Why did America vote as it did on Election Day? The mission of the American National Election Studies (ANES) is to inform explanations of election outcomes by providing data that support rich hypothesis testing, maximize methodological excellence, measure many variables, and promote comparisons across people, contexts, and time. The ANES serves this mission by providing researchers with a view of the political world through the eyes of ordinary citizens. Such data are critical, because these citizens' actions determine election outcomes.
This research continues the ANES mission for the next four years, but in new and better ways than ever before. It builds on an ANES history that has made the project a valuable resource to generations of social scientists. As has been true for every past presidential election in the ANES time series, a presidential year pre- and post-election study will be conducted using face-to-face interviewing of a nationally representative sample of adults, with an unusually high response rate. This study will include questions specific to the election of 2008 and also questions that augment the ANES time series, which is now in its sixth decade. For the first time, moreover, scholars will be able to purchase interview minutes and additional cases on the time series study to enhance its breadth.
In many other respects, this proposal constitutes a substantial break from the past, outlining new kinds of data collection, new methods for choosing questionnaire items, a new management structure, new organizational procedures to promote the involvement of a broader set of scholars, and a fundamentally different kind of relationship between the ANES and its user community. One new data collection effort will be a two-year panel study involving six core waves of data collection with the same respondents, plus 15 additional waves of data collection. The first core wave will be in late 2007, before the primaries; the next three core waves will be spread over the months running up to election day; and the final core waves will be in November and May after the election. Data will also be collected during every other month throughout the life of the panel, but with a focus on matters that are not explicitly political, to minimize selective panel attrition or conditioning driven by interest in politics while producing lots of valuable information on respondents. The panel will allow scholars to study citizen politics in new ways and will illuminate how election year politics affect judgments of the new administration in the formative months of its term.
A second new data collection enterprise involves a partnership with the Ohio State University Center for Human Resource Research. They conduct the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which has been interviewing a nationally representative panel of adults and their children for decades with breathtakingly long and varied questionnaires. Questions measuring political attitudes and behaviors will be included in these surveys for the first time, allowing the study of developmental and socialization experiences through the life-cycle and across generations.
To help scholars develop and validate new measurement tools for use in the above-listed surveys, an ANES pilot study will be run in November, 2006, reinterviewing respondents from the 2004 ANES. The components of this data collection plan each strengthen the others. Alone, each component will allow a broad range of scholars to evaluate the robustness of old and new theoretical claims. In addition, each endeavor will be designed to facilitate coordinated analysis with all the other data collections. The specifics of the designs of all these studies will be determined by an array of scholars more intellectually diverse than ever before. Its new PIs and Board of Overseers hail from more universities and a broader range of disciplines than any of its predecessors.
This research project includes a new Internet-based procedure for soliciting, processing, reviewing, and providing feedback on proposals for study design elements from anyone who wishes to offer them. All this will be done with an unprecedented transparency to the user community. Because these activities will generate a huge amount of data, detailed plans have been designed outlining how the management of the study design, data collection, and data dissemination processes will be carried out by the experienced technical staff that is already in place. In addition to coordinating the questionnaire design and fieldwork processes, the staff will maintain and update the study's huge and multifaceted website by adding the newly collected data and also dramatically enhancing the study's electronic archives of previously-collected information dating back from the 1940s.
Broader Impacts: By generating large, multifaceted datasets of high quality, the ANES will equip researchers to learn new and important lessons about the world of politics. These data will be distributed widely and quickly to serve thousands of scholars and to be used in classrooms around the world to enrich research and education. Americans want to understand how its democracy works. The ANES will help to inform the nation about itself, exploring the causes and consequences of voting behavior and electoral outcomes. With such knowledge, the polity will be better equipped to nurture and refine its system of government.
