Transitional Justice and Linked Party Sympathy Survey, 2023

Balcells, Laia and vanderWilden, Ethan (2024). Transitional Justice and Linked Party Sympathy Survey, 2023. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-857208

The project is organised around three thematic areas: (i) how trust within and between social groups and towards governance institutions emerges and evolves in contexts of rising inequality; (ii) how trust in unequal societies shapes governance outcomes through two intervening factors - political behaviour and social mobilisation; and (iii) the pathways through which changes in such intervening factors may sometimes result in inclusive governance outcomes, but in the breakdown of governance at other times. Each of these areas will incorporate detailed theoretical and empirical analyses at the subnational level in four countries - Colombia, Mozambique, Pakistan and Spain - affected by rising inequalities and characterised by unstable or strained democratic institutions.

The absence of systematic qualitative, quantitative and behavioural data has hindered progress in understanding the links between inequality, trust and governance in countries outside North America and Western Europe. The project seeks to compile a number of unexplored data sources and collect new data comparatively across these other countries in order to fulfil this critical gap. This data collection will involve: (i) comparative individual-level surveys to understand contemporaneous levels of trust, and attitudes towards formal and non-formal local governing institutions, (ii) behavioural experiments under different inequality and political contexts to better understand the formation of trust under different scenarios, (iii) indepth interviews with key political actors in government, members of social movements and citizen organisations to understand how inequalities affect perceptions of governance and strategies of political mobilisation, and (iv)detailed compilation of archival data that will allow us to better understand how inequalities and attitudes have evolved across time and how different historical junctures may shape the governance outcomes we observe today.

Data description (abstract)

Government actions reconciling with an undemocratic past can affect political attitudes and behaviors. Existing research has found that transitional justice policies have induced both electoral payoffs and costs for parties with symbolic or ideological linkages to prior regimes. This dataset includes responses to a survey related to transitional justice in Spain and attitudes toward Vox and other national political parties. It includes items capturing reactions to various transitional justice policies (randomly shown to different respondents), party preferences, and more general political attitudes. Results from these data have been used in a working paper written by the dataset creators: ‘Transitional justice and linked party sympathy,’ which documents how reactions to transitional justice policies are conditional on a variety of factors.

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