Grants

Currently, CONSIRT co-manages three major grants:

1. The project Survey Data Recycling: New Analytic Framework, Integrated Database, and Tools for Cross-national Social, Behavioral and Economic Research (SDR) was awarded a 4-year grant of 1,402,259 USD by the US National Science Foundation (2017-2021; PTE Federal award 1738502). Highlights of the SDR project include:

  • Individual-level harmonized measures of social capital, wellbeing, and political participation, and their main socio-demographic correlates derived from 24 international survey projects (over 3,000 national surveys) covering 3.5 million respondents in ca. 150 countries since 1966;
  • Metadata on source data quality and harmonization procedures;
  • Macro country-year measures of demographic, political, and economic variables;
  • Website interface for customized downloading, on-line analysis, and visualization;
  • Detailed documentation of the harmonization process, including computer code and guidelines for harmonizing survey variables of different kinds, for further expansion of the database.

For more on SDR, see the project website, DataHarmonization.org.

2. The project Multidimensional Biographies and Social Structure: Poland 1988-2018 (POLPAN 2018), received a 3-year grant (2018-2021) of ca. 360,000 USD from the Polish National Science Centre to collect the 7th round of the Polish Panel Survey POLPAN, and to produce new substantive and methodological research (polpan.org). Substantively, POLPAN 1988-2018 will address fundamental research questions in the social sciences:

  • How do intellectual and social resources impact individuals’ economic, political and cultural biographies?
  • How do these biographies shape the social structure through time?

Methodologically, the project will contribute novel information on optimal statistical techniques for analyzing longitudinal data and how to assess the quality of such data. POLPAN 1988-2018 offers the unique opportunity to assess the extent of within-person variation (i.e., change within people over time) in relation to the between-persons variation (i.e., differences between people over time) for a period spanning up to 30 years.

POLPAN 1988-2018 provides the necessary dynamic framework to properly understand the functioning of social structure – that is, how individuals influence social structure while being influenced by it. Collaboration networks stemming from CONSIRT’s long term involvement in carrying out POLPAN’s consecutive waves will be vital for the successful completion of this project.

For more on POLPAN, see the project website polpan.org

3. The project Political Voice and Economic Inequality across Nations and Time was awarded a multi-year grant (2017-2020) of ca. 210,000 USD by Poland’s National Science Centre. The purpose of the project is to advance the theory, methods, and empirical base for studying the dynamic relationship between political voice inequality and economic inequality. The core research questions are:

  • How and to what extent are the main components of political voice inequality related to each other once main features of political and economic institutions are accounted for?
  • At the macro-level, how and to what extent do political voice inequality and economic inequality influence each other?

This project will create the Political Inequality Database (POLINQ) with different measures of inequality of political voice constructed from harmonized survey and non-survey data for over 65 democratic countries from 1990 to 2015. With the organizational capacity and networks of CONSIRT, the project builds an international research team and an innovative infrastructure that relies on physical and virtual platforms to enable young and established scholars to produce high quality research and training products.

For more on political inequality, visit the project website, PoliticalInequality.org.

CONSIRT recently completed the following grants:

2012 – 2016 Democratic Values and Protest Behavior: Data Harmonization, Measurement Comparability, and Multi-level Modeling in Cross-National Perspective (Harmonization Project). This grant was awarded by Poland’s National Science Centre specifically for collaboration with the OSU Mershon Center for International Security Studies (grant no. 2012/06/M/HS6/00322; ca. 170,000 USD). The HCM database (cf. section Databases, p. 9) and corresponding documentation, available for free via Harvard’s Dataverse, are among the main outcomes of the Harmonization Project.

2013 – 2016 Who Wins and Who Loses in Parliamentarian Elections? From Formal Theory to Empirical Analysis was funded by Poland’s National Science Centre (ca. 100,000 USD; Sonata Bis grant no. 2012/05/E/HS6/03556) and involved resources for international cooperation, including the participation of OSU faculty, graduate students and alumni in workshops and joint research. Among its products is the East European Parliamentarian and Candidate dataset (EAST PaC). EAST PaC 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). EAST PaC data, covering altogether three countries, 29 years, 23 elections, and 97,439 unique candidates, are freely and publicly available from Poland’s Social Data Archive.

2012 – 2016 Social Structure and Mobility: Polish Panel Survey, 1988-2013 was funded by Poland’s National Science Centre  and involved adding the 6th wave to the Polish Panel Survey POLPAN (grant no. 2011/02/A/HS6/00238; ca. 640,000 USD). POLPAN is the longest continuously run panel survey in Central and Eastern Europe that focuses on changes in social structure with individuals as the units of observation. This dataset offers the unique opportunity to assess the extent of within-person variation (i.e., change within people over time) in relation to the between-persons variation (i.e., differences between people over time) for a period spanning 25 years. Thus, it provides the necessary dynamic framework to properly understand the functioning of social structure – that is, how individuals influence social structure while being influenced by it. It had funds for international cooperation, including for participation of OSU faculty, graduate students and alumni in workshops and joint projects (polpan.org).

The CONSIRT network of faculty at OSU and IFiS PAN, and at other institutions around the world, obtained funding from the (US) National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, the American Council of Learned Societies, IREX, the Research Council of Norway, and Polish institutions: the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, the Committee for Scientific Research, and Poland’s National Science Centre. The OSU Mershon Center for International Security Studies, the OSU College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and the Polish Academy of Sciences have also supported CONSIRT projects. CONSIRT will continue to seek financial support, including at its founding institutions.