2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

General Summary The 2016 Cooperative Congressional Study (CCES) is a collaboration of over 50 different university research teams throughout the United States. Collectively this group designs and fields a large sample survey of at least 50,000 American adults. The survey measures demographics, political opinions and attitudes, and electoral behavior, especially in the congressional elections, but also in the Presidential election and state elections. The very large sample size allows researchers to have sufficient data to study state electorates as well as the entire nation. The survey is used to study who votes and why, and what explains the choices that voters make. The CCES, which started in 2006, makes available at very low cost a survey platform that is open to all. Since its inception, the project has involved more than 100 different research teams and hundreds of faculty and student researchers, and it has conducted interviews with over 250,000 American adults. The survey helps to create and sustain a network of researchers interested in state and national elections, survey design, and public opinion. Technical Summary The 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey is developed by a consortium of research teams. Each research team that wishes to be involved in the project purchases a 1,000-person sample survey from the same firm. Each individual team determines half of the questions on its survey. The other half of the content (Common Content) is created by a design committee, drawn from the participating teams. Common Content consists of questions that every team would like to measure or questions that are of broad interest and require a very large sample. The project, thus, fields as many surveys as there are teams and also produces a single large sample survey that consists of the Common Content. The Common Content is designed by a committee in consultation with all teams involved in the survey. The survey will be fielded over the Internet, with samples constructed to be nationally representative. Each team will receive the data from its own 1,000-person survey and a dataset consisting of the 50,000+ observations from the Common Content survey. Survey data are validated using voter validation and through comparisons of state level election results to the survey results from the subsamples for each state. The data produced by this project will be a 2016 Common Content dataset, along with accompanying contextual data, as well as separate Team Content datasets and will be available on the CCES Dataverse website.