Stephen Ansolabehere

About

Stephen Ansolabehere is the Frank G. Thompson Professor of Government at Harvard University. He is an expert in public opinion and elections, with extensive publications on elections, mass media, representation, political economy, and public opinion, particularly in relation to energy and the environment. He has authored five books: Cheap and Clean, The Media Game, Going Negative, American Government, and The End of Inequality. Ansolabehere has been recognized as a Carnegie Scholar in 2000, a Hoover National Fellow in 1994, and a Truman Scholar in 1982. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007. He directed the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project from its founding in 2000 through 2004 and serves on the Board of Overseers of the Reuters Institute of Journalism at Oxford University. Additionally, he consults for CBS News Election Decision Desk. At Harvard, he is the director of the Center for American Political Studies and the principal investigator of the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, a collaborative project involving over 60 universities and colleges in the United States.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Economics
• Artificial Intelligence
• Data Mining
• Business
• Law
• Public economics
• Natural Language Processing

Selected publications

• Cooperative Election Study Common Content, 2020

  Harvard Dataverse · 2021-03-22 · 92 citations

  datasetOpen access

  This is the final release of the 2020 CES Common Content Dataset. The data includes a nationally representative sample of 61,000 American adults. This release includes the data from the survey, a full guide to the data, and the questionnaires. The dataset includes vote validation performed by Catalist. Please consult the guide and the study website (https://cces.gov.harvard.edu/frequently-asked-questions) if you have questions about the study. Special thanks to Marissa Shih and Rebecca Phillips…

  PublisherDOI

• Congressional Representation: Accountability from the Constituent's Perspective

  American Journal of Political Science · 2021 · 87 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The premise that constituents hold representatives accountable for their legislative decisions undergirds political theories of democracy and legal theories of statutory interpretation. But studies of this at the individual level are rare, examine only a handful of issues, and arrive at mixed results. We provide an extensive assessment of issue accountability at the individual level. We trace the congressional roll‐call votes on 44 bills across seven Congresses (2006–18), and link them…

  PublisherDOI

• Proximity, NIMBYism, and Public Support for Energy Infrastructure

  Public Opinion Quarterly · 2020 · 36 citations

  Abstract The public opinion literature examining the role of proximity and not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) attitudes in people’s judgments about energy projects has come to inconclusive findings. We argue that these mixed results are due to vast differences and significant limitations in research designs, which we mitigate through a large study (n = 16,200) of Americans’ attitudes toward energy projects. Our approach examines a diverse set of energy projects in development, explicitly compares the at…

  DOI

• Cooperative Election Study Common Content, 2022

  Harvard Dataverse · 2023-03-20 · 28 citations

  datasetOpen access

  This is the final release of the 2022 CES Common Content Dataset. The data includes a nationally representative sample of 60,000 American adults. This release includes the data from the survey, a full guide to the data, and the questionnaires. The dataset includes vote validation performed by TargetSmart. Please consult the guide and the study website (https://cces.gov.harvard.edu/frequently-asked-questions) if you have questions about the study.

  PublisherDOI

• The Current Population Survey Voting and Registration Supplement Overstates Minority Turnout

  The Journal of Politics · 2021-09-20 · 26 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The Current Population Survey (CPS) is a key source of information on who votes. Turnout estimates derived from the CPS are often cited in academic research on participation, widely used in the calibration of surveys, and central to ongoing legal and policy debates over the protection of voting rights in the United States. We compare CPS estimates to official voter turnout records from 2008–18 and document consistent, significant discrepancies that call into question the reliability of CPS turno…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• CCES, 2012 Panel Study

  NSF · $510k · 2012–2015

• 2018 CSES

  NSF · $845k · 2018–2020

Frequent coauthors

• Jonathan Rodden

  Stanford University

  360 shared

• James M. Snyder

  74 shared

• Brian Schaffner

  Tufts University

  67 shared

• Erik Snowberg

  University of Utah

  33 shared

• Shiro Kuriwaki

  Yale University

  21 shared

• Shanto Iyengar

  Stanford University

  20 shared

• Gary King

  Harvard University Press

  18 shared

• David M. Konisky

  Indiana University Bloomington

  17 shared

Awards & honors

• Carnegie Scholar (2000)
• Hoover National Fellow (1994)
• Truman Scholar (1982)
• inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (200…

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