The American National Election Studies (ANES) is a comprehensive longitudinal data collection. The ANES is responsible for providing gold standard data on voting, public opinion, and political participation in American national elections. ANES’s data are valuable for many reasons: they measure multiple variables; they allow complex comparisons across people, place, and time; they consistently and continuously leverage methodological advances; and they support dynamic hypothesis testing. Because ANES data have these attributes, they are used by researchers all over the world to answer questions that are vital to the health of American democracy. Through researchers who use ANES data, the ANES advances the progress of science and provides a vital service to the nation.
The project now known as the ANES has been collecting data and facilitating rigorous research since 1948. The project’s centerpiece is a series of in-person national surveys that are conducted in the weeks leading up to, and directly following, every U.S. presidential election. These surveys have been conducted using large sample sizes, many questions, and random sampling techniques. These attributes of the data offer researchers an opportunity to derive important discoveries from otherwise hard to see relationships between people, places, and circumstances that occur within every election cycle.
The ANES is known and respected among public users, academic researchers, and survey experts alike for providing the “gold standard” of election-focused survey data. As a result, any organization that runs the ANES is expected to explore, develop, evaluate, and use the best techniques available at the time.
The Accountable Institutions and Behavior Program in the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences expects to make one or two awards for the 2024 American National Election Study (ANES), with the award to run from fiscal years 2022 to 2025. We anticipate that the ANES funding will total no more than $14 million over four years, whether it is one or two awards. The expected starting date is July 2022.