Taking the Pulse of Public Opinion

American voters are unaware that their political opinions (gleaned from carefully selected samples of the voting public) are part of a 50-year research study that has become a national resource for social scientists, teachers, and policy makers.

In 1977, the National Science Foundation formally established the National Election Studies (NES) as a national resource. For 25 years before the NSF created the NES, an interdisciplinary team of investigators from the University of Michigan Survey Research Center and the Center for Political Studies carried out an unbroken series of national election studies that covered all thirteen presidential and midterm elections between 1952 and 1976.

"By the early 1970s, the so-called Michigan Election Studies had become an extraordinary resource for large segments of the science community. NES carries on this work," says Donald Kinder, the Philip E. Converse Collegiate Professor and an NES co-principal investigator. "The core of the NES time-series has become part of the infrastructure of American political science."

NES conducts national surveys of the American electorate in presidential and midterm election years and carries out research and development through pilot studies in odd-numbered years. The NES time-series encompasses 23 biennial election studies spanning five decades. "The longevity of the NES time-series greatly enhances the utility of the data, since measures can be pooled over time, and both long-term trends and the political impact of historical events can be identified," says Kinder.

Each NES study addresses a wide range of themes, such as expectations about the election outcome, perceptions and evaluations of the major parties and their candidates, assessments of the relative importance of major problems facing the country, detailed demographic information, and religious affiliation.

NES makes its data freely available to researchers around the world via the Internet. Typically, scores of researchers download NES data files within hours of their availability. On the Web, scholars can find the NES Guide to Public Opinion (with 120 tables and graphs, displaying the ebb and flow of public opinion and electoral behavior and choice since 1952), among many other resources. "We serve, on average, almost 4,000 individuals every month with data and related resources," says Kinder. A CD is also available and includes 45 data sets with more than 50,000 survey questions and related variables, and the results of the NES studies from 1948-1996.

The study's contribution to the understanding of elections and public opinion have helped to solve the mystery of how and why voters make the decisions they do, identify the ingredients that make up American opinion on matters of politics, and define the ways in which votersŐ demands and aspirations influence the decisions of public officials.

"Long-term funding from NSF-- as opposed to piecemeal funding from a variety of sources-- has allowed us to effectively maintain a core of central questions, asked time and again over the course of the entire NES series," says Kinder. "Our data have been used to train countless scholars and teach thousands of students." The study has also served as the model for the many national election studies organizations that have been created in other democracies. "The contributions of NES-- and thus, the NSF-- to the field are enormous."