DOI: 10.3886/icpsr07581.v1
title: American Voting Behavior: Presidential Elections from 1952-1980
title: Version 1

description: This instructional package includes a student manual
containing six exercises, an instructor's guide, and four subsets of
data required for use in conjunction with the manual's exercises. The
package's major purpose is to enable students to examine certain
substantive questions about electoral behavior through analysis of
political survey data. The manual avoids instruction in methodology,
per se, hence the student is taken no further than the analysis of
straightforward variables in percentagized tables with and without
controls, and is introduced to epsilon, the percentage difference
measures based on 2 X 2 tables, but offered no elaborate discussion of
measures of association. The six structured exercises introduce the
basic analytic techniques necessary for coping with survey data in the
expectation that the students will then move on to their own
topics. The datasets were designed to be both substantively and
analytically interesting, as students are forced continually to make
choices and judgments about which variables to use and how to combine
code categories. Beyond this, the exercises serve a more complex
purpose: to help the student gain a better understanding of the
existing scholarly literature by going through steps similar to those
of the original analysts. In some instances, the students can readily
appreciate how close their work is to the analysis in assigned
reading. The instructor's guide has two purposes: first, to help
instructors use the student manual effectively, and second, to suggest
various ways to depart from the six exercises and to develop
essentially new manuals. The subsets (Parts 1-4) contain data from
every presidential election survey that was conducted by the Survey
Research Center (SRC) and Center for Political Studies (CPS) (at the
University of Michigan) from 1952 to 1980. Part 4 contains an
extensive set of variables drawn exclusively from the CPS's AMERICAN
NATIONAL ELECTION STUDY, 1980 (ICPSR 7763). This is the only deck
needed to complete the exercises in Exercises l-5. Part 1 includes
small sets of comparable variables from each SRC/CPS presidential
election study from 1952-1972. The variables in these decks were
selected with the intention of providing students with a range of
interesting possibilities for original research topics for term
papers. Part 2 includes variables and respondents from panel surveys
contained in AMERICAN NATIONAL ELECTION SERIES: 1972, 1974, 1976
(ICPSR 7607). This dataset may be used with Exercise 6. Supplementing
the panel file is the data in Part 3, based on the cross-section
survey, AMERICAN NATIONAL ELECTION STUDY, 1976 (7381). It repeats the
variables from the 1976 component of the panel, with a much larger
N. The AMERICAN NATIONAL ELECTION STUDY, 1976 (7381) may be used
independently, as with the AMERICAN NATIONAL ELECTION STUDY, 1980
(ICPSR 7763), or it may be used in exercises comparing cross-section
with panel data. Data used for the exercises were made available by
ICPSR. The major analyses of these data have appeared in two
publications: (1) University of Michigan. Survey Research Center. THE
AMERICAN VOTER. New York, NY: Wiley, 1960, and (2) Campbell, Angus,
Philip Converse, Warren Miller, and Donald Stokes. ELECTIONS AND THE
POLITICAL ORDER. New York, NY: Wiley, 1966.
description: Datasets: 
DS0: Study-Level Files
DS1: 1952-1972 Data
DS2: 1972-1974-1976 Panel Data
DS3: 1976 Data
DS4: 1980 Data
description: The codebooks, Student Manual for All Parts and the
Guide to Instruction for All Parts, are provided by ICPSR as a
Portable Document Format (PDF) file. The PDF file format was developed
by Adobe Systems Incorporated and can be accessed using PDF reader
software, such as the Adobe Acrobat Reader. Information on how to
obtain a copy of the Acrobat Reader is provided on the ICPSR Web
site.