The 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study

In 2006 Polimetrix, Inc. of Palo Alto, CA. fielded the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, the largest study of Congressional elections ever fielded in the US. The project was a joint venture of 38 universities and over 100 political scientists. In this paper, we detail the design and execution of the project, with special attention to the method by which the sample was generated. We show that the estimates from the Common Content of CCES outperform conventional estimates based on RDD phone surveys. We also argue that opt-in panels, internet surveys, and cooperative ventures like CCES provide cost-effective alternatives for social scientists under certain conditions. These types of surveys can provide reductions in RMSE over conventional methods when sample matching is used to ameliorate the biases that come with sampling from an opt-in panel.