ANES Announcement: Call for Proposals for the ANES 2026 Pilot Study
The American National Election Studies (ANES) invites ideas for questionnaire content to be included in an upcoming pilot survey. The ANES 2026 Pilot Study survey will collect data from a national sample in the late fall of 2026, immediately following the midterm elections.
The primary purpose of the pilot survey is to test the measurement qualities and scientific value of questions for possible inclusion in the ANES 2028 Time Series Survey, but it will also be used for supplementing key ANES trend data in a consequential national election. The pilot survey is a critical resource for the ANES principal investigators as they make difficult decisions about questionnaire content and design because it allows tests of the effectiveness of new questions and formats well in advance of the next presidential election.
Request for Community Input
The ANES is already working to identify new questions on an array of topics. Prior to every survey, we seek input from our Advisory Board and, through invitations such as this, from the community of interested researchers at large. We see this process as a form of collective brainstorming, ensuring that a wider range of ideas are considered and ultimately yielding a better questionnaire. Hundreds of people have submitted ideas to the ANES over the past twelve years and collectively have had a significant impact on the content of ANES surveys.
We invite two types of proposals. First, we welcome general suggestions about the topics or concepts that ought to be measured in the survey, especially if you believe they might otherwise be overlooked. We will consider these broad ideas carefully and, based on those ideas, we may develop specific measures of them with the advice of the Board. Second, we welcome suggestions of specific survey questions (or revisions of older questions)—complete with full question wording and response options—whether you wrote the items or came across them elsewhere.
For both types of input, please briefly describe the rationale for inclusion of these topics or questions—in particular, how they may improve the discipline’s ability to describe and explain voting behavior and public opinion in the 2028 presidential election. Inspiration for innovations may come from theoretical advances or debates in the scholarly literature, methodological insights in survey measurement, or new developments in American politics. In addition, when recommending specific questions, please summarize any available evidence about the explanatory power and measurement qualities (e.g., validity, reliability) of the items. A brief list of variables needed to assess the new content would be useful as well. Concise tables and brief textual summaries of testing procedures are welcome. A note of caution: adopting long batteries of questions will almost certainly be infeasible, due to space constraints.
We will also consider experimental interventions for the ANES 2026 Pilot Study. This is most useful where one has reason to expect that how or when a question is asked may substantially affect its quality and value. In such cases, assigning respondents randomly to distinct variants of the question wording, response options, or question order may be useful. Experiments will be run on less expensive, non-probability samples.
Format and Deadline
Please submit your ideas in a Microsoft Word document. Suggestions of any level of detail are welcome, but please limit your submission, including supporting evidence (where relevant), to no more than five pages (11- or 12-point font, 1.5 or double spacing, one-inch margins). We will not have time to read longer documents. For full consideration, ideas should be submitted to ANES by 5:00 pm Eastern Time on Friday, April 17, 2026. Earlier submissions are encouraged. To submit your ideas, please email your file to the following address: [email protected]
What to Expect
We will be finalizing the pilot questionnaire in September and making it public by November 2026. As this is not a competition, we will not be designating winners or losers, nor issuing acceptances or rejections. It is always challenging for the PIs and the Board to prioritize the ideas you present: There are far too many good suggestions for us to field. We regard all input as valuable, regardless of the final decisions about what we have space to include on the pilot questionnaire. And while we will not have time to provide feedback on specific suggestions, we may follow up in some cases if we have further questions.
More about the Pilot Study
The pilot studies will come in 3 modes. First, immediately after the 2026 elections, we will field a national cross-sectional study of adults from an online panel measuring their vote choices and behavior in the midterm elections. Interviews will be self-completed on the web, averaging at least 20 minutes. The target sample size will be greater than 1,000 respondents but there will not be sufficient cases to analyze data at the level of individual states or congressional districts. Roughly one-third of the questionnaire will consist of standard ANES items (e.g., demographics, political predispositions, voting behavior) that are needed to assess the relevance and value of new items.
Second, we will also be running pilot studies on non-random samples, in order to test question wording via experiments. We welcome proposals of this type.
Third, we will briefly recontact the ongoing 2016-2020-2024 ANES panel of American citizens. We are open to suggestions about which existing content should be repeated in 2026, or which new measures should be included for these same respondents who have participated in each prior presidential election.