Description of ANES:
The following description of the American National Election Studies appears on the ICPSR Web site
"This collection pools common variables from each of the biennial National Election Studies conducted since 1948. The election studies are designed to present data on American's 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. The data provided in this cumulative file include a series of demographic variables and measures of social structure, partisanship, candidate evaluation, retrospective and incumbent presidential evaluation, public opinion, ideological support for the political system, mass media usage, and equalitarianism and post-materialism. Additional items provide measures of political activity, participation, and involvement, and voting behavior and registration (including results of vote validation efforts). In 2001, corrections were made to variables VCF0902, VCF0904, and VCF0905."
The Department of Sociology maintains SPSS and STATA versions of all American National Election Studies (each year and all years combined). There is one combined data file for data from 1948 to 2000. There is another combined data file from 2002, which includes both the main data and the auxiliary data. The Auxiliary Data File (Part 2) contains contextual variables for the 2002 National Election Study. Biographical variables for the Democratic and Republican candidates and retiring incumbents include candidate's gender, race, educational background, and committee membership. Incumbent president and party support are also included in that data set.
All of the ANES data sets are available on the Department LAN by following the path G:\ALL\ANES. The combined data sets are large. To use them in STATA, set mem 50m before issuing a "use" command. Alternatively, merge data sets from only the specific years that you need using procedures outlined in the file "Stata merge and append," available under the instructions section of the Data Resources home page.
Link to the ICPSR Web description of these datasets.
For the 1948-2000 data
http://webapp.icpsr.umich.edu/cocoon/ICPSR-STUDY/08475.xml
For the 2002 data
http://webapp.icpsr.umich.edu/cocoon/ICPSR-STUDY/03740.xml
