Core Political Science Databases Research Paper

Data in political science come about through a variety of means. They can be process-produced in an administrative environment like macro- or microcensuses for the purposes of societal self-observation and informed policy formation, they are created by scientists according to (more or less) methodologically sophisticated approaches of questioning individuals or other social units, or they are derived from inobtrusive techniques like content analyses of printed or video material as well as group observations. Information on a particular collection of units of observation or analysis placed in time and space is called a dataset. Correspondingly, databases are general or focused collections of datasets, as held, e.g., by data archives.

2. The Beginnings

In his history of the discipline of political science, Almond (1996) has pointed out that in the context of the professionalization of the field in the twentieth century, already in the first decades the empirical study of political phenomena had blossomed, most noteworthy in the Chicago School which is associated with such eminent scholars like Charles E. Merriam, Harold Gosnell, and Harold D. Lasswell. In this research paper it is emphasized, though, that a major break-through in the theory, methodology, and practice of empirical political science research was accomplished after the end of the Second World War. During the war, many of the later leading figures in the social sciences were employed in a variety of US government or related public and private organizations with the task to find answers to questions of critical military and civilian importance in the war context. One case in point is the series of seminal studies of The American Soldier directed by Samuel A. Stouffer.

The above war context in the long haul also led to the foundation of the Institute for Social Research (ISR) at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor by scholars like Angus Campbell, George Katona, Rensis Likert, and Robert Kahn. In 1952, Campbell and Kahn published a small book on the US presidential election of 1948, and this is worth mentioning on various accounts. First, the first election study by the Michigan Survey Research Center (SRC) was one of the very few if not the only one which got it right in that its data showed Truman’s win over Dewey. It was innovative in that it was national in scope, used a fairly sophisticated method for selecting respondents, applied a pre–post panel design and operated with a majority of standardized, but also some open-ended questions.

This study is singled out not only because it very well reflects the beginning theoretical and methodological innovations in research on political behavior, but also because it paved the way for one of the most demanding ventures in database construction: the American National Election Studies (NES).

Warren E. Miller (1994, pp. 249–50), in his re-capitulation of the NES history, points out that since the outcome of the 1948 presidential election resulted in ‘a public embarrassment to the national community of public opinion pollsters’ (because of their falsely picking Dewey as the winner), the successful Michigan study gained a remarkable public and scholarly visibility, resulting in a grant to the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) which in turn commissioned the Survey Research Center to also conduct a study of the 1952 presidential election. With the intellectual success of this study (Campbell et al. 1954), the ground was prepared for a continuous series of Michigan-based election studies which finally were transferred in 1977 into the format of the national political science research resource of the American National Election Studies (Miller 1994, pp. 260–2) funded by the National Science Foundation.

The intellectual pull of the Michigan school of electoral research was felt not the least by European political scientists who especially in the 1950s and 1960s came to Ann Arbor to learn about the study of elections and about advanced methods in social research. It is because of this connection that in a fair number of European countries national election studies have by now become institutionalized (for a detailed account of this see Thomassen 1994). What makes this development so pertinent for the topic of this research paper is that the Michigan–European interaction helped to prepare the ground for the most important development in creating political science databases: the emergence of academic data archives.

3. Data Archives—A Core Infrastructure For Political Science

There is agreement in the literature that the oldest general-purpose survey data archive in the world is the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research (Bisco 1966, pp. 96–7). It was founded in 1946 at Williams College and is now located at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. While in many ways it has served as an example for other data archives founded later, the impact of the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR; initially ICPR) at the ISR on the development of data archives in Europe has been more pronounced because it could build on an identity of substantive research interests between American and European scholars.

In his recollection of how the ICPR came about, Miller (1989, pp. 152–3) mentions the intersection of two important strands of thought regarding the improvement of political research. The first was the positive impact on the development of at least parts of political science in the US from the Michigan election studies and, more concretely, from two summer seminars held at the SRC in 1954 and 1958 which were sponsored by the SSRC Political Behavior Committee.

‘The attraction of the courses was the ability to analyze the Survey Research Center election surveys with state-of-the-art counter-sorters which were not available at most other campuses.’ (Weisberg 1987, p. 282)

Second, in the interaction between the SRC and Stein Rokkan, one of the great European social scientists and comparativists, the SRC took up ideas from a Rokkan report to the Ford Foundation in 1957 proposing the establishment of survey data archives particularly to stimulate comparative research (Rokkan 1964, p. 1966).

