Participation and Democracy: Dynamics, Causes ... - Jacobs University

are discussed in the following section. Basically all of them address the question of
reliability with respect to the information that respondents provide during a standardized
survey.
First, one of the difficulties in measuring political activism can be attributed to the
differences between attitudes and behavior. Whereas people’s attitudes are rather stable
and can, therefore, more easily be measured at one point in timed, people’s participation
in political action is seldom an activity that people engage in with steady enthusiasm and
dedication (Brady 1999: 741). Because of its rather spontaneous and irregular character,
this is even more true for elite-challenging action. Since the respondents are asked to
report about their behavior that lies in the past, people’s memory can be another
potential source of error. Tulving (1983) speaks here about a respondent’s “episodic
memory” (as distinct from the “semantic memory”).
Second, survey-based research plays a crucial role in the empirical study of social
behavior (Niedermayer 1997: 89). However, for studies that cover a considerate number
of nations, questions of measurement, comparability and equivalence become important
(van Deth 1998a, 1998b; Peters 1998: 209). Inglehart, too, points out that comparative
research, in particular survey research, is dispensable if the problem that given words
have comparable meanings in different societies is not satisfyingly solved (Inglehart
1998).
There has been a tendency in survey research to shift the focus on comparable measures
away from a claim for identity, to a claim for (functional) equivalence (Allerbeck 1977;
van Deth 1998a). In short, equivalence refers to a characteristic that two phenomena
have in common with respect to their value, their use or their function. The similarity
here does not refer to all characteristics but rather to those ones that are of importance
and relevance for the research interest (van Deth 1998a: 5). Considering the wide range
of societies and cultures included for example in the World Values Survey, questions of
general validity and cross-cultural equivalence are of great importance for such
comparative projects.
There are ways to cope with the problem of equivalence. After decades of cross-cultural
research, a good deal of knowledge has accumulated on how to conduct surveys in
19 For example, by using data from IDEA: www.idea.org .
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