all at the federal, state, and local levels. This is where we excel and where we have the most content. Election news, and other political news, belongs here. Currently we do not cover all local races, but we would like to, eventually. More than 500,000 officials are elected to office in the United States -- one day, we hope to in some capacity cover each and every one of them. Moreover, we hope to expand to include Native American and territorial politics, and some more local bodies such as port commissions and library boards. See also: Editorial approach for Ballotpedia's election coverage.
Government: Well-informed voters should be familiar with how government actually works. Therefore, we aim to discuss the executive bureaucracies, both in general and in their current operations and leadership (as determined by such things as salary level and the ability to enact policies). This large subject includes such things as Social Security and pensions, public health systems, welfare programs, tax systems, education, trade, diplomacy, the military, and the alphabet soup regulatory agencies—as well as summary information, such as budget and spending data, about all this. In addition to articles about how these agencies operate, we also aim to have articles about how the government’s regulatory and other actions actually impact society, both in terms of its institutions (e.g., marriage, religion, civil society) and in terms of social groups (the Hispanic population) and problems (crime, poverty, illegitimacy rates) and challenges (childcare and elder care). We also aim to explain the operations of other branches—how legislation is lobbied for, drafted, adopted, and implemented, and the operation of the Supreme Court and the lower courts. As with current politics, we aim to cover these various subjects at all levels: federal, state, local, Native American, and territorial. Clearly, this is a vast subject area. A comprehensive encyclopedia of, say, just the military or of welfare programs could be very large, so our approach is bound to be gradual.
Political participation (OR: Political science): The study, contained mostly in political science, of how the election system really works—beyond basic civics—is central to our mission. It includes the study of voters themselves: ideological attitudes and other relevant characteristics, voting patterns, and how voters are impacted by various forces. It includes the American political parties and how they operate, campaign finance, PACs, lobbying, the media (including, especially, the news media, punditry of all sorts, and the Internet), and other external attempts to influence the political process (this is currently covered by our Influencers desk). It also includes grassroots political action and organization: the general study of U.S. movements, organizations, social media use, political marches, protests, and riots, etc. Finally, it includes various other topics such as political economy, or the impact of the economy on politics, and the specialized areas of sociology and psychology that specifically study American voting behavior. Along these lines, we feature sample ballots for upcoming elections, linked to our articles.
Political history: American history as a whole is an enormous subject. Therefore, our coverage focuses on U.S. political history, especially the history of elections, parties, and politicians, as well as the founding and other seminal events in American history. We will cover domestic political history at the federal level (the Presidency and Congress) before getting very deep into foreign policy, international relations, military history, or state or local history. We will also include the highlights of specialized historical topics, such as Supreme Court history and history of public education, that have great relevance to U.S. political history. We might also include articles about the history of democracy and other international topics highly relevant to the American political system.
Civics and public policy: Civics covers the basics of how the American governmental system works, broad policy issues, and related concepts, terms, and their definitions—both positive, such as “democracy,” and negative, such as “corruption.” This subject is to be distinguished from the details of government operations and current politics. It includes different types of government and the arguments for and against the American system of representative democracy and capitalism. The early history of American political thought—e.g., The Federalist Papers and Democracy in America—belongs here, as does American political philosophy in general. In addition to the usual encyclopedia articles, Ballotpedia may venture into basic civics education under this heading. Finally, we will feature certain “citizenship” articles, i.e., articles about how to get things done with the government, from voting, to taxes, to party and other political participation, to jury duty, to navigating business bureaucracies, and more.
Law and legislation: A broad explanation, for the average citizen, of the American legal tradition is highly relevant to our mission. Subtopics would include, especially, constitutional law, but also the basics of criminal and civil law as well as administrative law. Under the latter heading would belong articles detailing significant new legislation considered by Congress, states, and municipalities and their progress to adoption or rejection. In time we would like to have a searchable database of federal, state, and local legislative proposals and their status. The law section covers what the law actually is, and is therefore distinguished from civics and public policy, which discusses what the law ought to be.
Broad areas we do not cover
Politics is related to everything, but Ballotpedia cannot cover everything. There are certain related subjects that, while they might be nice to include, are simply far too vast to include and are thus beyond our scope. Each of the following could fill up an encyclopedia the size of Ballotpedia. These include:
- Political science beyond the United States
- U.S. history beyond political/electoral history, and world history
- Political philosophy and civics that is not part of the American system
- The details of the American legal system beyond what a well-informed citizen really needs to know
Projected media types
Our stock in trade is encyclopedia articles. But in terms of media, we also illustrate the articles with tables, charts, images, maps, and interactive widgets.
Multimedia content
We also produce videos and previously published The Ballotpedia Podcast, primarily covering U.S. political news.
Social media
We have a social media presence on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
Non-encyclopedic articles
In addition, we have published, or may publish, other kinds of articles in addition to the strictly encyclopedic, although even in these cases we will strive to adhere to our neutrality policy:
- Definitions/very brief articles
- Original news articles and news summaries
- Neutral analysis pieces
- Fact check articles
- Summaries of general policy debates
- Statistical and academic studies
- White papers
- Book reviews
The Tap
The Tap is a pair of weekly newsletters, started in 2016, that cover the important events happening each week in federal, state, and local politics, as well as public policy. The first newsletter, The Federal Tap, covers federal politics, and The State and Local Tap is your source for important information on state and local politics. The Tap is delivered to inboxes on Monday mornings and includes information from the many corners of Ballotpedia's coverage, delivered in a easy-to-read format, organized by day. With this newsletter, Ballotpedia seeks to keep readers in the know about what happened last week and what's happening this week in politics.
Table
The following table shows where large, relevant intersections of Ballotpedia subjects and focus areas exist. The bold items in the table correspond to the subjects listed above.
| Institutions and individuals | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Government | Civil society | |||||
| Subjects | Federal | State | Local | Tribal/Territorial | Influencers | The public |
| Current politics | ||||||
| Election candidates | ||||||
| Ballot measures | ||||||
| Government: Leadership | ||||||
| Incumbents | ||||||
| Appointed positions | ||||||
| Government: Executive institutions | ||||||
| Social Security, etc. | ||||||
| Summary info | ||||||
| Legislative procedures | ||||||
| Judicial procedures | ||||||
| Political history | ||||||
| Political participation | ||||||
| Civics and public policy | ||||||
| Law and legislation | ||||||
| Under subjects, bold items correspond to subjects listed in this "Scope of Ballotpedia" article | ||||||
| Green fields indicate that a large, relevant intersection exists | ||||||
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See also
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