Cooperative Congressional Election Study Meets at 2015 Sundance Conference

In June 2015, IQSS affiliate Stephen Ansolabehere, in collaboration with the BYU Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy (CSED) and with support from IQSS, held the 2015 CCES Conference in Sundance, Utah. The CCES Sundance Conference is held every alternating year.

The Cooperative Congressional Election Study is a multi-institutional study coordinated by Stephen Ansolabehere,Professor of Government at Harvard University, and Brian Schaffner, Professor of Political Science (UMass Amherst). Each year, a consortium of as many as 50 teams (depending on the year) from various universities and institutes produce national sample surveys, which is then administered by YouGov/Polimetrix. Half of the questionnaire consists of Common Content asked of all 50,000+ people, and half of the questionnaire consists of Team Content designed by each individual participating team and asked of a subset of 1,000 people.

The conference opened with a welcome by Ansolabehere, followed by Schaffner, who discussed the CCES 2010-2014 Panel Study, in which participants interviewed in 2010 were re-interviewed in 2013 and 2014. Conference attendees then heard from Samantha Luks, Managing Director at YouGov/Polimetrix, who provided an overview of the 2014 CCES survey waves, conducted by her team. In the main conference sessions, researchers briefly presented the studies which their own teams conducted conducted in the CCES. They then engaged their colleagues in open discussion, led by Ansolabehere, in which they compared results and frequently exchanged valuable insights among teams. Research topics covered by team studies included campaign advertising and finance, voter ID laws, racial resentment, food policy, and partisan voting. A selection of presentations from the 2015 Sundance Conference will be posted to the conference website, and related publications will soon follow.

More information about the Cooperative Congressional Election Study is available at the CCES website.