Announcing the 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study

February 25, 2014

There is power in numbers. Starting in 2006, a consortium of 39 universities came together to create the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, the first truly large-scale academic survey project aimed at studying the midterm Congressional elections. The study has continued every year thereafter, and continues to involve teams of researchers from across the country. Our joint efforts have produced national sample surveys in every federal election since, including 55,000 person samples in 2010 and 2012. Professor Stephen Ansolabehere of Harvard University coordinates the CCES and the YouGov branch in Palo Alto, CA, conducts and distributes the surveys.

We invite you to join this unique project for 2014.

Design

We plan a national sample stratified by state and type of district, which permits the optimal study of congressional and state races and state politics. The sample design also an ideal setting for un­derstanding the relationship between the congressional and Presidential elections. For 2014, the survey will 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 CCES 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. 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 $17,500.  However, we have requested support from the National Science Foundation, and if that grant is successful, the cost of a module will be $12,500.  To join the study, please contact the project administrator, Liz Salazar (lsalazar@iq.harvard.edu).  If you know of other researchers who would like to join this collaboration, please send us their contact information.

Schedule

The study will be fielded in November 2014, after the general election. Survey data will be delivered by March 2015, and data matched to the voter files will be delivered in July 2015.

At YouGov, contact Sam Luks for further information about the technical details of the survey itself, sam.luks@yougov.com. For general questions, please contact Liz Salazar at lsalazar@iq.harvard.edu.

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