The 2024 American National Election Studies (ANES)

The 2024 American National Election Study (ANES) will occur at a moment of great uncertainty and change in American politics. The public is divided over long-standing political norms involving executive power, electoral legitimacy, the rule of law, and societal norms such as the proper balance of public health concerns with individual freedoms. Since 1948, the ANES has been the gold standard for measuring public opinion and understanding voting behavior in the United States.

The 2024 ANES maintains the tradition of a nonpartisan, scientifically valid survey while adding cutting-edge innovations. New and existing questions on the ANES survey allow researchers to understand the sources of political discontent, explain misunderstandings between elected officials the public, and identify opportunities for bridging the country's political and social divisions.

The 2024 ANES continues the ANES tradition of administering both pre- and post-election interviews, producing several new data products including the first-ever eight-year panel in the ANES time series, spanning the 2016, 2020, and 2024 election cycles. This data set allows researchers to break fresh ground on topics including opinion dynamics during a period of extreme volatility, the spread of misinformation, support for political violence, affective polarization, racial conflict, and threats to the legitimacy of our electoral institutions.

The 2024 study also delivers a Social Media Study panel spanning 2020, 2022, and 2024, providing data on the electoral consequences of news use and political advertising on social media by merging respondent attitudes to behavioral data. Ongoing collaborations with General Social Survey and the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems yield new datasets of interest to scholars in sociology, economics, political communication, comparative politics, and international relations.

Methodological innovations include a non-response follow-up study, new instrumentation probing critical threats to democracy, video interviewing, and the use of a mixed-mode design to yield further insights about survey mode effects.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.