If one lesson is learned from the congressional restrictions placed on NSF political science funding in 2013, it should be to appreciate what is here today because it may not be here tomorrow. That includes the NSF-funded American National Election Studies (ANES), an invaluable public good that many scholars likely download without giving much thought to the future of that resource.

Similarly, this volume, edited by John Aldrich and Kathleen McGraw, imparts a deep appreciation for the intense work that produces a “gold standard” survey like the ANES. As Jon Krosnick and Arthur Lupia discuss in their introduction, their tenure as ANES co-principal investigators (2005 to 2009) was influenced by an NSF challenge to “increase the scholarly and social value” (p. 11) of the survey. Their response was to develop a mechanism for scholars across fields to propose new questions for testing in the 2006 pilot study. That mechanism, the Online Commons, yielded numerous proposals that could be publicly vetted. Thirty modules were selected by the ANES Board for inclusion in the study. The reports for seventeen modules, organized into four thematic sections, constitute the substantive core of this volume.

Though the technical reports here are a hodgepodge of subject matters, they all carry the common theme of “innovation.” The authors of each report deserve praise for clearly framing how their proposals might innovate on the traditional core of ANES questions, some by adding new questions and others by altering question wording or response scales to produce improved measures. None is a comprehensive theoretical or empirical examination of its topic area. Some find satisfying empirical support for their suggested innovations, whereas others report null results or incomplete conclusions necessitating further research. To their credit, however, the reports are thorough in testing their hypotheses via various empirical strategies to the extent possible given their data. As most survey researchers know, pretesting novel survey items is often an imprecise task, so the diligence of the contributors in vetting their proposed measures is exemplary.

Section I highlights seemingly non-political predispositions. Adam Berinsky and Howard Lavine propose measures of individual tendency to self-monitor socially undesirable self-disclosures. They superbly illustrate a tactic that might provide additional insight into the quality of respondent reporting. Julia Albarracin and colleagues explore “defensive confidence,” meaning confidence in the ability to defend one’s attitudes. Their analysis offers counter-intuitive findings given the literature on persuasion and motivated reasoning in political science. Two chapters then explore the theory of basic personal values. Shalom Schwartz focuses on political effects of values such as traditionalism, conformity, hedonism, and universalism, whereas Steven Hitlin and Katherine Kramer identify their dimensional structures. These chapters offer a perspective on values that is likely novel to many political scientists and different from traditional ANES values scales. Eric Uslaner proposes generalized trust measures that prove no better than current ANES items, but his analysis is a good illustration of testing item comparability across surveys given limited data.

Section II reports deal with explicitly political dynamics. Joseph Gershtenson and Dennis Plane find mixed results for their alternative political trust measure, though their proposal is an innovative measurement approach on an established ANES item. Danielle Shani tests alternative political interest measures that intriguingly yield better distributions of interest but not improved predictive leverage in models. Scott Althaus and David Tewksbury forcefully advocate for innovating ANES media measures and propose several new items with important effects. Stephen Ansolabehere and colleagues explore variation in sociotropic and “ground level” perceptions of the economy using a novel measure on gas prices. These reports are strong for their rigor in testing new measures and the questions for further research they raise.

Section III focuses on political institutions and groups, testing new angles on old subjects even though the potential of their new measures is not always substantiated. Eric Whitaker and John Fulwider emphasize the social identity aspect of partisanship, but fail to show convincingly that group-centric perceptions translate to observable political effects. Charles Judd and colleagues test an interactive measure of perceived polarization that is most notable for issues it raises about the comparability of face-to-face ANES measures with data collected via other survey modes. Michael Martinez and colleagues propose a subjective ambivalence measure that promises greater measurement efficiency, but captures a different construct than conventional ambivalence measures. The final two chapters test measures of gender attitudes (Kira Sanbonmatsu and Kathleen Dolan) and religiosity (Stephen Mockabee and colleagues) that encourage analysts think about two established literatures in novel ways.

Section IV deals with political issues: abortion, crime, and taxes. L.J. Zigerell and Heather Marie Rice strongly argue that traditional ANES abortion items do not capture how complex and ambivalent abortion attitudes actually are. Though their argument is largely obvious from public opinion polling on this topic, the strength of their chapter is the difference that question formatting yields. The final two reports concern perceptions of police injustice (Ross Matsueda and colleagues) and attitudes toward taxation (Ruben Durante and Louis Putterman), offering interesting angles on two important policy areas.

Unifying this volume is the summary chapter by Krosnick and Lupia. In the most transparent way possible given the venue, they offer their perspectives on the reports in this text and the process that produced them. They also discuss how each chapter influenced the 2008 ANES Time Series and the 2008–2009 ANES Panel Study, clearly illustrating how the technical reports herein led to innovations in subsequent surveys. Their discussion clearly portrays the challenges that ANES principal investigators face in dealing with their user community democratically. Any institution like the ANES must routinely reflect on the process producing its products and the quality of those goods. This is especially true for the ANES given the rise of increasingly popular alternative survey mechanisms. For example, the Cooperative Congressional Election Study and commercial web survey providers give relatively cheap access to national samples and greater control over final survey instruments than the bureaucratic process producing the ANES. Certainly, no competitor rivals the longitudinal wealth of data the ANES provides, but for it to remain the dominant force in academic research on politics it must innovate in ways that keep it accessible, demonstrate its quality, and make it comparable to data collected via other modes (a challenge barely touched in this text).

This volume reflects on both the ANES process and its product, opening up the survey to innovation in a very public fashion. But the dilemma, as Krosnick and Lupia superbly convey, is what then to do with those efforts. The ANES faces cost and space constraints that limit change in its instruments. Including one good new idea from this volume on the next survey necessitates excluding another worthy innovation or cutting an established question with a longer time series in which some segment of the user community is invested. The price of innovation, then, is tough content choices and potential user discontent. Regardless of how it changes, the ANES assuredly will remain a high-quality survey into the future. Political scientists should hope for additional volumes like this documenting how this critical public good innovates for the better.