Vox populi, vox dei: A concept and measure for grassroots socio-political risk using Google Trends

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a concept of grassroots socio-political risk (SPR) and provide a measure for it that is based on individual-level Google Trends data that captures issue salience. Our concept provides a bottom-up complement to established measures that focus more on political and institutional players and the institutional constraints they face. Our grassroots SPR index attempts to capture public pressure to initiate institutional change in a country. In contrast to existing measures, our Google Trends–based measure captures issue salience directly among individuals rather than media or analyst reports. As such, it is uniquely representative of socio-political sentiment, timely, and widely available. Our concept and measure offer international business (IB) researchers novel opportunities. In addition to developing the index, we scrutinize its validity and provide an illustrative empirical application in the IB context by showing that differences between internal and external assessments of grassroots SPR are contingent on psychic distance.