There is power in numbers. Starting in 2006, a consortium of 39 universities came together to create 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 of 60,000 respondents for every recent federal election. In 2022, the CES included participation from over 200 faculty and approximately 100 graduate students across 60 teams. The study has been supported by the National Science Foundation since 2010.

 

We invite you to join this unique project for 2024.

 

Design

We plan a national sample stratified by state, which permits the optimal study of congressional and state races and state politics, as well as the Presidential election. The 2024 survey will be conducted on the Internet and consist of a 20-minute pre-election wave and a 10-minute post-election wave.

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

Pending final approval from the National Science Foundation, the price of a module will be $14,000. To join the study, please contact Marissa Shih (marissa.shih@yougov.com) at YouGov and please indicate whether your team’s participation will be contingent on the reduced price or if you will purchase a module regardless of whether we receive NSF funding. Note that there is a limit on the total number of teams that can participate in this study, so if you are considering joining, please let us know as soon as possible.

Schedule

July 1, 2024:          FINAL Questionnaires due to YouGov

August, 2024:       Test link to survey module sent to teams for review. Teams send edits back within 72 hours.

October, 2024:    Pre-election survey in the field.

Nov., 2024:            Post-election survey in the field.

March 2024:         Survey data delivered to teams.

Summer 2025:     Voter-file matched 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 or for information on potentially sharing a module with another team you can contact Marissa Shih at marissa.shih@yougov.com. For general questions about CES feel free to contact Brian Schaffner (brian.schaffner@tufts.edu ).