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Introducing the U.S. Partisanship and Presidential Approval Dataset: Rejoinder to Berry, Fording, and Crofoot

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 September 2023

Peter K. Enns Open the ORCID record for Peter K. Enns [Opens in a new window] ,
Rebekah Jones ,
Julianna Koch  and
Julius Lagodny
Peter K. Enns*
Affiliation:
Department of Government and Brooks School of Public Policy, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA Verasight, San Francisco, CA, USA
Rebekah Jones
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA
Julianna Koch
Affiliation:
Buzzback Market Research, New York, NY, USA
Julius Lagodny
Affiliation:
Data Science Lab, Hertie School, Berlin, Germany
*
Corresponding author: Peter K. Enns; Email: peterenns@cornell.edu
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article concludes an exchange on developing and improving longitudinal estimates of state-level public opinion in the United States by introducing the U.S. Partisanship and Presidential Approval Dataset, which combines more than 1.1 million survey responses from 1948 to 2020 into a single harmonized “mega poll.”

Keywords

public opinionmega polldatasurvey researchmethodologyelection forecasts

Information

Type
Original Article
Information
State Politics & Policy Quarterly , Volume 23 , Issue 4 , December 2023 , pp. 378 - 379
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NC
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original article is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained prior to any commercial use.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the State Politics and Policy Section of the American Political Science Association

We thank William Berry, Richard Fording, and Justin Crofoot for their ongoing interest in and attention to our efforts to generate direct measures of state policy mood (Enns and Koch Reference Enns and Koch2013; Reference Enns and Koch2015; Lagodny et al. Reference Lagodny, Jones, Koch and Enns2023). We also appreciate their encouragement to scholars to reflect on our measures as well as those developed by Caughey and Warshaw (Reference Caughey and Warshaw2018).

To help researchers continue to understand and develop measures of state public opinion, we have recently archived a harmonized “mega poll” of more than 1.1 million survey responses from 1948 to 2020 and corresponding codebook and documentation with the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research (Enns and Lagodny Reference Enns and Lagodny2023; Lagodny and Enns Reference Lagodny and Enns2023). We have used these data to estimate state public opinion in our past research and we hope the data will allow scholars to further evaluate and improve upon our measures of state public opinion and our previous election analyses and forecasts (Enns and Lagodny Reference Enns and Lagodny2021; Enns, Lagodny, and Schuldt Reference Enns, Lagodny and Schuldt2017). In addition to making the data available, the documentation highlights shifting demographic and political patterns in the U.S. as well as increasing variance across surveys for several demographic categories. We have also included instructions in the documentation for how scholars can contribute additional data to this mega poll and receive citation for their efforts. We look forward to utilizing and citing research that builds upon and improves on our past work.

Funding statement

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Competing interest

The authors declared no potential competing interests with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biographies

Peter K. Enns is a professor in the Department of Government and the Brooks School of Public Policy and the Robert S. Harrison Director of the Cornell Center for Social Sciences at Cornell University. He is also a co-founder and chief data scientist at Verasight.

Rebekah Jones is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her primary research examines the political economy of crime policy.

Julianna Koch is a Senior Research Director at Buzzback Market Research.

Julius Lagodny is the main Data Analyst at El Pato, a Berlin-based media company, and a Research Fellow at the Data Lab of the Hertie School.

References

Caughey, Devin, and Warshaw, Christopher. 2018. “Policy Preferences and Policy Change: Dynamic Responsiveness in the American States, 1936–2014.” American Political Science Review 112: 249–66.Google Scholar
Enns, Peter K., and Koch, Julianna. 2013. “Public Opinion in the U.S. States: 1956–2010.” State Politics and Policy Quarterly 13: 349–72.Google Scholar
Enns, Peter K., and Koch, Julianna. 2015. “State Policy Mood: The Importance of Over-Time Dynamics.” State Politics and Policy Quarterly 15: 436–46.Google Scholar
Enns, Peter K., and Lagodny, Julius. 2021. “Forecasting the 2020 Electoral College Winner: The State Presidential Approval/State Economy Model.” PS: Political Science & Politics 54 (1): 81–5.Google Scholar
Enns, Peter K., and Lagodny, Julius. 2023. “The U.S. Partisanship and Presidential Approval Dataset: Analyzing More than One Million Survey Respondents from 1948 to 2020.” Roper Center for Public Opinion Research. http://doi.org/10.25940/ROPER-31120311.Google Scholar
Enns, Peter K., Lagodny, Julius, and Schuldt, Jonathon P.. 2017. “Understanding the 2016 U.S. Presidential Polls: The Importance of Hidden Trump Supporters.” Statistics, Politics and Policy 8 (1): 41–63.Google Scholar
Lagodny, Julius, and Enns, Peter K.. 2023. “U.S. Partisanship and Presidential Approval Dataset.” Roper Center for Public Opinion Research. http://doi.org/10.25940/ROPER-31120311.Google Scholar
Lagodny, Julius, Jones, Rebekah, Koch, Julianna, and Enns, Peter K.. 2023. “A Validation and Extension of State-Level Public Policy Mood: 1956 to 2020.” State Politics and Policy Quarterly 23: 359–372.Google Scholar