Global Party Survey, 2022 (V2.0)

The second Global Party Survey (V2.0) is under development. This aims to build upon the first survey conducted in 2019. The new study will replicate many of the questions used earlier, to facilitate analysis of change over time, as well as adding some new items to facilitate analysis of additional topics and emerging issues in party competition.

The project is based at Harvard University. The Principal Investigator is Pippa Norris and the Survey Manager is Luke Williams. The project is generously funded by the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University.

If you would like to be added to our roster of experts on parties and elections, to participate in the survey in early-2022, please contact us at Administrator@GlobalParty.org .

Dec 2021

HKS Research Paper: Measuring Populism Worldwide

Pippa Norris

Measuring Populism Worldwide

HKS Working Paper No. RWP20-002

Abstract

Populism studies have rapidly burgeoned but nevertheless systematic cross-national evidence about this phenomenon has lagged far behind. How can populism be measured in ways which are consistent, valid, and reliable? To address this issue, Part I outlines the minimalist concept of populism used in the study. Part II summarizes the pros and cons of previous attempts at gauging and classifying party ideological values and issue positions in general, as well as recent studies seeking to classify populists as a distinct party family. Part III describes the research design employed to construct the Global Party Survey, replicating the methods of previous expert surveys but expanding coverage worldwide and including innovative measures of populist rhetoric. The new dataset, drawing upon estimates from 1,861 experts, covers 1,043 political parties in 163 countries around the globe (see www.GlobalPartySurvey.org). Part IV presents key results and a series of robustness tests confirming that the new estimates of ideological values and populist parties are consistently correlated with previous measures. The conclusion in Part V summarizes the results and considers the potential uses of the dataset for understanding populism as a global phenomenon.

Citation

Norris, Pippa. "Measuring Populism Worldwide." HKS Faculty Research Working Paper Series RWP20-002, February 2020.

The paper is also available from the SSRN:        http://ssrn.com/abstract=3541314

Data released on 15 Feb 2020

The data files for the Global Party Survey study have now been released in different formats (R, Stata, SPSS, Excel, .csv) through Dataverse, along with the documentation of the codebook and questionnaire.

Files can all be obtained from: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/GlobalPartySurvey

Please contact me with any corrections needed or suggestions for improvement.

Data visualizations

An initial look at some of the key results from the new Global Party Survey, 2019 dataset can be found in a Powerpoint presentation:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/oidnej45mx6tyei/Global%20Party%20Survey3.pptx?dl=0

This describes the methods and presents scatterplots illustrating some of the relationships between key variables, broken down in different regions and types of regimes.

The estimates from 1,861 party and election experts cover key ideological values, issue positions, and populist rhetoric for 1,043 parties in 163 countries.

Fieldwork started 19 November 2019

The fieldwork invitations to participate in the study started to be distributed on 19 November 2019. The invitations allow an easy op out for those not interested in participating and the distribution will continue for a one month period with two further reminders. For more details, see About Us.

The GPS data set is planned to be cleaned and merged with meta-data, then released in public for users in early-2020.

The survey has been translated into six common languages which are optionally available in a pull down menu on the front page.

Many thanks to the terrific response to the initial invitation and colleagues suggesting additional experts! The process is interactive to improve both the lists of political parties and expand and refine the list of experts.

Pippa Norris

Laura Welty