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This article proposes a new approach to analyze protest participation measured in surveys of uneven quality. Because single international survey projects cover only a fraction of the world’s nations in specific periods, researchers increasingly turn to ex-post harmonization of different survey data sets not a priori designed as comparable. However, very few scholars systematically examine the impact of the survey data quality on substantive results. We argue that the variation in source data, especially deviations from standards of survey documentation, data processing, and computer files—proposed by methodologists of Total Survey Error, Survey Quality Monitoring, and Fitness for Intended Use—is important for analyzing protest behavior. In particular, we apply the Survey Data Recycling framework to investigate the extent to which indicators of attending demonstrations and signing petitions in 1,184 national survey projects are associated with measures of data quality, controlling for variability in the questionnaire items. We demonstrate that the null hypothesis of no impact of measures of survey quality on indicators of protest participation must be rejected. Measures of survey documentation, data processing, and computer records, taken together, explain over 5% of the intersurvey variance in the proportions of the populations attending demonstrations or signing petitions. 

The SDR Database v.2.0 (SDR2) is a multi-country, multi-year database for research on political participation, social capital, and well-being. It comprises harmonized information from 23 international survey projects, covering over 4.4 million respondents from 156 countries in the period 1966 – 2017. SDR2 provides both target variables and methodological indicators that store source survey and ex-post harmonization metadata. SDR2 consists of three datasets. The MASTER file, which stores harmonized information for a total of 4,402,489 respondents. The auxiliary PLUG-SURVEY file containing controls for source data quality and a set of technical variables needed for merging this file with the MASTER file. And the PLUG-COUNTRY file, which is a dictionary of countries and territories used in the MASTER file. An overall description of the SDR2 Database, and detailed information about its datasets are available in the SDR2 documentation. SDR2 is a product of the project Survey Data Recycling: New Analytic Framework, Integrated Database, and Tools for Cross-national Social, Behavioral and Economic Research, financed by the US National Science Foundation (PTE Federal award 1738502). We thank the Ohio State University and the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences, for organizational support.