Cooperative Election Study, 2010 to 2014 Panel Survey

University Of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst MA

Investigators

Abstract

This project supports a 2014 pre- and post-election survey that re-interviews 9,000 citizens nationwide who were originally surveyed during the 2010 and 2012 elections. This will result in one of the largest multi-year election panel surveys ever produced. The panel design provides a way for researcers to better understand how public opinion, political attitudes, and electoral behavior change from one election to the next. The large panel provides sufficient statistical power to measure the dynamics of public opinion within groups, such as ethnic, economic, or partisan groups or within particular areas of the country. As a result, the power of the panel may provide new insights on a wide range of research questions. For example, how does the composition of the electorate change from midterm elections to presidential elections? What is the impact of redistricting on voter engagement? How does the electorate hold the government accountable for the economy? And, what role do deployements or casulties play in affecting support for U.S. involvement in foreign conflicts? The answers to these questions will contribute to our understanding of how to sustain an informed and engaged citizenry in democracies worldwide. The panel dataset produced by this project will be made available to the scholarly community and will be an important resource for scholars interested in a wide variety of questions ranging from how attitudes change over time, the impact of redistricting, and the administration of elections, and will additionally contribute to the advancement of survey research methods. The results may be highly useful in assessing the effects of shifts in district and preceints on election administration. The results of the project will be communicated to election administrators, especially through the CALTECH/MIT Voting Technology Project and associated activities. Finally, this project fosters education. The grant supports the production of educational materials related to the survey, so that faculty can readily integrate this and other panel studies into their courses and students can the results for their thesis and other research.