Using a political event coding system, this data collection describes 8,768 events and press items sampled from 42,000 entries in THE NEW YORK TIMES between 1968 and 1972. These data were generated in order to apply events data to the study of the emergence and processing of political issues in the United States and to test a number of hypotheses regarding the types of events associated with various political issues. Approximately 4,600 cases are events in which an actor attempts to influence a target. The remaining cases are reports of press items such as editorials and columns. The data include: (1) whether it was a political event (i.e., one in which an actor directs some action toward a target in a political system in order to influence the behavior of the target) or a press item (i.e., information about the domestic issue from either a newspaper column or a newspaper editorial), (2) the domestic issue (one of 40 possible categories), (3) the domestic subissue, (4) the date and the page of the newspaper in which the article describing the event was found, (5) the press treatment or coverage of the event, (6) the actor initiating the event (coded in one of 100 categories including both governmental and nongovernmental actors), (7) the federal role favored by the actor regarding the issue, (8) whether the actor specialized in dealing with the issue, (9) type of action initiated by the actor, (10) the mode of action, (11) the target of the event, and (12) the weight of the eventor press item.

Using a political event coding system, this data collection describes 8,768 events and press items sampled from 42,000 entries in THE NEW YORK TIMES between 1968 and 1972. These data were generated in order to apply events data to the study of the emergence and processing of political issues in the United States and to test a number of hypotheses regarding the types of events associated with various political issues. Approximately 4,600 cases are events in which an actor attempts to influence a target. The remaining cases are reports of press items such as editorials and columns. The data include: (1) whether it was a political event (i.e., one in which an actor directs some action toward a target in a political system in order to influence the behavior of the target) or a press item (i.e., information about the domestic issue from either a newspaper column or a newspaper editorial), (2) the domestic issue (one of 40 possible categories), (3) the domestic subissue, (4) the date and the page of the newspaper in which the article describing the event was found, (5) the press treatment or coverage of the event, (6) the actor initiating the event (coded in one of 100 categories including both governmental and nongovernmental actors), (7) the federal role favored by the actor regarding the issue, (8) whether the actor specialized in dealing with the issue, (9) type of action initiated by the actor, (10) the mode of action, (11) the target of the event, and (12) the weight of the eventor press item.