DOI: 10.3886/icpsr08475.v4
title: ANES Time Series Cumulative Data File (1948-2012)
title: Version 4

description: This collection pools common variables from each of the biennial National Election Studies conducted since 1948 up until 2012. The election studies are designed to present data on Americans' social backgrounds, enduring 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 data provided in this cumulative file include a series of demographic variables and measures of social structure, partisanship, candidate evaluation, retrospective and incumbent presidential evaluation, public opinion, ideological support for the political system, mass media usage, and egalitarianism and post-materialism. Additional items provide measures of political activity, participation, and involvement, and voting behavior and registration, including results of voter validation efforts.
description: Variables throughout the Time Series Cumulative Data File incorporate data for the same question from each of the ANES surveys. This file is useful in service to three kinds of analysis: (1) analysis that focuses on over time change in citizens, in their individual characteristics, in the opinions they hold, and in their political behavior; (2) analysis that looks at subgroups of citizens that are represented by few cases in a single cross-section sample, but by many more cases when several samples are combined; and (3) analysis that is concerned with replicating results over several elections. For these types of analyses, the chief advantage of relying on the Time Series Cumulative Data File, as opposed to personally combining data from several National Election Studies, is that in constructing the Time Series Cumulative Data File, the ANES Project Staff have already gone through the trouble of recoding variables so that the same question has the same variable number and the same coding scheme for each of the Election Studies.
description: The data are not weighted. This collection contains nine weight variables; VCF0009X, VCF0010X, VCF0011X, VCF0009Y, VCF0010Y, VCF0011Y, VCF0009Z, VCF0010Z, and VCF0011Z that must be used in any analysis. For more information on weights and sampling please see the Original P.I. Documentation within the ICPSR Codebook, as well as visit the American National Election Studies Web site for more information.
description: ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection: Created online analysis version with question text.; Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes..
description: Datasets: 
 
 DS1: ANES Time Series Cumulative Data File (1948-2012)
description: American National Election Study (ANES) Series
description: face-to-face interview, web-based survey 
This file contains only a subset of the variables from the entire American National Election Studies (ANES) Series. Variables selected for inclusion were those most central to the research program of the election studies and which appeared in at least three of the surveys. Variables have been recoded to be consistent across the time span.
Please refer to the Original P.I. Documentation in the ICPSR Codebook for further information pertaining to the labeling scheme for variables throughout this collection.
 Please refer to the American National Election Studies (ANES) Time Series Cumulative Data File Study Page, as well as the American National Election Studies Web site for more information concerning the American National Election (ANES) Studies Series.
description: Cases from the AMERICAN NATIONAL ELECTION STUDIES (ANES) SERIES. Smallest Geographic Unit: congressional district
description: Cross-section cases from the time-series election studies have been pooled to produce this dataset. For further information on sampling, please refer to the individual time series studies in the AMERICAN NATIONAL ELECTION STUDIES (ANES) SERIES housed at ICPSR, the Original P.I. Documentation found in the ICPSR Codebook, as well as visit the American National Election Studies Web site for more information.