Databases

CONSIRT deals extensively with data relevant for cross-national and longitudinal studies. This involves both reprocessing extant survey and non-survey data into new databases, and new data collection. Below are last years’ contributions.

Our flagships for creating integrated databases using existing information are the SDR Project and the Harmonization Project. Substantively, these studies tap into the wide interest that scholars and policy makers have in the relations between social capital and wellbeing, social capital and political participation, and democracy and political participation. Methodologically, they build on the observation that social scientists have free, public access to a wealth of international survey projects, yet they encounter difficulties in doing comparative analyses because most of the data are restricted to a particular area of the world and to given time periods. The data are often not comparable or even sufficiently documented.

The publicly available SDR database version 1.1[1] contains harmonized individual-level measures of political behavior, social attitudes, and demographics, control variables for the quality of the source data and for harmonization procedures, and economic, social and political macro indicators. It is a relational database whose core is the MASTER file with harmonized survey data pooled from 22 international projects. Additional PLUG-files (tables) contain information describing the survey process and source data quality, and contextual data from publicly available sources (e.g., GDP). Files link to each other via key variables in the form of one-to-many merges (Powałko and Kołczyńska 2016).[2] 

The SDR database version 2.0 has a broader scope, to provide individual-level harmonized measures of social capital, wellbeing, and political participation, main socio-demographic correlates, together with metadata as variables describing both source data quality and harmonization procedures. It is derived from 3,486 national surveys from 23 international studies, including the World Values Survey, the International Social Survey Programme, the European Social Survey, and Eurobarometer and its regional editions, among others. Harmonized information will be available for more than 4 million people interviewed in ca. 145 countries and different years since 1966. Demographic, political, and economic macro variables for all country-years will complement the individual-level measures. For more information, see: asc.ohio-state.edu/dataharmonization/data.

CONSIRT provides access to unique datasets on political elites in countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The East European Parliamentarian and Candidate Data (EAST PaC), collected during a recent Poland NCN grant, contains the near universe of candidates who ran for the national legislature in Poland, Hungary, and Ukraine and spans the 1990s to the 2010s (the Polish data go back to 1985). The data cover altogether three countries, 29 years, 23 elections, and 97,439 unique candidates. The structure of EAST PaC is similar to that of panel data. Data are matched over time, meaning that the same candidate can be identified whenever they appear across successive elections. For details, see electoralcontrol.org. EAST PaC is freely and publicly available from Poland’s  Social Data Archive.

The Political Inequality Database (POLINQ) is being constructed within the project Political Voice and Economic Inequality across Nations and Time (funded by the National Science Centre of Poland). POLINQ combines two types of data. The first are survey data containing individual-level indicators of political participation and support for political parties. They feature substantial coverage of varying types of modern democratic countries to provide variation in the degree of institutional efficiency and measurement points (i.e. national survey years) in order to gauge social and political change since the 1990s. The second type contains theoretically-informed characteristics of countries from sources such as the Standardized World Income Inequality Database.

The Polish Panel Survey, POLPAN 1988–2018, belongs to CONSIRT’s flagship projects. POLPAN is conducted every five years since 1988 with adult residents of Poland, using face-to-face PAPI interviews. The initial survey, run during State Socialism, had a national sample of 5,817 Poles aged 21–65 years. In 1993, this sample was randomly reduced to 2,500 individuals, of whom 2,259 were successfully interviewed. In the consecutive five-year waves the goal has been to both reach the core panel, and to ensure an adequate age balance, via additional subsamples involving young cohorts. Data collection for POLPAN 2018 was recently completed.

POLPAN data are available free of costs from the project administrators (polpan.org), GESIS, or the Polish Social Data Archive. We use the integrated POLPAN dataset to train students in designing and analyzing longitudinal panel data.

[1] Slomczynski, K. M., J. C. Jenkins, I. Tomescu-Dubrow,  M. Kołczyńska,  I. Wysmułek,  O. Oleksiyenko,  P. Powałko,  and M. W. Zieliński. 2017. SDR Master Box, doi:10.7910/DVN/VWGF5Q, Harvard Dataverse, V1.

[2] Powałko, P. and M. Kołczyńska. 2016. “Working with data in the cross‐National Survey Harmonization Project: outline of programming decisions.” International Journal of Sociology 46(1): 73–80. doi: 10.1080/00207659.2016.1130433.