The Globalization of Comparative Public Opinion Research

Abstract

One of the most dramatic recent developments, transforming the field of comparative politics during recent decades, has been the expanding range of survey resources facilitating the systematic cross-national analysis of public opinion around the globe. This process started more than four decades ago, with Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba’s path-breaking The Civic Culture (1963), which was immediately recognized and acclaimed by Philip Converse (1964) as ‘an instant classic’. Previously a few other crossnational attitudinal studies had been deployed, notably William Buchanan and Hadley Cantril’s 9-country How Nations See Each Other (1953), sponsored by UNESCO, sociological surveys of social stratification, and USIA surveys of attitudes towards international affairs.1 The civic culture survey laid the foundation for the comparative study of public opinion and subsequent crossnational survey research as a distinctive subfield in political science open to empirical investigation. To explore the nature and evaluate the contribution of this sub-field, the first part of this chapter examines the globalization of the study of cross-national public opinion over successive decades. The statistical revolution spurred the initial growth in survey research in Europe and the United States, emphasizing individuallevel social-psychological variables and quantitative scientific methods. More recently the rise of the European Union (EU), international networks in the social sciences, the diffusion of the market research industry, and the expanding number of democratic states worldwide have all facilitated the growth and scope of data resources. This chapter compares and contrasts the major series of cross-national social survey datasets which are now available, summarized in Table 28.1, defined as those covering more than one independent nation-state which have established a regular series of surveys of social and political attitudes and behavior. This includes the Euro-barometer and related EU surveys (which started in 1970), the European Election Study (1979), the European Values Survey and the World Values Survey (1981), the International Social Survey Programme (1985), the Global Barometers (1990 and various), the Comparative National Elections Project (1990), the European Voter and the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems