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Whether respondents approve of the way the U.S. Congress is handling its job; ANES uses a binary approve/disapprove scale while CES uses a four-point strength scale, which can be collapsed to approve/disapprove.
AI-matched An AI model grouped these questions and mapped their answers onto shared categories, and a second AI review checked and corrected the grouping and mapping. No person has checked it: compare the question wordings and the answer mapping below before reading the lines against each other.
Latest: 18% answered “Approve” in ANES, 2024.
Dashed lines mark changes in how interviews were done, which can shift answers: 1. ANES → mixed mode (2012).
Shares of people whose answer maps onto these categories (non-answers and answers outside the scale are left out), because surveys differ in whether they offer “don’t know.” Each column is one survey wave, evenly spaced rather than to scale in time; hover for exact shares.
Dashed lines mark changes in how interviews were done, which can shift answers: 1. ANES → mixed mode (2012).
Shares of people whose answer maps onto these categories (non-answers and answers outside the scale are left out), because surveys differ in whether they offer “don’t know.” Each point is one survey wave at the middle of its field period. Lines from different surveys are never spliced together.
Groups differ from everyone by 5 points on average across all answers, in ANES.
| Line | Question | Match | How answers map |
|---|---|---|---|
| ANES | Approval of Congress's job performance Do you approve or disapprove of the way the U.S. Congress has been handling its job? Caveat: Binary scale with no strength of approval; this is the reference wording. | identical | Approve → Approve; Disapprove → Disapprove |
| CES: Approval of Congress's job performance | Approval of Congress's job performance Do you approve or disapprove of the way each is doing their job... [The U.S. Congress] Caveat: Four-point strength scale collapsed to binary; strength is lost. | equivalent | Strongly approve → Approve; Somewhat approve → Approve; Somewhat disapprove → Disapprove; Strongly disapprove → Disapprove |
| CES: Approval of the U.S. Congress | Approval of the U.S. Congress Do you approve of the way each is doing their job... [The U.S. Congress] Caveat: Four-point strength scale collapsed to binary; strength is lost. | equivalent | Strongly approve → Approve; Somewhat approve → Approve; Somewhat disapprove → Disapprove; Strongly disapprove → Disapprove |
| CES: Approval of the U.S. Congress | Approval of the U.S. Congress Do you approve of the way each is doing their job? [The U.S. Congress] Caveat: Four-point strength scale collapsed to binary; strength is lost. | equivalent | Strongly approve → Approve; Somewhat approve → Approve; Somewhat disapprove → Disapprove; Strongly disapprove → Disapprove |
| CES: Approval of Congress's job performance | Approval of Congress's job performance |
Dashed lines mark changes in how interviews were done, which can shift answers: 1. ANES → mixed mode (2012).
Groups differ from everyone by 5 points on average across all answers, in ANES.
Dashed lines mark changes in how interviews were done, which can shift answers: 1. ANES → mixed mode (2012).
Subgroup charts are picked automatically. Of every breakdown in the data (party, ideology, age, sex, race, education, income, region, religion, and community type), these two put their groups furthest from everyone’s answers: the gap is averaged across all answer categories and waves, with each group weighted by its share of respondents. Party and ideology count as one choice, so the second chart shows a different kind of split. Groups with an effective sample under 50 in a wave are left out of that wave.
| equivalent |
| Strongly approve → Approve; Somewhat approve → Approve; Somewhat disapprove → Disapprove; Strongly disapprove → Disapprove |