Inter-university Consortium For Political And Social Research Research Articles

A Review: Preelection Survey Methodology: Details From Eight Polling Organizations, 1988 and 1992

D. STEPHEN voss is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Government of Harvard University. ANDREW GELMAN is assistant professor in the Department of Statistics in the University of California, Berkeley. GARY KING is professor in the Department of Government of Harvard University. They thank the following individuals for their openness and detailed assistance: David K. Krane and Robert Spanski of Louis Harris and Associates; Martin Frankel, a consultant for Louis Harris and statistian at Baruch College; Kathleen Frankovic, Bala Ramnath, and Marla Kaye of CBS; Sharon Warden of the Washington Post; Kristen Conrad of Chilton Research; Dale Kulp and Amy Starer of Marketing Systems Group, responsible for the GENESYS Sampling System; Steve Shaw of Media General; Kathy Walenczyk and Linda Piekarski of Survey Sampling, Inc.; Dan Soulas of ICR Survey Research Group; Bums W. Roper, Peter Case, and Brad Fay of the Roper Organization; Hal Quinley of Yankelovich; Jeff Alderman of ABC; Shari Weber of Gallup; and especially Gallup's Jack Ludwig, who weathered the inherent inefficiency of a trial run. They also thank Mark Lew and Cassie Hartzog for programming assistance; Bradley Palmquist, Dale Kulp, Roger Purves, Bob Groves, and anonymous reviewers for comments and corrections; and the National Science Foundation for grants SBR-9223637 (to Gelman and King), DMS-9457824 (to Gelman), and SBR-932121 (to King). Gary King also thanks the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for a fellowship during which time this research was completed. E-mail addresses are Voss, dsvoss@isr.harvard.edu; Gelman, gelman@stat.berkeley.edu; King, gking@harvard.edu. 1. Most of these data are available through the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) or the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research.

An Integrated Network Interface Between the Researcher and Social Science Data Resources: In Search of a Practical Vision

It is clear that major data archives such as the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) must soon be able to offer a wide range of services over the Internet. This paper suggests that ICPSR should attempt to provide a full range of integrated network services to the data librarian and to the individual researcher, permitting substantive searches, perusal of documentation, extracts from data, data analyses, and receipt of data within the context of a simple and friendly desktop environment. A set of principles for such a service are suggested in the hopes that the data librarian, computer science, and research communities will discuss them and aid ICPSR in reaching sound decisions. Key to these principles is that the service must be standards-based rather than based on proprietary or unique software. Keywords: telecommunications, social science, networks, Internet, data access, social science research.

The Social and Political Participation of Black Americans: Compensatory and Ethnic Community Perspectives Revisited

Two competing approaches to the study of black social and political participation - the compensatory and ethnic community perspectives - have dominated attempts to explain the relatively high levels of collective involvement within the black population. One of the main limitations of research in this area has been its weak treatment of the meaning and measurement of compensatory theory. The erroneous belief that blacks had disproportionately low self-esteem was widely held at the time that this theory was developed. Therefore, unlike most previous researchers, we use a measure of low selfesteem to operationalize compensatory behavior. In contrast to the equivocal findings of several previous studies, our results are clear: the ethnic community approach receives strong support, while the compensatory approach finds virtually no support. For at least four decades, social scientists have analyzed racial differences in social and political participation. This literature had generally concluded that blacks engage in higher levels of formal and informal social and political activity than whites when the effects of socioeconomic status and other key demographic attributes are held constant.' A number of studies in the 1970s and 1980s attempted to identify those factors contributing to the relatively high levels of collective involvement within the black population. Two competing approaches to the study of black participation - the compensatory and ethnic community perspectives - have doninated the contemporary literature.2 From *Portions of this study werepresented at the 1990 meetings of the Eastern Sociological Society, Boston. We would like to thank Darren Sherkat and several anonymous reviewersfor helpful comments on earlier drafts. The assistance of Elizabeth Wing in the preparation of the tables is gratefully acknowledged. Datafor this study were made available through the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), Ann Arbor. The authors alone are responsiblefor the analyses and interpretations presented here. The authors names are listed in alphabetical order; all work was equally shared. Direct correspondence to Christopher

Southern Primary and Electoral Competition and Incumbent Success

A survey of primary and general elections in the lower houses of 11 southern and border states (1968-1986) shows that there is a very high rate of renomination and reelection for those incumbents who run and that a substantial proportion are unopposed in the primary, the general election, or both. Those running in multimember free-for-all districts are more likely to have some opposition than those in single-member or multimember position districts. There has been an increase over the 20-year period in the proportion of incumbents who are unopposed in one or both elections. Although Republican incumbents are more likely than Democrats to have general election opposition, there has been a surprisingly large increase over time in the proportion of Republican incumbents reelected without opposition. This is a study of the success of incumbent representatives in southern and border state legislatures in winning renomination, winning reelection, and winning without opposition. It includes primaries and general elections in 11 states for which adequate primary data are available from the dataset compiled by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR).

