American National Election Studies

The American National Election Studies (ANES) are academically-run national surveys of voters in the United States, conducted before and after every presidential election. Although it was formally established by a National Science Foundation grant in 1977, the data are a continuation of studies going back to 1948. The study has been based at the University of Michigan since its origin and, since 2005, has been run in partnership with Stanford University. Its principal investigators for the first four years of the partnership were Arthur Lupia and Jon Krosnick. As of 2017, the principal investigators are Ted Brader and Vincent Hutchings of the University of Michigan and Shanto Iyengar of Stanford University.

With over 8,300 citations in published work, data spanning over 75 years, and 70+ datasets, the American National Election Studies has acted as a cornerstone for public opinion research for the past 75 years, asking a reportedly representative sample of the American population survey questions before and after presidential elections. The ANES asks their participants a wide scope of questions, ranging from the party identification of the respondent’s mother to their opinion on gay people in the military. Due to the ANES’ impressive research methods, it is commonly referred to as “the gold standard” of political science survey data.

The studies ask the same questions repeatedly over time and are frequently cited in works of political science. Early ANES data was the basis for The American Voter (1960). It is now used by scholars, students and journalists. It has allowed the detection of partisan bias in survey responses, showing that respondents' political affiliations contribute to their responses, extending even to questions with objective, known answers, such as whether or not Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

In 2006, ANES opened the ANES Online Commons to allow interested scholars and survey professionals to propose questions for future surveys. In 2022, ANES received a $14 million grant to study the 2024 United States elections. University of Michigan professor Nicholas Valentino, Stanford University's Shanto Iyengar, Duke University's D. Sunshine Hillygus, and the University of Texas' Daron Shaw will be principal investigators.

On the American National Election Studies website, the data the study has collected over the past 75 years can be accessed and downloaded under the “Data Center” tab. This tab houses many datasets, including those for each year studied and a time series dataset that holds data from 1958 on. These datasets can be downloaded in many formats, including as a CSV file, which can be used when coding in R.

The ANES recently launched a new data tool to assist in research: the question search tool. To find a specific variable in the datasets, the question search tool can filter through every ANES variable given a keywood to find the preferred variable.

External links

• Official website