Reflections on 75 years of ANES

Thanks to the ANES’s commitment to high-quality data, scientists have advanced what we know about social attitudes, policy preferences, and voting behavior, among many other topics. More specifically, ANES data has allowed scientists to unveil opinions on specific issues for different segments of the electorate- for instance, how Americans view immigration, how education relates to political knowledge and participation, or what people like about specific presidential candidates. The large ANES questionnaire gives scientists an extensive list of topics to explore and to understand the American electorate.

The ANES is a uniquely valuable source of data for illuminating the mechanisms undergirding social and political forces in America. It is a critical resource not just for understanding specific moments in time but for connecting these moments to others across time—how Black Lives Matter echoes the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, which echoed the long, hot summers of the 1960s. While it is a particular resource for political science scholars, it is a true public good—in an interdisciplinary spirit, it is available to all and remarkably open to outside ideas. I have been continually impressed by the study’s open calls for proposals topics and willingness to consider proposals from a variety of disciplines. This has been critical to my own work, as I have sought to build bridges between political science and sociological criminology to create better understandings of the politics of crime and justice.

Looking back over the decades, it’s worth noting the enormous intellectual progress that the ANES participated in and helped to generate—when you’re low on the learning curve progress is rapid. Many ideas that are imparted to undergraduates in Survey Research 101 today were being discovered or becoming appreciated in the early 80s. I remember Don Kinder bringing in a paper to a Board meeting showing the different responses obtained by framing survey items in different ways. Priming respondents to think along various lines, question order, the importance of response formats—ideas that are taken for granted today—were brought into mainstream Political Science by the activities of the ANES.

From graduate school onward, whenever I want to understand how Americans think about policy, who votes and how, or what they think about political figures, I turn to the ANES. The time series is an invaluable resource to the social science community in understanding trends in partisanship, vote choice, and attitudes from everything about gender to foreign policy. I have used ANES data as a jumping off point for multiple papers of my own. I regularly recommend to graduate students that they analyze the data as a first step to see if there is empirical evidence for their theories or if there’s a “there, there” before undertaking an experiment or original survey collection for their dissertations.

The unparalleled ANES time series data have made possible the discovery of an entirely new subfield of American politics – the phenomenon of affective polarization or animus across the party divide. Using the ANES feeling thermometers, which date back to the 1970s, scholars documented a significant increase over time in partisans’ hostility toward their opponents. This finding, first published in 2012, has since generated more than 350 published papers (with the term affective polarization in the title) and approximately 1,2000 citations (from Google Scholar). I would add that the ANES database has greatly facilitated my own research over the past decade into partisan affect and the underlying causes of polarization.

The contributions of the ANES data sets to the understanding of American politics, particularly voting behavior and public opinion, are beyond counting at this point. But to my mind, the greatest is the opportunity they provide for scholars to trace and explore both the continuities and profound changes in mass political attitudes and behavior over the past 75 years.

The ANES is one of the most powerful tools social scientists have for understanding political attitudes and behavior in the United States. There’s a reason it’s referred to as the “gold standard” of public opinion data. The high-quality sample, careful design of survey questions, and dedication to the time series provide unparalleled insight into the dynamics of American politics over time. The study has been invaluable to me as a researcher, allowing me to study everything from the gender gap in political participation, to the effect of group attitudes on voting behavior, to the partisan polarization of racial attitudes over the past four decades, to the effect of group identities on political preferences, and more.

As a scholar of race and politics, one of the most useful aspects of the ANES is that it allows us to track racial attitudes and their relationship with political outcomes over time. For example, we can observe the ebb and flow of racial resentment among white Americans, while also investigating the changing political significance of more explicit racial attitudes. In more recent years, the ANES has allowed for the careful study of white identity and its relationship to some of the most consequential political outcomes of our time, including white Americans’ support for Donald Trump. There is no doubt that the ANES will remain a vital tool for generations of scholars to come.

The ANES is one of the earliest surveys of the American public. Much of the research on partisanship, for example, emerges directly from the way that the ANES asks people about their party identification. Concepts like a “leaning independent” – someone who identifies as an independent but “leans” toward one of the two parties– largely exist because of the ANES. Given the importance of partisanship to political behavior, the ANES is really the first step in our understanding of how people come to feel a connection to a party.