The establishment of the ICPR in 1962 was preceded in time by that of the Zentralarchiv fur Empirische Sozialforschung (ZA) at the University of Cologne, Germany. It was founded in 1960 by Guenther Schmoelders, a professor of public finance, and later directed by Erwin K. Scheuch, a major figure in international cooperation in the social sciences and in comparative research. Both ICPR and ZA were pioneers in academic data archiving and cooperated closely from their early days on. This innovation owed a lot also to the network of the Committee on Political Sociology of the International Political Science Association (IPSA) and of the International Sociological Association (ISA) which brought together scholars like Campbell, Philip E. Converse, Juan Linz, Seymour Martin Lipset, Richard L. Merritt, and Miller from the American and Hans Daalder, Mattei Dogan, S. N. Eisenstadt, Arend Lijphart, Giovanni Sartori, Scheuch, Otto Stammer, and Jerzy J. Wiatr from the European side.

The emergence of academic social science data archives reflects very much the state of empirical political science in the 1950s and 1960s. First, the methodology of social research and particularly survey research had been advanced to a point where it was regarded as a reliable, fruitful way of collecting information on a broad variety of social and political topics found interesting by the research community, but also by social and political elites as well as by the mass media (for example, see Lazarsfeld and Rosenberg 1955, Hyman 1955). However, the time period for which survey studies were then available was still quite short, and therefore one-shot studies, usually of a cross-sectional and not a longitudinal nature, dominated the field. In addition, high-quality surveys were expensive, funding opportunities were limited, and therefore access of the academic com-munity to such information was difficult.

The resulting scarcity of data plus the growing insight that primary investigators were not capable of completely exhausting the analytical potential of a given dataset paved the road for considerations to make data which were often paid for by public money and therefore in principle a collective property avail-able also to other than the primary investigators after those had had their first good shot at data analysis and publication.

A further consideration is also relevant. Often, data collected by primary researchers under a specific conceptual scheme can be reanalyzed under a vastly different scheme and may lead to new insights. Thus, the logic of secondary analysis (Hyman 1972) of existing data was an important addition to the arsenal of empirical political and social research and triggered an increasing demand for such data.

In sum, data archives were the answer to many concerns resulting from the data needs of empirical political science. Thus, it is little wonder that already in 1966 Ralph L. Bisco (1966, p. 93) could speak ‘of a growing movement within the social sciences: the establishment of repositories of social science data.’

4. The Historiographic Dimension Of Longitudinal Data

In one of his many insightful contributions to the social sciences, Paul F. Lazarsfeld [1972 (1964)] put himself into the role of a 1984 historian and asked about the obligations a 1950 pollster has vis-a-vis this historian. One can carry this torch much farther now in observing that especially data from survey research have opened up a new dimension in historic analysis along the lines of social history. With the advent of representative sample surveys of national population or special subgroups in society the potential for the ex post understanding of microphenomena of an attitudinal as well as of a behavioral nature has been vastly enhanced, and examples of excellent historical analysis based on findings from longitudinal sample surveys are increasing in number (see for instance the analysis by Schildt in 1995 on the modernization process in postwar West Germany).

But there is much more to be gained analytically from data which reach back into the past, and this is even more true when the researcher’s interest is in more than one country. In the late 1980s, after heated controversies especially in Europe about the future of democratic government, many political scientists felt that the time had come to take stock of the socio-political changes in the 1960–1990 period in the nations of Western Europe which could be observed among mass publics. Such a stocktaking took place between 1989 and 1994 through the Beliefs in Government project funded by the European Science Foundation (ESF) and directed by Max Kaase and Kenneth Newton (Kaase and Newton 1995; Abramson and Inglehart 1998). Clearly, this project would not have been possible without systematic recourse to existing databases held in European data archives. Still, at the same time a number of shortcomings and weaknesses in the availability, equivalence (van Deth 1998), and quality of the data showed when becoming longitudinal and at the same time comparative in perspective.

Pitfalls in comparative research can be more easily avoided when the data are collected through primary research, like in the ongoing (1999) project on the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) running in 40–50 countries of the world, and in the planned European Social Survey (ESS). This is a Europe-wide extension of the concept of General Social Surveys as developed first by James A. Davis of the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago in 1972 and since then con-ducted almost annually in the US and also, though less frequently, in some European countries. An additional advantage of both surveys will be that they will be amended by systematic macroinformation on political and social arrangements (like the respective electoral laws) in the participating nations, thereby permitting micro–macro (multilevel) analyses.

