Call for teams for the 2021 CES

April 2, 2021

Announcing the 2021 Cooperative Election Study

There is power in numbers. Starting in 2006, a consortium of 39 universities came together to create the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (now the Cooperative Election Study), the first truly large-scale and cooperative academic survey project aimed at studying American elections.   Our joint efforts have produced national sample surveys in excess of 50,000 respondents for every recent federal election. In 2020, the CES included participation from hundreds of faculty and graduate students across 60 teams. Stephen Ansolabehere (Harvard University), Brian Schaffner (Tufts University) and Sam Luks (YouGov) coordinate the CES, which is administered by YouGov. The study has been supported by the National Science Foundation since 2010.

We invite you to join this unique project for 2021.

Design

We plan a national sample stratified by state, which permits the optimal study of states and congressional districts, as well as national level opinion. The 2021 survey will be conducted on the Internet and consist of a single 20-minute questionnaire (10 minutes of common content and10 minutes of team content).

Content

Half of the survey content will be Common Content, administered to all survey respondents, and half of the content will be team content, administered to 1,000 respondents for each team. The CES Planning Group will design the Common Content. Common Content consists of a battery of questions asked of all respondents to capture commonly asked questions, such as vote choice, as well as a handful of items for which it is uniquely advantageous to have a very large sample. Each team will design its own team content.

Deliverables

The project will deliver a 1,000-person survey covering your team’s content; a Common Content survey that consists of a subset of questions asked of all subjects; and the validated vote for most subjects in the sample, where available. Team data will be embargoed for the private use of those participating teams for a term of one year after the delivery of the survey.

Cost

The cost of the study is $13,000 for a 1,000-person sample. Additional cases can be purchased for $10 per case. To join the study, please contact Sam Luks (sam.luks@yougov.com) and Marissa Shih (marissa.shih@yougov.com) at YouGov

Schedule

August, 2021:       Team questionnaires dues to YouGov.

Nov., 2021:            Survey in the field.

March 2022:         Survey data delivered to teams.

More information, data from previous studies, and announcements can be found at https://cces.gov.harvard.edu/.

For further information about the technical details of the survey itself, you can contact Sam Luks at sam.luks@yougov.com. For general questions or for information on potentially sharing a module with another team, please contact Brian Schaffner (brian.schaffner@tufts.edu).