Welcome to the Online Commons for the 2008 ANES Time Series study! The heart of the ANES is its presidential year time series, of which this study will be the latest installment.

The time series legacy is well known, having generated thousands of publications and serving as a model for election studies around the world. The study will consist of two face-to-face surveys with a nationally representative sample of the American electorate. One survey will be administered in the weeks before the United States presidential election in November 2008, and another survey afterwards with the same respondents. Data collection will be conducted by RTI International.

The following documents are available to help in preparing content proposals for the 2008 ANES Time Series study. The same documents are linked to in the header of the Online Commons main page, under the title "2008 ANES Time Series Study". We encourage your participation, either as a proposal author or through posting helpful comments about the proposals of others.

• "Overview" is the document you are currently reading.



• "Study Description" is a memorandum from the ANES Principal Investigators that describes the 2008 ANES Time Series study, how to propose content for the study using the Online Commons, and the criteria for evaluating content proposals.



• "Calendar and Deadlines" lists important deadlines for Online Commons submissions, comments, and resubmissions for the 2008 ANES Time Series study.



• The "2008 Default Core Utility" is a web-based tool that is intended to help users consider suggestions for additions or deletions to the ANES Core. In absence of suggestions from users, the core content for the 2008 study will be the rows marked with two red asterisks (**) in the utility. The page is quite large, and takes a little time to load. For help using the utility, select the "help" button at the top of the utility once it has loaded.



• The 2008 Default Core Utility includes only questions from the 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004 presidential election studies; to look at older questions, please refer to the past lists of Questions Asked in ANES Surveys.



• The "Bonus Minutes program" describes an alternate way to add content to the survey, through the purchase of survey minutes at a rate that allows the creation of additional public goods.

For a general introduction to the Online Commons, visit our Online Commons overview page. More specific information can be found in the links in the header of the Online Commons main page, under the titles "General Documentation" and "Things You Can Do". If you have any questions or comments that are not answered there, please contact us by email to "anes@electionstudies.org".

We look forward to your participation!