U.S. Racial Attitudes and Presidential Vote Switching, 2016-2024 Panel

Dynamic racial grievance, specifically changes in perceptions of discrimination, predicts shifts in presidential voting behavior. This dataset contains a three-wave panel of American National Election Studies respondents surveyed in 2016, 2020, and 2024. It was authored by Lauren Olson and published via Harvard Dataverse in June 2026.

Use Cases

• Modeling the effect of changing perceptions of discrimination on vote choice using first-difference models.
• Analyzing the stability of relative racial affect (warmth toward white vs. Black Americans) over an eight-year period.
• Testing for reverse causality between vote switching and subsequent shifts in racial attitudes.
• Studying within-person variation in racial attitudes using fixed-effects models.

Strengths

• Three-wave panel design tracks the same individuals across three U.S. presidential elections (2016, 2020, 2024).
• Analysis leverages within-person variation, a strength for causal inference mentioned in the description.
• Focuses on two distinct types of racial attitude change: perceived discrimination and relative racial affect.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data may reflect temporal and respondent bias inherent to the American National Election Studies panel.

Provenance

Source

American National Election Studies (ANES) panel respondents.

Collection Method

Panel survey conducted across three waves.

Time Range

2016, 2020, 2024

Freshness

Last updated 2026-06-04 14:35:27; freshness should be verified.

Geography

United States