The Crowdsourced Replication Initiative: Investigating Immigration and Social Policy Preferences. Executive Report.

In an era of mass migration, social scientists, populist parties and social movements raise concerns over the future of immigration-destination societies. What impacts does this have on policy and social solidarity? Comparative cross-national research, relying mostly on secondary data, has findings in different directions. There is a threat of selective model reporting and lack of replicability. The heterogeneity of countries obscures attempts to clearly define data-generating models. P-hacking and HARKing lurk among standard research practices in this area.This project employs crowdsourcing to address these issues. It draws on replication, deliberation, meta-analysis and harnessing the power of many minds at once. The Crowdsourced Replication Initiative carries two main goals, (a) to better investigate the linkage between immigration and social policy preferences across countries, and (b) to develop crowdsourcing as a social science method. The Executive Report provides short reviews of the area of social policy preferences and immigration, and the methods and impetus behind crowdsourcing plus a description of the entire project. Three main areas of findings will appear in three papers, that are registered as PAPs or in process

The winner takes all the trust: Populism, democracy, and winner-loser gaps in political trust in Central and Southern urope

Replication material

Political Parties Crosswalk (PPC)

The Political Parties Crosswalk (PPC) maps party codes used in questions about party preferences in European cross-national public opinion surveys to Party Facts IDs, which are commonly used identifiers of parties in political science datasets. The PPC, a data linkage tool, supports research that combines data on party preferences from surveys with characteristics of parties, and in particular facilitates research that combines data from different survey projects. PPC v.1 covers surveys conducted in Europe in the following projects: European Social Survey, European Values Study, Asia Europe Survey, Consolidation and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe, Integrated and United, Life in Transition Surveys, New Baltic Barometer, New Europe Barometer, World Values Survey, and selected waves from the Candidate Countries Eurobarometer, Eurobarometer, and the International Social Survey Programme. Overview article Marta Kołczyńska & Przemek Powałko. 2022. The Political Parties Crosswalk for mapping party codes in cross-national surveys to Party Facts IDs. Political Research Exchange 4(1). DOI: 10.1080/2474736X.2022.2048957

Seeing the world through party-tinted glasses: Performance evaluations and winner status in shaping political trust under high polarization

Reproduction materials for: "Party-tinted glasses? Performance evaluation and winner-loser status in shaping political trust under strong polarization

Political trust as a cause and consequence of democracy: Longitudinal analysis of European data

The causal link between political trust and democratic performance has been assumed rather than established. Building on research on political trust as related to regime legitimacy and on the evaluative nature of political trust, we formulate hypotheses about the effect of political trust on democracy and of democracy on political trust, both with regard to overall levels of trust in societies, as well as trust by education and age groups. We test these hypotheses with cross-lagged models applied to country time series of political trust from 26 European countries between 1991 and 2019, and with two democracy indicators, from the Varieties of Democracy and the Democracy Barometer projects. We find evidence of effects of democracy on trust and vice versa, as well as of differences in the effects of democracy on political trust among different education and age groups. The results are sensitive to the choice of the democracy indicator as well as the lag length, which points to the need of examining different reasonable combinations of indicators and nags in this kind of analysis

Insightful dimensionality reduction with very low rank variable subsets

Funding Information: This work was supported by the Academy of Finland project AIDA (317085), the EC H2020RIA project “SoBigData++” (871042), and the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange within the Bekker programme, number PPN/BEK/2019/1/00133. Publisher Copyright: © 2021 ACM. | openaire: EC/H2020/871042/EU//SoBigData-PlusPlusDimensionality reduction techniques can be employed to produce robust, cost-effective predictive models, and to enhance interpretability in exploratory data analysis. However, the models produced by many of these methods are formulated in terms of abstract factors or are too high-dimensional to facilitate insight and fit within low computational budgets. In this paper we explore an alternative approach to interpretable dimensionality reduction. Given a data matrix, we study the following question: are there subsets of variables that can be primarily explained by a single factor? We formulate this challenge as the problem of finding submatrices close to rank one. Despite its potential, this topic has not been sufficiently addressed in the literature, and there exist virtually no algorithms for this purpose that are simultaneously effective, efficient and scalable. We formalize the task as two problems which we characterize in terms of computational complexity, and propose efficient, scalable algorithms with approximation guarantees. Our experiments demonstrate how our approach can produce insightful findings in data, and show our algorithms to be superior to strong baselines.Peer reviewe

Interviewer Involvement in Respondent Selection Moderates the Relationship between Response Rates and Sample Bias in Cross-national Survey Projects in Europe

Replication materials for: Interviewer Involvement in Respondent Selection Moderates the Relationship between Response Rates and Sample Bias in Cross-national Survey Projects in Europ

Support for democracy in ego-centered social contexts

Replication materials for "Support for democracy in ego-centered social contexts