Democratic Values and Protest Behavior: Data Harmonization, Measurement Comparability, and Multi-Level Modeling in Cross-National Perspective

This article describes the research project Democratic Values and Protest Behavior: Data Harmonization, Measurement Comparability, and Multi-Level Modeling. This survey data harmonization project engages with the relationship between democracy and protest behavior in comparative, cross-national perspective by proposing a theoretical model that explains variation in political protest in light of individual-level characteristics, country-level determinants, and interactions between the two types of factors. Methodologically, the project requires data with information at both the individual- and the country-level that varies over time and across space. While the social sciences have a growing wealth of survey projects, the data are often not comparable. This project selects variables from existing international surveys for ex post harmonization to create an integrated dataset consisting of large number of variables with individuals nested in countries and time periods. Throughout this process, focus is on three important and well-defined fields of methodology, namely data harmonization, measurement comparability, and multi-level modeling.