Our proposal retains the diverse and experienced multi-university team of scholars and staff that led the most recent ANES grant cycle. Their collective experience will be critical for capturing the full benefits of innovations begun in 2020 and for designing innovations for 2024.

Building on the Past

We will continue to preserve, develop, and refine the time series, the world?s longest-running representative sample survey of public opinion. Leading scholars of public opinion have noted that the ANES remains ?the central workhorse of American political behavior research,? and that its centrality stems from the time series (Robison et al. 2018). Over one-third of the more than 1100 papers in American political behavior published between 1980 and 2018 employed ANES data. Preserving the time series is critical for tracking changes in public opinion, behavior, and commitment to basic democratic norms in a historical moment of upheaval.

We will create the longest panel design in ANES history by extending the 2016-2020 panel study through 2024. We will build on the successful 2020 social media study to enabling users to estimate the impact of individual media environments on political attitudes and behavior. We will collaborate with GSS and CSES to maximize knowledge about the influence of social demographics and political institutional design on mass public opinion.

New Innovations for 2024

Enabled by the single NSF RFP for this cycle, the 2024 ANES will feature the first fully integrated mixed-mode design in the history of the project. The use of face-to-face, video, and paper interviewing will maximize response rates and representativeness. A huge challenge for the survey industry in 2020 was recruiting subsets of Republican identifiers and underrepresented groups such as Latinos and African Americans. The 2024 study will deploy innovations in responsive design related to sample recruitment, screening, and incentives. We are committed to exploring ways to reduce interviewing costs, especially via the use of video interviewing, while maintaining ANES?s highest data quality standards. The 2024 study will innovate new content using pilot studies that test ideas contributed by the Board and the user community. Finally, we will be prepared for another tumultuous post-election period by holding a random subset of interviews after the election certification date, in case the legitimacy of the electoral system is once again challenged by either party.