Great news!
Wave 1 of the German Campaign Panel 2017 is now available and waiting to be analyzed by you.
About 18.000 respondents were surveyed online in October and November 2016. It is a long questionnaire (about 25 minutes for the average respondents). It contains several batteries on attitudes towards politicians and political parties, psychological predispositions, values and issue orientations, social networks and media usage. It is the first of many waves to come up to the German federal election in September 2017.
You can download the data here.
The dataset contains respondents from two previous GLES-project which I had described in an earlier blog post:
- Long-term panel of the campaign panel: This is in unplanned but beloved child. The GLES started an online campaign panel in the weeks before the 2009-federal election. When the colleagues were setting up a replication for the 2013-election they discovered that many of the 2009-panelists were still active. So, they decided to recruit them again which is why for >1,000 individuals we can observe with amazing detail individual stability of dynamics not only within an electoral campaigns but also across electoral campaigns (2009-2013). We follow up on that and survey about 5,000 respondents that were active participants of previous campaign panels. Beginning with the second wave, they will be treated like ordinary members of our biggest project, the 2017 campaign panel.
- Campaign panel: Compared to its predecessors, the 2017 campaign panels evolves both in quality and in quantity. This campaign panel starts with a drastically expanded sample size of 15,000 individuals, allowing for very fine-grained analyses of even small subgroups of the electorate (strategic voters, young voters and so on). Second, this time the campaign panel starts long before the actual campaign. The campaign panel aims at better understanding campaign effects. To achieve this we need a benchmark to which stability and dynamics during campaigns is compared.
By any chance, is there an English translation of the survey questions and response options available? It sounds like a useful dataset, but I unfortunately can’t make sense of the variables.
Thanks for your interest!
Yes, the German Election studies is supposed to be a service for the academic community throughout the world. GLES started in 2009 and for all completed surveys you can find english translations of the surveys and of the datasets at http://www.gles.eu.
However, with the campaign panel it´s a little more tricky since this is an ongoing process and we are more or less constantly in the field. One core idea of GLES is to harmonize all components and the campaign panel is just one of them. Several other components will start data collection later, closer to the federal election in fall 2017. That is one reason why it was decided to start the translation when data collection for most components is completed. So, for campaign panel we will not have english translations before 2018.
However, most question we surveyed so far were already surveyed in 2013 or 2009. For these surveys, english translations are available at http://www.gles.eu and http://www.gesis.org/en/elections-home/gles/
If you want to „triangulate“ with these earlier surveys and have any questions, feel free to contact me.
P.S. I always use the google translate tool to upload PDFs to get translations of foreign questionaires. Works pretty well to get a basic idea of the concepts in question.