Public Opinion Quarterly

A highly controlled experimental setting using a sample of questions from the European Social Survey (ESS) and European Values Study (EVS) was used to test the effects of integrating machine translation and post-editing into the Translation, Review, Adjudication, Pretesting, and Documentation (TRAPD) approach in survey translation. Four experiments were conducted in total, two concerning the language pair English-German and two in the language pair English-Russian. The overall results of this study are positive for integrating machine translation and post-editing into the TRAPD process, when translating survey questionnaires...

Even among those who share the same partisan commitments, some people say they despise the opposing party while others report far less animosity. Why are some people more likely to express hostility toward the opposing political party? We explore how individual-level differences in feelings of self-confidence fuel out-party animosities. Drawing on responses to a module of the 2020 Cooperative Election Study, we show that higher levels of internal political efficacy are associated with greater affective polarization...

Voters support less spending on means-tested entitlements when they perceive beneficiaries as lacking motivation to work and pay taxes. Yet do concerns about the motivations of "undeserving" beneficiaries also extend to universal public goods (UPGs) that are free and available to all citizens? Lower spending on UPGs poses a particular trade-off: it lessens subsidization of "unmotivated" beneficiaries, but at the expense of reducing the ideal levels of UPGs that voters personally can access. Studies suggest that individuals will sacrifice their preferred amounts of public goods when beneficiaries who do not pay taxes try to access these goods, but it is unclear whether they distinguish based on motivations...

Authoritarian regimes regularly turn to the law to justify repression. This article examines whether invoking legal institutions has a persuasive effect on public perceptions of repression, and whether that effect is shaped by partisanship. The article uses the case of Cameroon's Special Criminal Tribunal, created in 2011 to prosecute high-profile corruption cases. A survey experiment was designed that describes the arrest and trial of a suspected corrupt oppositional minister and reminds a treatment group about the Special Criminal Tribunal...

Opposition to LGBT rights remains a contemporary fixture within the United States in spite of increasingly liberalizing attitudes toward LGBT individuals. In this paper, I argue that a potentially overlooked factor driving this opposition is rural identity-or an individual's psychological attachment to a rural area. Using data from the 2020 ANES, I find that rural identity predicts less favorable estimations of LGBT individuals. Rural identifiers are also less likely to support pro-LGBT policy measures than nonrural identifiers...

Support for democracy in the United States, once thought to be solid, has now been shown to be somewhat shaky. One of the most concerning aspects of this declining attachment to democracy is a marked age gap, with younger Americans less supportive of democracy than their older compatriots. Using age-period-cohort analysis of 12 national surveys collected between 1995 and 2019, we show that this age gap is largely a function of a long-term generational decline in support for democracy, with little evidence of an independent life-cycle effect apparent...

This paper scrutinizes the effect of social media use on institutional trust in the European Union (EU) among European citizens. Fixed-effects regression models on data from the Eurobarometer survey conducted in 2019, the year of the most recent European Parliament (EP) elections, demonstrate that higher social media use is associated with lower trust in the EU. More importantly, social media usage habits exert particularly detrimental effects in regions with wider and faster internet connections. In such high-information environments, those who more frequently use online social networks, tend to trust those networks, and receive information on EU affairs from these networks have less faith in the EU compared to those in regions with lower-quality internet access...

In this paper, we consider the role of personality as a component of motivation in promoting or inhibiting the tendency to exhibit the satisficing response styles of midpoint, straightlining, and Don't Know responding. We assess whether respondents who are low on the Conscientiousness and Agreeableness dimensions of the Big Five Personality Inventory are more likely to exhibit these satisficing response styles. We find large effects of these personality dimensions on the propensity to satisfice in both face-to-face and self-administration modes and in probability and nonprobability samples...

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Among the numerous explanations that have been offered for recent errors in pre-election polls, selection bias due to non-ignorable partisan nonresponse bias, where the probability of responding to a poll is a function of the candidate preference that a poll is attempting to measure (even after conditioning on other relevant covariates used for weighting adjustments), has received relatively less focus in the academic literature. Under this type of selection mechanism, estimates of candidate preferences based on individual or aggregated polls may be subject to significant bias, even after standard weighting adjustments...

