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National Election Studies
In the last quarter of the twentieth century, social scientists in the United States and around the world benefited from a systematic examination of U.S. elections by the National Election Studies (NES). The work of the NES is highly regarded by political scientists and other scholars who need objective, factual information on American political behavior.
The NES describes its mission as follows: “To produce high quality data on voting, public opinion, and political participation that serve social scientists, policy makers, teachers, and students concerned with the theoretical and empirical foundations of mass politics in a democratic society.” To that end, the NES conducts national surveys of the U.S. electorate in presidential and midterm election years. During odd-numbered years it carries out research and development work through pilot studies.
The NES “time series” are made up of pre- and postelection studies in presidential election years and postelection studies in midterm election years. The lengthy time span covered helps scholars to spot and understand long-term trends and changes in public opinion, political values and behavior, and the political and social composition of the electorate.
Background
The U.S. National Science Foundation established the NES in 1977 as a national resource for data on voting, public opinion, and political participation. It began funding NES data collections the following year. As of early 2003 the NES time series encompassed twenty-five biennial election studies spanning almost six decades.
The NES is located within the Center for Political Studies at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research at Ann Arbor. The institute's Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), established in 1962, disseminates NES data in several different ways, including the Internet and CD-ROM. The CD-ROM contains all the major time-series datasets, as well as major panel and special studies (including a special Senate study) and the 1952–1996 cumulative data file.
The Web site address for the NES is http://www.umich.edu/nes. The ICPSR Web site address is http://www.icpsr.umich.edu..
Any user at any educational institution can access the NES time-series studies datasets for online interactive use. Most NES documents on the Web page, as well as some not yet available on the Web, are available for anonymous retrieval from the NES FTP server (http://ftp.nes.isr.umich.edu).
ICPSR maintains what it calls “the world's largest repository of social science data.” Among its holdings is the Historical Elections Returns File resulting from a massive data collection effort begun in 1962 with support of the Social Science Research Council and the National Science Foundation. Scholars in all the states participated in the data search for returns on presidential, congressional, and gubernatorial elections.
Through 1973 the collection included 25,000 individual elections and the names of almost 115,000 candidates. ICPSR's continued collection of election returns was supported by more than three-hundred member colleges and universities.
In cooperation with ICPSR, Congressional Quarterly published the original historical returns file in 1975 as Congressional Quarterly's Guide to U.S. Elections. Popular returns in the book began in 1824 for presidential, gubernatorial, and U.S. House elections and in 1913 for Senate elections. For subsequent editions in 1985, 1994, and 2001 Congressional Quarterly provided the most recent election returns.
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