Featured Resource: 2004 Election Panel Study, Wave I, Data Now Available

The Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy (CSED) at Brigham Young University and the Wisconsin Advertising Project at the University of Wisconsin, Madison are conducting a panel study this election year to better understand the link between campaign communications and voter behavior.

We are making these survey data available to the research community as quickly as possible so that other scholars can conduct micro-level analysis of the dynamics of voting behavior immediately, as well as after the election.

We are conducting a three-wave panel study to measure the impact of campaign communications at critical points during the campaign. We conducted the first wave over an eight day period between June 24 and July 3, completing 2,782 interviews comprising a random sample of the United States with an oversample of potential voters in presidential and Senate battleground states. We also oversampled voters in Ohio for a representative look at that key state.
The second wave of interviewing will occur in early September. The third wave will begin on Tuesday evening November 2nd (Election Day).

These waves will be released as quickly as possible following merging and after consistency checks are completed.

Although much of the instrumentation in the survey is designed to tap the effect of campaign communications on voter behavior, there are a slew of other questions that we hope other scholars can make use of in their research and we are happy to provide real time access to that data as soon as possible over the course of our study and beyond. The data are available from our web site.

The website includes the questionnaire, sample design, benchmark frequencies, press releases and of course the data. Due to the oversampling of battleground states, the data must be weighted. See the sampling description on the website for the details of the design.
We ask users to register so we may contact those using the data with updates and announcements. You are free to use the data as you wish, though the data source should be cited as: The 2004 Election Panel Study, BYU Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy and UW-Madison Wisconsin Advertising Project. Electronic resources from the EPS Web site (http://csp.polisci.wisc.edu/BYU_UW/). Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin, Wisconsin Advertising Project [producer and distributor], 2004, Wave 1.

Principal investigators for the BYU/UW Election Panel Study are David B. Magleby and Kelly D. Patterson at BYU and Kenneth M. Goldstein and Charles H. Franklin at Wisconsin.

Submitted by Charles H. Franklin