Recreational Poli Sci

There's a lot to like about Pew

I like Pew. Lots of obvious reasons: lots of samples with interesting, germane questions, free and relative painless downloads, and a reasonable search feature. What spatially-minded political analysts might not know though, is that Pew maintains far more reasonable policies on disclosing respondents’ county of residence than the ANES. Of course, of course, we should protect personally identifiable information for respondents (our response rates are bad enough already). But, ANES’ policy is overboard. According to Jon Krosnick and Skip Lupia’s letter on the matter, “some geographic information is provided on a very limited basis to researchers under our Restricted Data policy,” which makes all kinds of sense for street or zipcode, but county? C’mon, include those delicious fips codes in the open release—what could be the harm? Pew does it for all their samples, you can too. I don’t want to pony up $335 out of my teeny tiny institutional budgets to go on an inductive spatial fishing expedition.