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Public opinion surveys constitute a widespread, powerful tool to study peoples’ attitudes and behaviors from comparative perspectives. However, even global surveys can have limited geographic and temporal coverage, which can hinder the production of comprehensive knowledge. To expand the scope of comparison, social scientists turn to ex-post harmonization of variables from datasets that cover similar topics but in different populations and/or at different times. These harmonized datasets can be analyzed as a single source and accessed through various data portals. However, the Survey Data Recycling (SDR) research project has identified three challenges faced by social scientists when using data portals: the lack of capability to explore data in-depth or query data based on customized needs, the difficulty in efficiently identifying related data for studies, and the incapability to evaluate theoretical models using sliced data. To address these issues, the SDR research project has developed the SDR Querier, which is applied to the harmonized SDR database. The SDR Querier includes a BERT-based model that allows for customized data queries through research questions or keywords (Query-by-Question), a visual design that helps users determine the availability of harmonized data for a given research question (Query-by-Condition), and the ability to reveal the underlying relational patterns among substantive and methodological variables in the database (Query-by-Relation), aiding in the rigorous evaluation or improvement of regression models. Case studies with multiple social scientists have demonstrated the usefulness and effectiveness of the SDR Querier in addressing daily challenges. 

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. 

This special issue examines innovative methods in three areas of protest studies: (1) survey methodology and scaling, (2) the development and assessment of political event data, and (3) methods of contextual analysis. The articles provide new techniques and general methodologies for improving the quality of data that we have about protest, especially in the comparative study of protest. 

A common claim about the affluent democracies is that protest is trending, becoming more legitimate and widely used by all political contenders. In the new democracies, protest is seen as having contributed to democratization, but growing apathy has led to protest decline while in authoritarian regimes protest may be spurring more democratization. Assessing these ideas requires comparative trend data covering 15 or more years but constructing such data confronts problems. The major problem is that the most available survey item asks “have you ever joined (lawful) demonstrations,” making it difficult to time when this protest behavior occurred. We advance a novel method for timing these “ever” responses by focusing on young adults (aged 18-23 years), who are likely reporting on participation within the past 5 years. Drawing on the Survey Data Recycling harmonized data set, we use a multilevel model including harmonization and survey quality controls to create predicted probabilities for young adult participation (576 surveys, 119 countries, 1966-2010). Aggregating these to create country-year rate estimates, these compare favorably with overlapping estimates from surveys asking about “the past 5 years or so” and event data from the PolDem project. Harmonization and survey quality controls improve these predicted values. These data provide 15+ years trend estimates for 60 countries, which we use to illustrate the possibilities of estimating comparative protest trends.