In a new paper titled “Modeling public opinion over time: A simulation study of latent trend models” and forthcoming in the Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology, Paul Bürkner and Marta Kołczyńska propose a framework for the estimation of trends in mass public opinion based on survey data distinguishing three components: (1) the resonse model, (2) the latent trend model, and (3) representativeness adjustments. The paper focus on the second component, and compares four latent trend models that can be used for estimating trajectories of public opinion: (a) thin-plate splines, (b) Gaussian processes, (c) autoregressive models of order one, and (d) their special case, random walk models.
A new paper titled “The winner takes all the trust: populism, democracy, and winner-loser gaps in political trust in Central and Southern Europe”, published in the Journal of Contemporary European Studies, analyzes the effects of the status of the supported political party (whether it is government leader, junior coalition partner, or in the opposition) and the party’s level of populism, on people’s political trust. From the abstract:
Studies typically find that supporters of populist parties exhibit low political trust.
A new paper, co-authored by Marta Kołczyńska and Ireneusz Sadowski, published in the journal Acta Politica, analyzes the effects of electoral winner or loser status and performance evaluations on political trust in Poland, in the context of increasing political polarization. From the abstract:
Individuals with more favorable evaluations of government performance exhibit higher trust in the political system. People also tend to put more confidence in political institutions led by the party they support or identify with.
A new data note, authored by Marta Kołczyńska and Przemek Powałko, published in the journal Political Research Exchange, presents the Political Parties Crosswalk. From the abstract:
The Political Parties Crosswalk (PPC) maps party codes used in questions about party preferences in European cross-national public opinion surveys to Party Facts IDs, which are commonly used identifiers of parties in political science datasets. The PPC, a data linkage tool, supports research that combines data on party support from surveys with characteristics of parties, and in particular, facilitates research that combines data from different survey projects.
A new paper, authored by Piotr Jabkowski, Piotr Cichocki, and Marta Kołczyńska and titled “Multi-Project Assessments of Sample Quality in Cross-National Surveys: The Role of Weights in Applying External and Internal Measures of Sample Bias”, was published in the Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology. From the abstract:
This paper examines existing methods of evaluating sample quality, showing that their practical utility and applicability to large-scale cross-project comparisons depends on whether they require auxiliary individual-level data.
This github repository contains resources for secondary analysis of data from cross-national survey projects, including ex-post survey data harmonization.
In particular, I collected survey metadata in form of data dictionaries or codebooks, from two major cross-national survey projects: the Eurobarometer and the International Social Survey Programme, which are available here.
A new paper, written by Piotr Jabkowski and Marta Kołczyńska and titled “Sampling and Fieldwork Practices in Europe: Analysis of Methodological Documentation From 1,537 Surveys in Five Cross-National Projects, 1981-2017”, was published in the journal Methodology-European Journal of Research Methods for the Behavioral and Social Sciences. From the abstract:
This article addresses the comparability of sampling and fieldwork with an analysis of methodological data describing 1,537 national surveys from five major comparative cross-national survey projects in Europe carried out in the period from 1981 to 2017.
Availability across projects Availability across countries The first step towards harmonization is to learn which surveys have the necessary items - in this case about trust in different institutions: the government, national parliament, political parties, justice system, police, army, press, TV, and religious institutions.
This information, for 13 cross-national survey projects listed here, from 1939 national surveys from 39 European countries, is provided in this file:
Welcome to the project “Causes and Consequences of Political Trust: Polarization and Democratic Utility of Trust in Cross-national Perspective”.
You can learn more about the project and about the source data.
The project is funded by the National Science Centre under grant number 2019/32/C/HS6/00421.