American National Election Studies (Anes)

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American National Election Studies (Anes)

The American National Election Studies (ANES) is a well-known, widely used, and broadly collaborative scientific study of elections. It focuses its efforts on providing high-quality data about voting, turnout, and participation to a wide range of social scientists. ANES data has served as the basis for hundreds of books and thousand of articles. Around the world, researchers, students, government agencies, and interested members of the public use ANES data to gain a deeper understanding of citizens and elections in the United States.

Angus Campbell, Philip E. Converse, Warren Miller, and Donald Stokes started the project in 1948. From 1952 to 1977 it was called the Michigan Election Studies and was run by the Center for Political Studies and the Survey Research Center of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. The founders introduced many valuable methodological and procedural innovations, and their book The American Voter is a focal reference in the study of American politics. In 1977, following an agreement with the National Science Foundation, the study was renamed the National Election Studies and has received its primary funding from the National Science Foundation ever since. This agreement stabilized the project’s funding and instituted procedures to increase the number of political scientists who contributed to the design of ANES data collections.

Throughout its history, the focal activity of ANES has been the production of a comprehensive national survey taken before and after every major election. Collectively, these studies are known as the ANES Time Series. ANES Time Series surveys are carried out via face-to-face interviews conducted in people’s homes. The combination of high response rate and carefully worded questions results in data that deeply and uniquely reflect voter perceptions and attitudes. Each survey includes many questions, including some questions that appear repeatedly over time. Such attributes allow researchers to test a wide range of hypotheses about citizen attitudes and perceptions.

In 2005 the National Science Foundation agreed to fund a substantial expansion of the project. The University of Michigan, Stanford University, and other universities are using this opportunity to give the project a new interdisciplinary emphasis. While the project’s mandate continues to be providing survey-based resources for studying voting, turnout, and participation, it is now led by a team of scholars from across the social sciences. The new ANES also features a more transparent governance and consultation structure, including the ANES Online Commons, which allows scholars to make, amend, view, and review proposals for future data collections as they are being developed. New data-collection activities include a twenty-one-month panel study. This panel interviews the same people multiple times, with the interviews starting well before the onset of presidential primary elections and ending well after the election. This strategy allows original and deeper testing of hypotheses about how and when citizens make decisions about presidential candidates and how actions taken during the election year affect public views of the new president, and hence the president’s ability to pursue new policies, in the initial months of the new president’s term.