Survey participants' mouse movements provide a rich, unobtrusive source of paradata, offering insight into the response process beyond the observed answers. However, the use of mouse tracking may require participants' explicit consent for their movements to be recorded and analyzed. Thus, the question arises of how its presence affects the willingness of participants to take part in a survey at all-if prospective respondents are reluctant to complete a survey if additional measures are recorded, collecting paradata may do more harm than good...

We use a unique panel of household survey data-the Austrian version of the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (SILC) for 2008-2011-which have been linked to individual administrative records on both state unemployment benefits and earnings. We assess the extent and structure of misreporting across similar benefits and between benefits and earnings. We document that many respondents fail to report participation in one or more of the unemployment programs. Moreover, they inflate earnings for periods when they are unemployed but receiving unemployment compensation...

Interviewers' postinterview evaluations of respondents' performance (IEPs) are paradata, used to describe the quality of the data obtained from respondents. IEPs are driven by a combination of factors, including respondents' and interviewers' sociodemographic characteristics and what actually transpires during the interview. However, relatively few studies examine how IEPs are associated with features of the response process, including facets of the interviewer-respondent interaction and patterns of responding that index data quality...

Survey researchers frequently use supplementary data sources, such as paradata, administrative data, and contextual data to augment surveys and enhance substantive and methodological research capabilities. While these data sources can be beneficial, integrating them with surveys can give rise to ethical and data privacy issues that have not been completely resolved. In this research synthesis, we review ethical considerations and empirical evidence on how privacy concerns impact participation in studies that collect these novel data sources to supplement surveys...

Widely held gender stereotypes present obstacles for women experts, who are generally evaluated less positively than equally qualified men across a range of fields. While audiences may view women as better equipped to handle certain feminine-stereotyped issues, Role Congruency Theory suggests that expert authority in politics may be incongruent with traditional feminine gender roles, leading to a subsequent backlash. Building upon the latter theory, I hypothesize that when cued to consider the expertise of a news source, the (in)congruence of gender-stereotyped roles will activate gender biases which increase the gap in evaluations and trust of women and men...

The debate around "fake news" has raised the question of whether liberals and conservatives differ, first, in their ability to discern true from false information, and second, in their tendency to give more credit to information that is ideologically congruent. Typical designs to measure these asymmetries select, often arbitrarily, a small set of news items as experimental stimuli without clear reference to a "population of information." This pre-registered study takes an alternative approach by, first, conceptualizing estimands in relation to all political news...

To study human behavior, social scientists are increasingly collecting data from mobile apps and sensors embedded in smartphones. A major challenge of studies implemented on general population samples, however, is that participation rates are rather low. While previous research has started to investigate the factors affecting individuals' decision to participate in such studies, less is known about features of the study design which are under the researcher's control and can increase the acceptance of smartphone-based data collection methods...

Existent research shows that affective polarization has been intensifying in some publics, diminishing in others, and remaining stable in most. We contribute to this debate by providing the most encompassing comparative and longitudinal account of affective polarization so far. We resort to a newly assembled dataset able to track partisan affect, with varying time series, in eighteen democracies over the last six decades. We present results based on two different operational measures of affective polarization: Reiljan's Affective Polarization Index, based on reported partisans only, and Wagner's weighted distance from the most liked party, based on the whole electorate...

Research into cyber-conflict, public opinion, and international security is burgeoning, yet the field suffers from an absence of conceptual agreement about key terms. For instance, every time a cyberattack takes place, a public debate erupts as to whether it constitutes cyberterrorism . This debate bears significant consequences, seeing as the ascription of a "terrorism" label enables the application of heavy-handed counterterrorism powers and heightens the level of perceived threat among the public. In light of widespread conceptual disagreement in cyberspace, we assert that public opinion plays a heightened role in understanding the nature of cyber threats...

Human mobility has become a major variable of interest during the COVID-19 pandemic and central to policy decisions all around the world. To measure individual mobility, research relies on a variety of indicators that commonly stem from two main data sources: survey self-reports and behavioral mobility data from mobile phones. However, little is known about how mobility from survey self-reports relates to popular mobility estimates using data from the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) and the Global Positioning System (GPS)...