5. Core Databases In Social Sciences

By the turn of the twentieth century, the initial data scarcity in the social sciences has been replaced by a situation of data richness. There are many reasons for this. With economic growth especially in the OECD countries since the end of the Second World War, the number and/or size of educational institutions has risen dramatically with larger student populations (measured by shares in birth cohorts), and with this also the number of researchers both within and outside of institutions of higher learning. This development has, of course, embraced the social sciences too, and with more research money around the number of academically driven data gathering research projects has increased substantially. Also, a large number of empirical social science studies is regularly conducted on behalf of government agencies, the media, and for private business, often with advice from the academic community. Therefore, quite a few of these data also find their way into academia, and this means mostly through data archives. In addition, new survey re-search methods, and here especially the rise in telephone surveys, has made data production less ex-pensive than in face-to-face interviewing studies. This data richness, however, does not automatically justify the conclusion that these data also satisfy most of the information needs in political science.

A specification of which core databases in political science presently exist has to be taken according to explicit criteria. For the purposes of this research paper, the main selected criteria are emphasis on microdata stemming from representative sample surveys, longitudinality and international scope. In addition, one has to keep in mind that longitudinal national or comparative multipurpose surveys like the General Social Survey (GSS), the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), and the biannual Eurobarometer surveys in the member states of the European Union (EU) as well as the Latinobarometro for South America regularly contain a variable mix of political and nonpolitical items, thereby preventing an un-ambiguous classification as political science surveys. They will, though, be included in the following listing, with the first two entries bearing more emphasis on a national than on an international focus.

5.1 The National Election Studies

For political scientists the most interesting data come from the various national election studies, in particular from the American NES. They aim at the heart of the democratic political process—elections—and are longitudinal in nature. The opportunity to look at the electoral process comparatively is provided by these data to the extent that there are enough at least functionally equivalent questions asked across nations and different institutional and political settings to make an international comparison meaningful at all (for an inventory of election studies in nine European nations see Mochmann et al. 1998).

5.2 The General Social Surveys (GSS) And Other Surveys

As the analyses by Putnam (1998) on the decline of social capital in the United States show, the data from the GSSs can be and are put to an excellent longitudinal use by political scientists. In addition, there are many national datasets, cross-sectional and/or longitudinal, which are relevant for political scientists, but cannot be specified in detail here because of their number and their numerous national specialities.

Moving on from a more national to a distinctly comparative perspective, the following databases are of core interest to political scientists:

5.3 The Eurobarometers, The New Democracies Barometer, And The Latinobarometros

The Eurobarometers are representative sample surveys with usually about 1000 respondents conducted twice a year since 1974 in all countries of the European Union. As the number of EU member countries has grown over the years, so has the number of nations covered by the Eurobarometer. While many of the questions are concerned with special needs of the European Commission, the data contain enough continuous information on politics to make them very attractive for political scientists (for example, see Kaase and Newton 1995). Also, since the demise of communism, similar surveys have been regularly conducted in Central and Eastern Europe (Eurobar-ometer East). All Eurobarometer data are accessible through data archives like ICPSR and ZA.

For research on the transition from communist to democratic rule, it is important to know that in addition to the Eurobarometer East, comparable longitudinal representative sample surveys for 11 Central and East European countries have also been conducted in the context of the New Democracies Barometer organized on behalf of the Austrian Paul F. Lazarsfeld Society. Between 1991 and 1998 five such surveys were fielded (Rose et al. 1998). An extension to 20 countries with surveys in 2000 and 2002 is envisaged. Presently, the data for waves one, two, and three (1991, 1992, 1993–94) and wave five (spring 1998) are freely available through the Austrian data archive Wiener Institut fur Sozialwissenschaftliche Dokumentation und Methodik (WISDOM). Further-more, the Centre for the Study of Public Policy at the University of Strathclyde under the direction of Richard Rose has set up a New Russia Barometer since 1992 with seven surveys until the summer of 1998 and a New Baltic Barometer in the three Baltic states since 1993, with three surveys as of the summer of 1999. For both, a continuation is planned. The data are not yet freely accessible (for other pertinent data on the transition topic see also Sect. 5.5).

A Latinobarometer has been modeled after the Eurobarometer and has been conducted annually since 1995 in countries of Central and Latin America (1995: eight countries; since 1996: 17 countries). The Latinobarometro is anchored at the Centro de Estudios de la Realidad Contemporanea in Santiago, Chile, and directed by Marta Lagos (Lagos 1997). The data of this survey as of now (autumn 1999) are not freely available through an academic data archive.

5.4 The International Social Survey Programme (ISSP)

ISSP originated in 1982 from an American–German collaboration in devoting a small part of their GSSs to a common set of questions. It then developed to a four-nation participation in 1985–1986 and by 1998 had grown to 31 participating nations in all parts of the world. ISSP is often attached to a GSS, uses different data collection modes, and in each year focuses on a particular topic which is replicated from time to time. For example, in the ISSP surveys in 1985–1986, 1990–1991, and 1996/1997/1998, the topic was role of government. These data are, like the Eurobarometers, accessible through data archives.