[Because of the ANES], we know about the predominant importance of party identification in political evaluations and vote choices. We know how much motivated reasoning exists in politics, and how much of it is driven by party ID. We know about the poor consistency and lack of ideological constraint in the policy views of the American public. We know how little the public knows about their representatives in Congress. We know that the variance in general political knowledge among the American public is high, but the mean is low. We know about the different types of political behaviors that some people perform, and how many performers there are for each of those. Despite what economists think, we know how little tangible self-interest has to do with most political attitudes. We know a great deal about how race, and racism, shapes policy views in the country. We have learned a great deal about the gender gap in American politics.

The ANES is my go-to source for a wealth of information about US politics and public opinion. There are so few surveys that span such a long period, cover rich and diverse topics, and ask consistent, well-designed questions. In my view, the contributions of the ANES to scholarship on American political behavior simply cannot be overstated.

Scholarship using the ANES has shed unparalleled insight on central determinants of public opinion and political behavior: interests, principles, partisanship, and group attitudes. [It] is one of the most important public goods in political science. I’m grateful that it exists and I look forward to seeing it evolve in the future.

Directly observing political behavior is important and often the most valid measurement—but we also need to understand what goes on in people’s heads. For that, surveys are indispensable. But not every survey is the same. The ANES provides a long-running, credible benchmark for many survey-based measurements in political science. Its historical value can’t be argued with, yet its significance in contemporary political science is just as great: Thanks to unrivaled resources and the pooled experience of many experts, the ANES continues to form a foundation on which all of us can build.

To my mind, the ANES has been the single most important resource in my career in political psychology.

I became a behavioral political scientist that day in the early 1960s when I first touched an “analysis deck” of the 1956 Michigan Election Study (not yet called ANES). Sixty or so years later the excitement of that moment is still with me. A fourth of a continent away from Ann Arbor and as an undergraduate I could test ideas that, at least so far as I knew, had never occurred to anybody before. My testbed then was the novel instrument called the counter-sorter and the method was literal cross-tabulation. I immediately began to think of myself as a voting behavior analyst, even before graduate school. And it stuck. Even though my scholarly trajectory has switched away from the micro behavior questions that initially motivated me, I have never been weaned from the ANES. I have exploited every biennial or quadrennial study and am sure that will eventually include the yet to come 2024 study — even in retirement. My debt to the ANES is everything I am.

The ANES time series has been invaluable to my research—at that of many other social scientists—on generations. This research focuses on whether Americans differ depending on when they were born and what they experienced when coming of age, and on whether generational replacement is fueling social and political trends, such as partisan realignment and dealignment; declining civic engagement, political participation, and trust; and growing secularism, liberalism, egalitarianism, and polarization. Studying generational dynamics requires what the ANES time series supplies: repeated population-based surveys stretching across decades. With each additional study, we gain more leverage for understanding the interplay of politics, history, and demographics.

I think that the single most important contribution of ANES to the study of American politics was the concept of party identification. In the 1940s, the study of US politics was done through demographic analysis at the local level. Then in the 1948 and 1952 studies, Michigan began to organize national studies of the electorate. In 1952 they started measuring attitudes about Eisenhower and Stevenson and the role of parties, and with the “Michigan Model” they were able to move from group-level analysis to national analysis. You can’t see a study of the electorate now without a reference to the difference between Democrats and Republicans, and that can be traced directly back to the 1952 ANES study.

So much of what we do as social scientists is observe the world and ask, “Compared to what? Compared to when?” Nearly eight decades of ANES data makes answering these questions possible. Nothing in the study of American political behavior is more important. From Harry Truman to Joe Biden, spanning voters from the Greatest Generation to Gen Z, the ANES timeseries data collection has demonstrated the enduring power of party identification, the recent aligning of ideology with political party, and the public’s increasingly clear view of the differences between the world each party wants to build. It feels like American politics is changing because it is — we know this because of the ANES.

When I was a graduate student in the 1970s I thought the study of American democracy was the study of public opinion and the study of public opinion was working with ANES data. My favorite party game was “Michigan Marginals” – competitive guessing the response distributions to questions in the NES codebooks. I’m older now and enthusiastic about different things, but I still believe the ANES is one of the world’s finest social science institutions, with its greatness only growing as the Time Series extends. I was incredibly lucky to have ANES data for my dissertation and later work, as have been hundreds of others.