This project supports a 2012 pre-and post-election survey that re-interviews 18,000 citizens nationwide who were originally surveyed during the 2010 election. Ultimately, this will result in one of the largest multi-year election panel surveys ever produced. This panel design provides a way for researchers to better understand how public opinion, political attitudes, and electoral behavior change from one election to the next. The large panel provides sufficient statistical power to measure the dynamics of opinion change within groups, such as ethnic, economic, or partisan groups or within particular areas of the country. As a result, the power of this panel provides new insights on a wide range of research questions. For example, how does the composition of the electorate change from midterm elections to presidential elections? What is the impact of redistricting on voter engagement? How does the electorate hold the government accountable for the economy? And what role do deployments or casualties play in affecting support for U.S. involvement in foreign conflicts? The answers to these questions will contribute to our understanding of how to sustain an informed and engaged citizenry.
The panel dataset produced by this project will be made available to the scholarly community and will be an important resource for scholars interested in a wide variety of questions ranging including how attitudes change over time, the impact of redistricting, and the administration of elections, and will additionally contribute to the advancement of survey research methods. We anticipate that the results here will be highly useful in assessing the effects of shifts in district and precincts on election administration. The PIs will communicate these results to administrators, especially through the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project and associated activities. Finally, this project fosters education. This grant supports the production of educational materials related to the survey, so that faculty can readily integrate this and other panel studies into their courses and students can use this survey for thesis and other research.
