Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-s22k5 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-12T22:34:59.777Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Panel Effects in the American National Election Studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2017

Larry M. Bartels
Larry M. Bartels*
Affiliation:
Princeton University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Parallel panel and fresh cross-section samples in recent National Election Study surveys provide valuable leverage for assessing the magnitude of biases in statistical analyses of survey data due to panel attrition and panel conditioning. My analyses employing a variety of typical regression models suggest that substantial panel biases are likely to be fairly rare in these data, even when panel and cross-section respondents have markedly different characteristics. However, two of the dependent variables considered here—campaign interest and turnout—do appear to be sufficiently sensitive to panel effects to warrant significant discounting or adjustment of panel data. I propose adjustments for panel effects in both cross-sectional and dynamic analyses, based upon variants of the “fractional pooling” (Bartels 1996) and “two-stage auxiliary instrumental variables” (Franklin 1990) methods.

Type
Research Article
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , 1999 , pp. 1 - 20
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 by the Society for Political Methodology 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Achen, Christopher H. 1975. “Mass Political Attitudes and the Survey Response.” American Political Science Review 69: 1218–1223.Google Scholar
Achen, Christopher H. 1983. “Toward Theories of Political Data.” In Political Science: The State of the Discipline, ed. Finifter, Ada W. Washington, DC: American Political Science Association.Google Scholar
Achen, Christopher H. 1986. The Statistical Analysis of Quasi-Experiments. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bartels, Larry M. 1993. “Messages Received: The Political Impact of Media Exposure.” American Political Science Review 87: 267–285.Google Scholar
Bartels, Larry M. 1996. “Pooling Disparate Observations.” American Journal of Political Science 40: 905–942.Google Scholar
Bartels, Larry M. 1998. “Partisanship and Voting Behavior, 1952-1996,” Unpublished manuscript. Princeton, NJ: Department of Politics and Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University.Google Scholar
Becketti, Sean, Gould, William, Lillard, Lee, and Welch, Finis. 1988. “The Panel Study of Income Dynamics After Fourteen Years: An Evaluation.” Journal of Labor Economics 6: 423–445.Google Scholar
Berelson, Bernard R., Lazarsfeld, Paul F., and McPhee, William N. 1954. Voting: A Study of Opinion Formation in a Presidential Campaign. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Brehm, John. 1993. The Phantom Respondents: Opinion Surveys and Political Representation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Efron, Bradley, and Gong, Gail. 1983. “A Leisurely Look at the Bootstrap, the Jackknife and Cross-Validation.” American Statistician 37: 36–48.Google Scholar
Finkel, Steven E. 1993. “Reexamining the ‘Minimal Effects’ Model in Recent Presidential Campaigns.” Journal of Politics 55: 1–21.Google Scholar
Franklin, Charles H. 1990. “Estimation Across Data Sets: Two-Stage Auxiliary Instrumental Variables Estimation (2SAIV).” Political Analysis 1: 1–24.Google Scholar
Heckman, James J. 1976. “The Common Structure of Statistical Models of Truncation, Sample Selection, and Limited Dependent Variables and a Simple Estimator for Such Models.” Annals of Economic and Social Measurement 5: 475–92.Google Scholar
Heckman, James J. 1979. “Sample Selection Bias as a Specification Error.” Econometrica 47: 153–161.Google Scholar
Johnston, Richard, Blais, André, Brady, Henry E., and Crête, Jean. 1992. Letting the People Decide: Dynamics of a Canadian Election. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.Google Scholar
Just, Marion R., Crigler, Ann N., Alger, Dean E., Cook, Timothy E., Kern, Mantague, and West, Darrell M. 1996. Crosstalk: Citizens, Candidates, and the Media in a Presidential Campaign. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Lazarsfeld, Paul F., Berelson, Bernard, and Gaudet, Hazel. 1948. The People's Choice. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Markus, Gregory B. 1982. “Political Attitudes During an Election Year: A Report on the 1980 NES Panel Study.” American Political Science Review 76: 538–560.Google Scholar
Miller, R. G. 1974. “The Jackknife: A Review.” Biometrika 61: 1–15.Google Scholar
Mooney, Christopher Z., and Duval, Robert D. 1993. Bootstrapping: A Nonparametric Approach to Statistical Inference. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.Google Scholar
Patterson, Thomas E. 1980. The Mass Media Election: How Americans Choose Their President. New York: Praeger.Google Scholar
Patterson, Thomas E., and McClure, Robert D. 1976. The Unseeing Eye: The Myth of Television Power in National Elections. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.Google Scholar
Traugott, Santa. 1996. “Effects of Panel Attrition and Forms Assignment in the 1995 Pilot Study.” Technical Report 52, The National Election Studies. Ann Arbor: Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan.Google Scholar
Wiley, David E., and Wiley, James A. 1970. “The Estimation of Measurement Error in Panel Data.” American Sociological Review 35: 112–117.Google Scholar
Zaller, John, and Hunt, Mark. 1995. “The Rise and Fall of Candidate Perot: The Outsider Versus the Political System—Part II.” Political Communication 12: 97–123.Google Scholar