A sample of respondents from the 1986 NES Post Study was selected for the 1987 pilot study, which was carried out, via telephone interviews,in two waves. Wave I (May 5 to May 30) encompassed 457 interviews, and Wave II (June 2 to July 2) obtained 360 reinterviews. Each wave used two questionnaires, Form A and Form B, administered to different half-samples (randomly assigned). The sample was drawn form 1986 form A respondents who had provided a telephone number for recontact. The sample was stratified on political information. The sampling fraction for the stratum was proportional to predicted response rate.

New measures of system support, foreign policy predispositions, and morality; roles of U.S. Senators and Representatives. EXPERIMENTS: Location of feeling thermometer on the questionnaire: beginning versus the end of the questionnaire; this experiment has a test/retest component. Trust in government items: asked with agree/disagree format and with standard NES format, i.e., "how much/how many." Experiment in priming: preceding a Reagan approval question with anti-Reagan primes, (e.g., questions about budget deficit) versus preceding the approval item with pro-Reagan primes (e.g. items reminding Rs about tax cut and lower inflation). Two series of questions about what R thought were proper responsibilities of Senators and Representatives were asked widely separated in Wave 1 and adjacent to each other in Wave 2. The order of a series of items about how U.S. should respond to "terrorist acts" was reversed for half the sample. Experiments with making survey response more stable and reliable: Asking R to "stop and think" before responding to a question about an issue; versus asking "what did you have in mind when you answered that question" after the response is given (with test/retest). Experiment with ways to reduce misreport of turnout: preceding traditional NES vote question with a request for the respondent to report on turnout in the three elections preceding the last one versus simply asking the traditional NES vote question for the most recent election. "Forced choice" partisan identification versus standard NES party ID: the difference amounts to leaving out the response option "an independent" when the question is read. Asking R about "welfare recipients" or "welfare programs" as opposed to "the poor" or "programs to assist the poor". Reading the liberal-conservative and party ID questions with a filter: "or don't you think of yourself that way" versus reading the questions without this filter. Asking R's opinion on several standard issue questions with and without the filter "or haven't you thought much about this?"

Special Content: New measures of system support, foreign policy predispositions, and morality; roles of U.S. Senators and Representatives. A significant portion of the survey was devoted to experiments in the survey response, including reported vote.

Design Features: A sample of respondents from the 1986 NES Pre-Post Study was selected for the 1987 pilot study, which was carried out, via telephone interviews, in two waves. Wave I (May 5 to May 30) encompassed 457 interviews, and Wave II (June 2 to July 2) obtained 360 reinterviews. Each wave used two questionnaires, Form A and Form B, administered to different half-samples (randomly assigned). The sample was drawn form 1986 form A respondents who had provided a telephone number for recontact. The sample was stratified on political information. The sampling fraction for the stratum was proportional to predicted response rate.