American National Election Study (ANES) Series

collection: series

Investigator(s): Warren E. Miller et al. and the National Election Studies

Studies

95

Variables

80,035

Publications

6,294

About this Collection

The American National Election Study (ANES), begun in 1948, is the oldest continuous series of survey data investigating electoral behavior and attitudes in the United States. The focus of the survey includes voter perceptions of the major political parties, the candidates, national and international issues, and of the importance of the election. Also explored are voter expectations about the outcome of the election, degree of voter interest in politics, political affiliation and voting history, as well as participation in the electoral process. ANES interviews are conducted before and after presidential elections and after national congressional elections. Post-election interviews include questions on actual voting behavior and voter reflections about the election outcome.

Studies

95 results
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Why Are Surveys Struggling to Estimate Vote Shares

This release is a replication resource for the journal article "Why Are Surveys Struggling to Estimate Vote Shares?" (American Journal of Political Science, 28 April 2026). This collection contains data, codebooks, code, and additional documentation to replicate the assessment. The study centers around the question as to whether political surveys are accurate. It is in response to the 2020 U.S. presidential election, during which the political support of candidate Donald Trump was significantly underestimated. The study leverages a large set of data collected alongside the 2020 American National Election Studies (ANES) to identify and quantify sources of error using the Total Survey Error framework. This methodological approach quantifies a non-ignorable nonresponse bias, and reveals that the estimated differential nonresponse is sufficiently large to explain the ANES 2020 Biden-Trump error. This result has broader implications for the presence of bias in political surveys, and informs potential avenues of correction in future survey development.
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ANES 2020 Time Series Study Geocodes

This study is part of the American National Election Studies (ANES), a time series collection of national surveys fielded since 1948. The American National Election Studies are designed to present data on Americans' social backgrounds, political predispositions, social and political values, perceptions and evaluations of groups and candidates, opinions on questions of public policy, and participation in political life.

The files included in this study are restricted-use due to the geocodes contained in them for the year listed in the title.

Please review the contents of the ZIP file pkg38176-0001_documentation_REST.zip for helpful information about the meanings of variables and changes to geocoding over time. Should you need to merge datasets across the 1992-1997 or 2000-2004 panel, ID bridging files for those panels are also included in the same ZIP file.

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ANES Social Media Study Restricted-Use Facebook Supplemental Data, 2020-2022

The ANES 2020-2022 Social Media Study was a two-wave survey before and after the 2020 presidential election and a third survey following the 2022 midterm elections in the United States. Data from these surveys are available as a public use file from the American National Election Studies (ANES) website. The three questionnaires have largely the same content, affording repeated measures of the same constructs. The questionnaire covers voter turnout and candidate choice in the 2020 presidential primaries and general election, the coronavirus pandemic, the economy, feeling thermometers, feelings about how things are going in the country, trust in institutions, political knowledge and misinformation, political participation, political stereotyping, political diversity of social networks, and campaign/policy issues including health insurance, immigration, guns, and climate change.

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