ANES 1980 Time Series Study: U.S. Voter Opinions and Political Behavior

1980 pre- and post-election surveys from the American National Election Studies time-series collection, which has been fielded continuously since 1948. The study, led by Warren E. Miller of the Institute for Social Research, measures Americans' social backgrounds, political values, policy opinions, and participation. It was part of a larger project consisting of 8 integrated survey data collections throughout the 1980 election year.

Use Cases

• Modeling party identification based on new measures introduced in the study.
• Analyzing voter attitudes on public policy issues like defense spending and U.S. foreign policy toward Russia.
• Studying perceptions of political leadership using the introduced 'traits and affects' measures.
• Exploring the role of social networks in vote choice crystallization.
• Investigating retrospective and prospective evaluations of the economy on voting behavior.

Strengths

• Part of a continuous national survey time-series collection fielded since 1948, enabling longitudinal analysis.
• Includes contextual data such as election returns, interest group ratings, and campaign contribution data.
• Represents a traditional pre-post election study design with two waves of data collection.
• Planned by a committee of six scholars and project staff, suggesting structured development.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale ML tasks.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Provenance

Source

Institute for Social Research

Collection Method

National pre- and post-election surveys, part of an 8-survey integrated project.

Time Range

1980

Geography

United States