ANN ARBOR—More Americans than ever before believe that public officials don’t care what other people think. According to the National Election Studies (NES) at the University of Michigan, two out of three Americans feel this way.

This is but one example of the wealth of information included in the NES Guide to Public Opinion and Electoral Behavior, which is now available free, on-line, via the NES World Wide Web site. The guide, available to journalists, policy-makers and scholars, provides immediate access to tables and graphs that display the “ebb and flow of public opinion and electoral behavior and choice in American politics over the past half-century,” says Steven Rosenstone, NES principal investigator and U-M professor of political science. Visitors to the NES Web site can display responses to more than 100 questions asked of representative samples of the American electorate since 1952. Topics include: –

• Social and religious characteristics of the electorate

• Partisanship and evaluation of the political parties.

• Ideological self-identification.

• Public opinion on public policy issues (health care, affirmative action, abortion, military spending, evaluations of the economy).

? Support for the political system (trust in government, government responsiveness).

• Political involvement and participation in politics (voter turnout, campaign contributions and other activities, attention to a campaign in the media, interest in politics).

? Evaluation of presidential and congressional candidates. Information in the guide also can be broken out separately for sub-groups of the electorate (age, gender, race, education, income, occupation, union/non-union household, region, partisanship, ideology).

In addition, tables and graphs, which are in the public domain and can be freely re-distributed, may be printed and/or down-loaded to users’ desktops.

For more information, visit the NES Web site or contact the NES project staff at [email protected] or (313) 764-5494. The NES is a National Science Foundation-designated national resource in the social sciences, and is located at the Center for Political Studies at the U-M Institute for Social Research.

National Science FoundationInstitute for Social ResearchU-M News and Information ServicesUniversity of Michigan