The 2024 U.S. elections will be studied by a national team of scholars supported with a $14 million ... [+]
Following a competitive grant process, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a $14 million grant to the American National Election Studies (ANES) to conduct research on the 2024 United States elections. ANES, housed at the University of Michigan, will head up the comprehensive, ongoing study, which will involve investigators from several universities.
ANES will survey a large, representative sample of eligible voters both before and after the 2024 election, using a combination of in-person, online, video and postal service interviewing. Special efforts will be undertaken to include traditionally underrepresented groups.
“The 2024 elections will occur at a moment of great uncertainty and change in American politics,” said Nicholas Valentino, a research professor at the University of Michigan with appointments in UM’s Center for Political Studies and Department of Political Science. Valentino is one of the principal investigators who will lead the multi-investigator team.
“Long-standing political norms involving executive power, electoral legitimacy and the rule of law, as well as societal norms such as the proper balance of public health advice with individual freedom, are under challenge. What does the public make of these disruptions? The 2024 ANES will help scholars from multiple disciplines answer this question,” added Valentino.
Along with Valentino, the project’s scientific leadership team includes Shanto Iyengar of Stanford University, D. Sunshine Hillygus of Duke University and Daron Shaw of the University of Texas.
According to the announcement from the University of Michigan, the research team will receive input from an advisory board made up of a diverse group of 17 top public opinion scholars from around the country.
Because of its longitudinal nature, the ANES gives researchers a unique opportunity to study both voter stability and change over what is now more than a 70-year time period. For example, the 2024 version of the study will include questions that have been asked since the study’s inception in 1948, and it also will include new questions on topics such as public health, democratic norms and electoral legitimacy.
A key feature of the study will be an eight-year panel of questions connecting interviews with the same individuals from 2016, 2020 and 2024. Other innovations in the upcoming analysis are a study that will tie individual survey responses to social media activity during the election and a survey of respondents during the final election certification process that will occur in January 2025.
“The 2024 ANES includes several exciting methodological innovations. The 2016-24 re-interviews of the same respondents will permit systematic modeling of opinion dynamics over a period of extreme volatility,” said Stanford’s Shanto Iyengar. “These data will also open entirely new avenues of research into the spread of misinformation, support for political violence and threats to the legitimacy of our electoral institutions.”
ANES investigators will also invite the public and the scholarly community to submit additional suggestions for new questions to be included in the surveys.
According to NSF, the ANES provides “gold standard data on voting, public opinion, and political participation in American national elections.” The data from the studies “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.”
The forerunner to ANES was a pilot study of the national electorate in 1948 conducted by the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan. For the next 25 years, UM’s Survey Research Center and the Center for Political Studies in the Institute for Social Research carried out studies of 13 presidential and midterm elections between 1952 and 1976.
However, inadequate funding limited the ability of the Michigan team to improve the election studies and to involve scholars from other institutions in the planning and analysis of the work.
Then, in 1977, a grant from the National Science Foundation established the American National Election Studies as a national research resource, charged with continuing to collect core citizen and political data over time while at the same time improving the methodology and study designs so that new hypotheses about voting and public opinion could be measured. ANES has received multiple NSF grants over the years.
ANES plans to provide the data resulting from the 2024 study on its website for use by scholars, students, policymakers, journalists and other interested persons in the U.S. and worldwide.
