Conference Agenda

A virtuous circle redux: The media and trustworthiness in the digital age Professor Pippa Norris (Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University) Should the news media be blamed for political cynicism? Part I describes the theoretical debate on this issue. This study seeks to examine empirical evidence concerning two arguments. The virtuous circle thesis predicts that at individual level, selection effects and media effects interact. Activists will be likely to pay attention to the news and public affairs. And knowledge gained from this process will strengthen informed judgments of political trustworthiness and lower barriers to civic engagement. Moreover, secondly, at macro-level, the information environment matters. Open societies expand the capacity of critical citizens to identify trustworthy agencies accurately, by providing two-sided forms of political communications about the performance of the authorities. By contrast, closed societies restricting the free press are likely to foster credulous trust in strongman leaders, which is unwarranted by their performance. Part II outlines the sources of survey cross-national and time-series data used to test these propositions from the European Social Survey in 39 countries. Part III presents the results. Part IV summarises the main conclusions and considers their broader implications.

Since its inception in 2001, the European Social Survey aimed to ‘promote and practice the highest standards in cross-national research’. Its survey methodology has been widely recognised as excellent, with its firm emphasis on input harmonisation, the use of best practice, transparency, and effective central coordination. A key part of the ESS methodology has been the use of a single mode of data collection for the questionnaire, required to prevent different mode influencing survey responses in different ways, within and across the various countries taking part in the survey. The mode chosen by the founders of the ESS was face-to-face in-home interviewers, felt in 2002 to be the ‘gold standard’ as well as the only mode that could realistically be used in every participating ESS country.
In 2027 the ESS will no longer use face-to-face interviewing for its data collection instead offering web and paper self-completion questionnaires in all countries. Its 2025 round will compare the old and new modes in a split ballot design. This change, brought forward by the COVID-19 pandemic, has been driven by a number of factors, including: improved quality of self-completion data collection; declining quality of face-to-face data collection; and the near collapse of face-to-face interviewing capacity in many countries in Europe.
Fitzgerald will outline the new ESS self-completion data collection methodology, showing how the approach was developed and presenting data about the quality of the new mode compared to the face-to-face approach. The expected impact of the mode change on data quality and the survey time series will be discussed. The presentation will conclude on a positive note arguing that that the benefits of the new self-completion approach outweigh the negatives and provide a solid basis for high quality comparative ESS data collection for the future.
Following the presentation the ESS ERIC Director will host a roundtable discussion where survey methodologists and substantive cross-national scholars, discus the challenges and opportunities that this once in a generation methodological change brings to the infrastructure and its community of users.

How (un)fair is Europe? Jule Adriaans (2024 Jowell-Kaase Early Career Researcher, Bielefeld University) Social inequalities are ubiquitous in European societies. They are frequently at the center of public debate and social science research. Both in academic and non-academic discourse, the need to address social inequality is often motivated by the assumption that large inequalities harm societies by reducing their members' well-being and threatening social cohesion. However, empirical findings show that lay people are neither particularly good at assessing the extent of inequality nor do they prefer strict equality. Instead, it seems that people strive for justice - demanding equal treatment as well the consideration of individual contributions and needs - and react negatively to injustice. Against this backdrop, I will use comparative survey data - with a particular focus on ESS Round 9 data - to take stock of the state of justice and fairness in Europe, asking: How unfair is Europe? And how do Europeans respond to the unfairness they identify?