Dear PolMeth Subscribers,
I write on behalf of the new Principal Investigators of the American
National Election Studies to convey exciting news about the project (see
below press release).
Sincerely,
-Dave
David Howell
Director of Studies, ANES
-----
October 26, 2005
NSF awards $7.6 million for a more multi-faceted, broadly collaborative,
and interdisciplinary American National Election Studies
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $7.6 million to fund
the American National Election Studies (ANES) to study the causes of
voter participation and candidate choice in the 2008 U.S. presidential
election. This award represents a dramatic increase in NSF's funding for
the project, more than doubling the financial support it received during
2002-2005.
The substantial increase in funding for the project is the result of two
years of advisory workshops held by NSF to evaluate the study's
scientific value and innovative directions for its future. "This award
allows us to conduct the project in much bigger and better ways than has
ever been possible," said Arthur Lupia, one of two principal
investigators of the project. "NSF's ringing endorsement of the project
is a wonderful recognition of 50 years of important scholarship by
hundreds of social scientists studying elections and will equip them
superbly to continue this important work," said Jon Krosnick, also a
principal investigator.
The centerpiece of the 2005-2009 study will be state-of-the-art
hour-long interviews with thousands of Americans face-to-face in their
homes both before and again after the November, 2008, election. The
questionnaires will ask hundreds of questions of respondents, measuring
their opinions on a wide array of political issues, their assessments of
the health of the nation, their hopes for government action in the
future, their perceptions of the candidates and their platforms, their
behavioral participation in the campaign and in politics more generally,
and much more. Many of these questions have been asked identically every
two years since the 1950s, allowing scholars to track changes in the
American electorate over time.
In addition, a nationally representative sample of American adults will
be recruited during 2007 and will answer questions once a month for 21
consecutive months, continuing well after the presidential inauguration
in 2009. This will allow researchers to study which citizens change
their candidate preferences when and why during the primaries and
general election campaigns and how citizens react to the election
outcome after the nation's new leader begins to govern.
A third component of the new project will be collaboration with another
long-term national survey project, the National Longitudinal Survey of
Youth, run by the Ohio State University's Center for Human Resource
Research. As a result, questions measuring political opinions and
behavior will be asked of a representative sample of thousands of young
adults every two years, illuminating patterns of long-term change of
individuals across elections.
The November, 2008, pre-election and post-election face-to-face
interviews will employ innovative new measurement techniques for the
first time in the ANES, such as using laptop computers to display
questions and answer choices confidentially to respondents and allowing
them to answer secretly. In addition, for the first time, the computers
will show respondents election-related photographs and videos to enhance
measurement of what voters learn during the campaign.
The computers will also measure the speed with which respondents make
judgments, using the latest techniques from social and cognitive
psychology. This will entail the use of measurement tools that have
been used extensively in laboratories around the world but have rarely
been administered in surveys of representative national samples of
adults.
Response speed measurement is one way to elucidate automatic processes
that occur unconsciously in the brain and guide political thinking and
action. "By combining self-reports that measure opinions and
measurements of response speed, we can better understand the impact of
sensitive attitudes, including prejudice and stereotyping." explained
Lupia.
2006 will mark a substantial expansion of the number of academic
disciplines that will influence and be served by the ANES. The Board of
Overseers will double in size to include 20 world-renowned professors
from political science, psychology, sociology, economics, and
communication.
During the coming years, substantial efforts will be mounted to
encourage scholars from all of these disciplines and others as well to
submit proposals about how the study should be designed and what
questions should be asked of the survey respondents.
The ANES has conducted gold-standard national surveys every two years
since then to equip scholars around the world to study American voting
behavior and election outcomes. Thousands of books, journal articles,
book chapters, and conference presentations have been based upon ANES
data during the last five decades. It was created by the University of
Michigan's Institute for Social Research (ISR) in 1952 and is now
administered jointly by ISR and Stanford University's Institute for
Research in the Social Sciences.
* * * * *
Related Links:
ANES Homepage: http://www.electionstudies.org
IRiSS: http://www.stanford.edu/group/iriss/index.html
ISR: http://www.isr.umich.edu/
Krosnick Homepage:
http://communication.stanford.edu/faculty/krosnick.html
Lupia Homepage: http://www.umich.edu/~lupia
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