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.

Founded by the U.S. National Science Foundation in 1977 as a national resource for data on voting, public opinion, and political participation, and now fully titled as the American National Election Studies (ANES), the organization is a joint project of Stanford University and the University of Michigan. Prior to Science Foundation backing, data for the time-series in elections were gathered from 1947 and after by social scientists at Michigan.

ANES describes its mission as follows: “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.”

To that end, ANES conducts national surveys of the U.S. electorate in presidential and midtermelection years. During odd-numbered years it carries out research and development work through pilot studies.

The NES “time series” are made up of preelection 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.

The ANES website includes its Guide to Public Opinion and Electoral Behavior, which offers data ranging from 1948 through 2008 and is divided into the following categories:

• Social and Religious Characteristics of the Electorate, such as age, race, gender, education, and religion
• Ideological Self-Identification
• Public Opinion on Public Policy Issues, such as health care, affirmative action, abortion, the military, and the economy
• Support for the Political System, such as trust in government and government responsiveness
• Political Involvement and Participation in Politics, such as voter turnout, campaign contributions and other activities, attention to the campaign in the media, and interest in politics
• Evaluation of the Presidential Candidates
• Evaluation of Congressional Candidates
• Vote Choice, for president, for the U.S. House of Representatives, and split-ticket voting

The address for the ANES Web site is http://www.electionstudies.org.

Through 1973 the organization's collection at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research and its Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research included 25,000 individual elections and the names of almost 115,000 candidates.

These data provide the basis for the first edition of CQ Press's Guide to U.S. Elections, published in 1975. Popular returns in the book began in 1824 for presidential, gubernatorial, and U.S. House elections and in 1913 for Senate elections. For the five subsequent editions of the book, the latest published in 2010 and updated through voting in 2008, election information was derived from Congressional Quarterly election coverage, CQ Press's America Votes biennial series, and election officials in many state governments.

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