This study is part of a time-series collection of national surveys fielded continuously since 1952. The election studies are 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. In addition to the standard or core content items, new topics include evaluations of the presidential primary candidates, respondent's primary vote, the budget deficit, health insurance, foreign policy, equal rights for women, the drug problem, the Reagan presidency, recall of the 1984 presidential vote, parental party identification, evaluation of Bush and Dukakis on the issues of environment and crime, the death penalty, and new system support and political efficacy items. The file also contains post-election vote validation and election administration survey data as well as data collected in 1991 to revalidate the 1988 respondents in order to assess the reliability of the vote validation process.

face-to-face interview Two forms were used in both the pre- and post-election surveys so that a maximum amount of content could be included. For both the pre- and post-election surveys, half the sample was assigned to Form A, the other half to Form B. In particular, the lengthy section containing Reagan retrospective evaluation items was split between the two waves and the two forms in order not to make either the pre- or post-election instrument unacceptably long, and to study the effects of post-election media analysis of the presidency. The other major use of the two forms was to conduct an experiment in survey response.

ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection: Performed consistency checks.; Standardized missing values.; Performed recodes and/or calculated derived variables..

All United States citizens of voting age on or before November 8, 1988, residing in housing units other than on military reservations in the 48 coterminous states.

Datasets: DS0: Study-Level Files DS1: ANES 1988 Time Series Study DS2: Auxiliary File: 1988 Time Series Nonresponse/Bias File

American National Election Study (ANES) Series

National multistage area probability sample.