Chapter 28: The Globalization of Comparative Public Opinion Research

Pippa Norris

The globalization of comparative public opinion research One of the most dramatic recent developments, transforming the field of comparative politics during recent decades, has been the expanding range of survey resources facilitating the systematic cross-national analysis of public opinion around the globe. This process started more than four decades ago, with Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba's path-breaking The civic culture (1963), which was immediately recognized and acclaimed by Philip Converse (1964) as ‘an instant classic’. Previously a few other cross-national attitudinal studies had been deployed, notably, William Buchanan and Hadley Cantril's 9-country How nations see each other (1953), sponsored by UNESCO, sociological surveys of social stratification, and USIA surveys of attitudes toward international affairs. 1 The civic culture survey laid the foundation for the comparative study of public opinion and subsequent cross-national survey research as a distinctive sub-field in political science open to empirical investigation. To explore the nature and ...

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