Stability and Change in the U.S. Public's Knowledge of Politics

The U.S. public's current knowledge about politics is compared with levels of knowlege in the 1940s and 1950s. Fourteen questions asked by Gallup on various surveys from 1945 to 1957 were included on a larger survey of political knowledge conducted by telephone in 1989 with a randomly selected sample of 610 adult U.S. residents. On 8 of the 14 items, the percentage answering correctly in 1989 was higher than in the earlier surveys (by 4-15 points). One item showed an increase of 1 percent, two were down 1 percent, and three others declined by 5 percent, 9 percent, and 10 percent. When level of education is controlled, however, levels of knowledge appear to have declined for most of the items. A reanalysis of some of the original Gallup data is used to estimate the effectiveness of schools in transmitting political information in 1989 compared with the earlier years. An informed citizenry is an implicit requisite for any theory of democracy. However, public opinion surveys of the 1940s and 1950s consistently demonstrated the average citizen's limited knowledge concerning public affairs and the basic workings of parties, politics, and government (Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee 1954; Campbell et al. 1960; Converse 1962, 1964; Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet 1944). In 1962 and 1963 Erskine published four articles in Public Opinion Quarterly cataloging how informed the American citizenry was on a host of political and public concerns (Erskine 1962, 1963a, 1963b, MICHAEL X. DELLI CARPINI is assistant professor of political science at Barnard College, Columbia University. SCOTT KEETER is associate professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University. This research was supported by grants from Virginia Commonwealth University and Barnard College and by the Virginia Commonwealth University Survey Research Laboratory. Some of the data were made available through the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) and the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research. Neither ICPSR nor the Roper Center is responsible for the analyses and interpretations presented here. We wish to thank Stephen Earl Bennett and the anonymous referees for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. Public Opinion Quarterly Volume 55 583-612 C 1991 by the American Association for Public Opinion Research All rights reserved 0033-362X/91/5504-0002$02.50 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.25 on Mon, 12 Sep 2016 04:27:47 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 584 Michael X. Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter 1963c). The articles brought together national survey questions asked from 1947 through 1962. Since the late 1950s the number and range of political knowledge questions asked on national surveys have declined precipitously. Using a national telephone survey, we have replicated several of the items reported by Erskine to document what, if any, changes have occurred in the U.S. public's political knowledge. First we summarize extant research on political knowledge, pointing out its conclusions as well as the shortcomings that result from a relative lack of current data. Next we discuss the design and validity of our survey and examine the willingness of respondents to complete a survey devoted mainly to a test of political knowledge. We then turn to the Gallup polls used in our comparisons, explaining adjustments that are necessary due to sampling bias. We follow with a comparison of marginals for 14 knowledge questions. Finally, we explore the changes in political knowledge (and lack thereof) in light of societal changes in educational achievement.

Private Materialism, Personal Self-Fulfillment, Family Life, and Public Interest: The Nature, Effects, and Causes of Recent Changes in the Values of American Youth

Private Materialism, Personal Self-Fulfillment, Family Life, and Public Interest: The Nature, Effects, and Causes of Recent Changes in the Values of American Youth

Microcomputer‐based Access to Machine‐readable Numeric Databases

The Data and Program Library Service (DPLS) supports the research needs of the faculty, staff, and students of the University of Wisconsin‐Madison. Although our primary charge is to the College of Letters and Science, we serve the entire university. DPLS is primarily a data archive of numerical databases for secondary analysis, but we are also the local official representative of the Inter‐university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR).

Machine-readable data files: Statistics on crime and criminal justice

This paper provides an overview of the major sources of government-produced machine-readable primary data on crime and criminal justice. Primary among these is the Criminal Justice Archives and Information Network (CJAIN), maintained by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), the major national repository of primary data. Other sources include the National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS); the bibliographic data base maintained by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS); the Criminal Justice Periodic Index, produced by University Microfilms International and available through DIALOG; and the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research. The paper describes the holdings of each data source and provides necessary information on obtaining access.

A new process for documenting and checking archival data

The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) is a data archive and repository for social science data. A major function of the ICPSR is to disseminate the data holdings in a reasonably standard format. For holdings that will be extensively used, additional effort is made to prepare comprehensive, machine-readable documentation, to cross-check the documentation against the data for accuracy and consistency, and to correct or document any inconsistencies discovered.In the past, "cleaning" and documenting the data involved using a number of different computer programs. A great deal of human time was expended on procedural matters: which programs to use, when to use them, and how to coordinate the various stages of the cleaning process. As staff costs and the number of new acquisitions skyrocketed, and computers increased in power and decreased in cost, it became imperative to automate as much as possible the procedure for preparing data for distribution. The GIDO software was developed to meet this need.GIDO is an interactive multi-function program package that guides staff members through the procedure for documenting and cleaning social science data. A cohesive history of the processing operations performed on the data is maintained automatically in machine-readable form. Video terminals are used to display "forms" which the staff fill out with the textual and technical documentation for the data. GIDO immediately verifies the contents of each form and provides an opportunity to make corrections. The forms allow the input of information without requiring knowledge of specialized syntax and conventions. After all documentary materials have been entered, GIDO checks the data for consistency with the original documentation, corrects or flags discrepancies encountered, reformats the data using uniform conventions, and produces machine-readable documentation in a form ready for dissemination.Use of GIDO enables the ICPSR archive to perform its data processing functions more efficiently and at lower cost, thus permitting the organization to meet ever-increasing demands on its resources.