Statistics resulting from public opinion surveys and political polls are available seemingly everywhere: in journal articles, in the popular press, and even on the Web. There are, however, far fewer free sources for public opinion or polling data. This chapter reviews the notable exceptions.
Major Sources: United States
American National Election Studies (Stanford University and the University of Michigan)
General Social Survey (National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago)
Both the American National Election Studies (ANES, www.electionstudies.org) and the General Social Survey (GSS, www3.norc.org/gss+website/) are venerable surveys: ANES surveys have been conducted every two years since 1948 (with additional pilot studies in some odd years), and the GSS has been run either annually or biennially since 1972. The questions on ANES cover a wide range of topics, both directly and indirectly related to American politics and elections. For example, questions include feelings toward various political, religious, and socioeconomic groups (e.g., unions, the military, Catholics, conservatives), appraisals of the presidential candidates in presidential election years, and opinions about the socioeconomic situation of African Americans, to name just a few of the broad topics covered. In general the GSS covers people’s opinions on social issues ranging from family relationships to socioeconomic inequality, although some of the topic areas and questions change every year. Both surveys can be analyzed online through the SDA Archive at the University of California–Berkeley (http://sda.berkeley.edu/archive.htm; see appendix B for instructions for using the SDA software).
Odum Institute for Research in Social Science (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
The Odum Institute for Research in Social Science maintains an extensive catalog of public opinion data sets (http://dvn.iq.harvard.edu/dvn/dv/odum/). Many, but not all, of these data sets are freely available to the public. One valuable collection consists of data from more than one thousand surveys from Harris Interactive and its predecessor Louis Harris and Associates, dating back to 1958. This polling organization conducted surveys on a wide range of topics, primarily political opinion polls but also surveys about health and nutrition, public education, and more. Other notable data sets include data from USA Today and Atlanta Journal-Constitution polls from the 1980s and early 1990s and the National Network of State Polls, which contains several hundred polls that were conducted in a single U.S. state.
Major Sources: World
Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives
The Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA) maintains the CESSDA Catalogue (www.cessda.net/catalogue/), which allows users to search for survey data from the national social science data archives of many European countries. A wide range of social and economic topics, from politics and social policy to sports, nature, and the media, are covered in the various surveys. Most of the data is from the 1980s to present, but some older surveys are available. Although the catalog itself is centralized, access to the data is via the websites of each of the national data archives. This leads to differences in accessibility between different data sets; for example, some data and interfaces are available in English, others only in the official language of the country or the original language of the survey. Access to some of these data archives requires registration. Many of the individual archives allow their data to be analyzed online using the NESSTAR software (www.nesstar.com), which provides similar functions to the SDA software commonly used for online analysis by American data archives but has a very different interface.
Globalbarometer Surveys
The Globalbarometer Surveys encompass four different ongoing survey projects: the Afrobarometer (www.afrobarometer.org; conducted since 1999), Arabbarometer (www.arabbarometer.org; conducted since 2006), Asian Barometer (www.asianbarometer.org; conducted since 2001; data available by application only), and Latinobarómetro (www.latinobarometro.org; conducted since 1995; there is a charge for the most recent year’s data, but older years are free).1 These surveys are a rich source of data on people’s opinions about politics and public life in participating countries, with special emphasis on opinions about democracy, trust in various institutions, and participation in civic life. The Arabbarometer can be downloaded only in SPSS format; the Afrobarometer can be downloaded in SPSS format or analyzed online; and the Latinobarómetro can be downloaded in SPSS, SAS, or Stata format or analyzed online. All four projects, including the Asian Barometer, also publish freely available reports containing statistics generated from the data.
World Values Survey
The World Values Survey (www.wvsevsdb.com) is a lengthy public opinion survey that has been conducted in more than fifty countries, many of which have been surveyed multiple times since the project was launched in 1981. Many of the questions are similar to those on the Globalbarometer Surveys, covering people’s opinions on politics and democracy (e.g., “How important is it for you to live in a country that is governed democratically?”) and their trust in various groups and institutions, but there are also sections with more personal questions about people’s religious beliefs and opinions about family life (e.g., “How important is God in your life?”). Data from the World Values Survey has been merged with data from the European Values Survey (www.europeanvaluesstudy.eu), a separate project whose maintainers cooperated with the maintainers of the World Values Survey to generate harmonized data sets, to create an even larger sample. This integrated data set is available on the World Values Survey website.
Minor Sources
Pew Research Center
The Pew Research Center is an umbrella organization encompassing seven different ongoing research projects. Data sets are available from many of the Pew Research Center’s subdivisions (http://pewresearch.org/databank/datasets/), including the weekly surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, the National Survey of Latinos by the Pew Research Hispanic Center, international surveys from the Pew Research Global Attitudes Project, and assorted surveys on other topics, including those performed by the Pew Research Internet and American Life Project and the Pew Research Forum on Religion and Public Life. Most of the available data is from the 2000s, with only the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press data going as far back as 1997. Registration is required for access to some of the data.
Latin American Public Opinion Project
The Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) at Vanderbilt University (www.vanderbilt.edu/lapop/) has performed the AmericasBarometer survey every two years since 2004. The survey has been administered at least once in every Central and South American country as well as in some Caribbean nations. Despite its name, it is not part of the Globalbarometer Surveys project, but it asks similar questions, focusing on people’s opinions about democracy, their involvement in politics and civic life, and their trust in various people and institutions, from the president of their country to the Catholic Church. Data can be analyzed online or downloaded in Stata or SPSS formats.
CBS News Polls
One source for polling statistics (not raw data sets) that is worth mentioning is the online archive of CBS News polls (www.cbsnews.com/news/cbs-news-poll-database/). This freely available database contains thousands of questions that have been asked on public opinion surveys sponsored by CBS News since 1976. Questions can be browsed by topic or searched by keyword, and the responses are presented graphically as well as in tables.
Note
1. Although the Eurobarometer survey, which is available through the CESSDA Catalogue, is similar to the other Barometer surveys, it is not part of the Globalbarometer project.