5.5 The European World Values Surveys

In 1981, the European Values System Study Group started with surveys in 10 West European societies; this survey was replicated soon in 14 other countries outside of Europe to become the World Values Survey. Its second wave of surveys was coordinated by Ronald Inglehart between 1989 and 1993, the third wave ran between 1995 and 1998 in 53 countries, and the fourth wave of surveys has presently (1999) begun. Not all of the data at the time of writing is accessible; in the long run this study is, however, one of the most interesting for comparatively working political scientists because of its potential for macro–micro analyses (for a major comparative analysis of these data see Inglehart 1997).

Bibliography:

1. Abramson P R, Inglehart R 1998 Comparing European Publics. American Political Science Review 92: 185–90
2. Almond G A 1996 Political science: the history of the discipline. In: Goodin R E, Klingemann H-D (eds.) A New Handbook of Political Science. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK
3. Bisco R L 1966 Social science data archives: a review of developments. American Political Science Review 60: 93–109
4. Budge I, Robertson D, Hearl D (eds.) 1987 Ideology, Strategy and Party Change: Spatial Analyses of Post-War Election Programmes in 19 Democracies. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
5. Campbell A, Kahn R L 1952 The People Elect the President. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
6. Campbell A, Gurin G, Miller W E 1954 The Voter Decides. Row Petersen, Evanston, IL
7. van Deth J W (ed.) 1998 Comparative Politics. The Problem of Equivalence. Routledge, London
8. Hyman H 1955 Survey Design and Analysis. Principles, Cases and Procedures. Free Press, Glencoe, IL
9. Hyman H H 1972 Secondary Analysis of Sample Surveys. Principles, Procedures and Potentialities. Wiley, New York
10. Inglehart R 1997 Modernization and Postmodernization: Cultural, Economic, and Political Change in 43 Societies. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ
11. Kaase M, Newton K 1995 Beliefs in Government. Beliefs in Government Series. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, Vol. 5
12. Klingemann H-D, Hofferbert R I, Budge I 1994 Parties, Policies and Democracy. Westview Press, Boulder, CO
13. Lagos M 1997 Latin America’s smiling mask. Journal of Democracy 8: 125–38
14. Lazarsfeld P F 1972 The obligations of the 1950 pollster to the 1984 historian. In: Lazarsfeld P F (ed.) Qualitative Analysis. Historical and Critical Essays. Allyn and Bacon, Inc., Boston, MA
15. Lazarsfeld P F, Rosenberg M (eds.) 1955 The Language of Social Research. A Reader in the Methodology of Social Research. Free Press, Glencoe, IL
16. Lipset S M 1963 Approaches Toward Reducing the Costs of Comparative Survey Research. Social Science Information 2: 33ff
17. Miller W E 1989 Research life as a collection of intersecting probability distributions. In: Eulau H (ed.) Crossroads of Social Science: The ICPSR 25th Anniversary Volume. Agathon Press, New York
18. Miller W E 1994 An organizational history of the intellectual origins of the American National Election Studies. European Journal of Political Research 25: 247–65
19. Mochmann E, Oedegaard I C, Mauer R 1998 Inventory of National Election Studies in Europe 1945–1995: Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, The Netherlands, Norway and Sweden. Edwin Ferger Verlag, Bergisch Gladbach, Germany
20. Putnam R 1998 Democracy in America at the end of the twentieth century. In: Rueschemeyer D, Rueschemeyer K, Wittrock B (eds.) Participation and Democracy. East and West. Comparisons and Interpretations. M E Sharpe, Armonk, NY
21. Rokkan S 1964 Archives for Secondary Analysis of Sample Survey Data. An Early Inquiry into the Prospects for Western Europe. International Social Science Journal 16: 49–62
22. Rokkan S (ed.) 1966 Data Archives for the Social Sciences. Monton, Paris and The Hague
23. Rose R, Mishler W, Haerpfer C 1998 Democracy and its Alternatives. Understanding Post-Communist Societies. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD
24. Schildt, A 1995 Moderne Zeiten: Freizeit, Massenmedien und ‘‘Zeitgeist’’ in der Bundesrepublik der 50er Jahre. Christians, Hamburg, Germany
25. Taylor Ch L, Jodice D A 1983 World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators. Vol. II: Political Protest and Government Change, 3rd edn. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT
26. Thomassen J 1994 The intellectual history of election studies: Introduction. European Journal of Political Research 25: 239–46
27. Weisberg H 1987 The Silver Summer: The ICPSR Summer Training Program’s 25th Anniversary. PS 20: 281–7