This article focuses on a preliminary step in any ex-post data harmonization project—wrangling the pre-harmonized data—and suggests a practical routine for helping researchers reduce human errors in this often-tedious work. The routine includes three steps: (1) Team-based concept construct and data selection; (2) Data entry automation; and (3) “Second-order” opening—a “Tao” of data wrangling. We illustrate the routine with the examples of pre-harmonizing procedures used to produce the Standardized World Income Inequality Database (SWIID), a widely used database that uses Gini indices from multiple sources to create comparable estimates, and the Dynamic Comparative Public Opinion (DCPO) project, which creates a workflow for harmonizing aggregate public opinion data.
Trust in civil servants is essential for effective governance, enabling policy implementation, public service delivery, and compliance. However, the lack of comparable cross-national data on trust in bureaucracy has limited our ability to systematically examine these relationships. To address this gap, we develop the Trust in Civil Servants (TCS) dataset using an advanced latent-variable modeling technique, using 132 national and cross-national surveys from 98 countries (1986-2022). Our measures reveal variations in trust both within and between countries.
Public discontent with the political system has become an increasingly salient concern in recent years, with the argument that it undermines democratic stability and effective governance. Nevertheless, the understanding of the nature, trends, and drivers of political discontent remains debated, largely reflecting the constraints from available survey data and items in the construction of measurement. This article takes advantage of the state-of-the-art latent-variable modeling to aggregat survey responses and a comprehensive collection of survey data to generate dynamic comparative estimates of public political discontent (PPD) for over a hundred countries over the past four decades.
Objective. Support for gay rights has increased in the publics of many countries over recent decades, but the scholarship on the topic has been hindered by the limited available data on these trends in public opinion. The goal of the Support for Gay Rights (SGR) dataset is to overcome this problem. Method. The SGR dataset is constructed by combining a comprehensive collection of survey data with a latent-variable model to provide annual time-series estimates of public support for gay rights across 118 countries and over as many as 51 years that are comparable across space and time.
How does public climate change concern and policy preferences affect climate policy outputs? Prevailing explanations regarding the adoption of climate change (mitigation) policies often focus on collective action, institutions, distributive politics, and policy diffusion. Despite being the focus of many studies on public policy in other issue areas, the role of public opinion on national climate policy has not been studied simply because of a lack of survey questions repeated consistently across years and countries.