DOI: 10.3886/icpsr35142
title: ANES 1996 Time Series Study
title: Archival Version

description: This study is part of a time-series collection of national surveys fielded continuously since 1952, 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 1996 National Election Study contains both pre- and post-election components. The Pre-Election Survey includes interviews in which approximately 77 percent of the cases are comprised of impanelled respondents first interviewed in either AMERICAN NATIONAL ELECTION STUDY, 1992: PRE- AND POST-ELECTION SURVEY [ENHANCED WITH 1990 AND 1991 DATA] (ICPSR 6067) or in AMERICAN NATIONAL ELECTION STUDY, 1994: POST-ELECTION SURVEY [ENHANCED WITH 1992 AND 1993 DATA] (ICPSR 6507). The other 23 percent of the pre-election cases are a freshly drawn cross-section sample. Of the 1,714 citizens interviewed during the pre-election stage, 1,534 (89.5 percent) also participated in the Post-Election Survey (1,197 of these were panel cases and 337 were cross-section). The content of the 1996 Election Study reflects its dual function, both as the traditional presidential election year time-series data collection and as a panel study. Substantive themes presented in the 1996 questionnaires included interest in topics such as political campaigns, evaluations of the political parties, knowledge of and evaluation of presidential and House candidates, political participation (including turnout in the presidential primaries and in the November general election and other forms of electoral campaign activity), and vote choice for president, the United States House of Representatives, and the United States Senate, including second choice for president. Additional items focused on perceptions of personal and national economic well-being, positions on social welfare issues like the role of government in the provision of jobs and a good standard of living), positions on social issues (including abortion, women's roles, and prayer in the schools), racial and ethnic stereotypes, opinions on affirmative action, attitudes toward immigrants, opinions about the nation's most important problem, political predispositions, social altruism, social connectedness, feeling thermometers on a wide range of political figures and political groups, affinity with various social groups, and detailed demographic information and measures of religious affiliation and religiosity. Previous updates added a core battery of campaign-related items in the pre-election wave to better understand the dynamics of congressional campaigns, several questions related to issue importance and uncertainty both in relation to respondents and to candidates, an eight-minute module of questions developed by a consortium of electoral scholars from 52 polities to facilitate comparative analysis of political attitudes and voting behavior, and a measure of exposure to entertainment programs as an indirect measure of exposure to campaign advertisements. Additional items from previous updates concerned social issues, the environment, like air quality and the safety of drinking water, and the media. The fifth version of the data adds an auxiliary file consisting of merged data on group membership previously found in 1996 Pre-Post releases. In addition, the documentation for variable V961454, included in both the new Auxiliary file and in the 1996 Pre-Post file, was incorrect. The variable information has been corrected in the codebooks and variable labels for the Auxiliary File but not corrected in the 1996 Pre-Post codebook or variable labels.
description: Datasets: 
 
 DS0: Study-Level Files 
 DS1: Main Data File 
 DS2: Auxiliary File: 1996 Time Series Group Membership File
description: face to face interview, telephone interview
description: All United States citizens of voting age on or before November 5, 1996, residing in housing units other than on military reservations in the 48 coterminous states.
description: National multistage area probability sample.