The 2016 American National Elections Studies (ANES) focuses on two issues that are the essence of democratic elections: candidate preference and voter turnout. The core mission of the study is to inform explanations of election outcomes by providing the systematic and rigorous collection of 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.
This research continues the ANES mission for the next four years, but in new and better ways than 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 past presidential elections 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. In addition, a parallel internet study will be conducted that will use a novel fresh-recruit-to-web sampling strategy. The results of this methodological innovation have the potential to revolutionize the conduct of high-reliability, high-response rate surveys by significantly reducing their costs and unclustering their samples. The results of this methodological innovation may have implications for all large-scale individual-level data collection enterprises and ensure the long-term viability of this project, the General Social Survey, and others.
In addition to methodological innovations, the 2016 survey continues to allow the examination of how a rapidly changing electorate, one that has experienced several years of divided government and extraordinarily high party unity, engages a new set of nominees in new electoral, economic, and social conditions. Besides continuing the times series, special emphases will be placed on the role of gender, the rapid growth of the Latino population, and how the growing levels of income inequality all impact the election. The results of this study will inform views and research perspectives of social scientists from a broad range of disciplines, as well as journalists, policy makers, and ordinary citizens.
