CURRENT research projects:

1. THE ELECTORAL INTEGRITY PROJECT

2. the Global Party Survey, 2019 and 2023

3. the world values survey, 6th to 8th waves

4. THE WORLD OF POLITICAL SCIENCE SURVEY, 2019 and 2023

5. the TrustGov Project, and,

6. trust in european democracies, 2023-2026.

1.THE ELECTORAL INTEGRITY PROJECT

Pippa Norris is the founding director of the Electoral Integrity Project which was based at Harvard University and Sydney University from 2012 to 2021. In January 2021, the project has been directed by Professor Holly Ann Garnet and Professor Toby S. James, and housed at the Royal Military College of Canada/Queen’s University and the University of East Anglia.. The project focuses upon three issues:

·       When do elections meet international standards of electoral integrity?  

·       What happens when elections fail to do so? 

·       And what can be done to mitigate these problems? 

EIP has produced innovative and policy-relevant scientific research that achieves international standing in the social sciences and leads to a significant advancement of capabilities and knowledge about elections, democracy, and autocracy.

Strategic goals

The project achieves these objectives through three strategies: developing and deepening concepts and theories concerning the causes and consequences of electoral integrity; gathering valid, reliable, and generalizable empirical evidence (through expert indicators, mass surveys, experimental designs, and case-studies) monitoring and comparing electoral integrity across and within nations; and building a worldwide research community engaging scholarly and practitioner networks drawn from diverse disciplines, theoretical approaches, global regions, international organizations, and methodological techniques to advance knowledge of electoral integrity.

Publications

The EIP has demonstrated a productive track record of generating publications, datasets, and outreach activities. Since establishing the project, publications on electoral integrity by staff and visiting scholars include a dozen books, 34 peer-reviewed journal articles and edited book chapters, and eight policy reports. Special issues of Electoral Studies and the Electoral Law Journal have also been produced. These outputs have attracted more than 250 scholarly citations to EIP publications, as well as hundreds of articles in the international news media (see www.electoralintegrityproject.com).

Datasets

The EIP project has also generated many datasets which are shared in the public domain for secondary research through Dataverse. The global Perceptions of Electoral Integrity (PEI) data-set evaluates the quality of elections held around the world. Based on a rolling survey collecting the views of 3,821 election experts, this research provides independent and reliable evidence to compare whether countries meet international standards of electoral integrity. The PEI-7.0 cumulative release covers 336 national parliamentary and presidential contests held worldwide in 166 countries from 1 July 2012 to 31 December 2018.

2. The Global Party Survey

The Global Party Survey is designed to identify and compare the ideology, policy positions, and rhetoric of political parties around the world.

How do political parties differ, such as in their ideological values, their stance on policy issues, and their rhetoric? This research uses an expert survey to address these questions, generating a dataset to be shared within the academic community. During November-December 2019, the survey gathered the views of over 2000 party experts covering, in total, around 170 countries. The first dataset was released via Dataverse in spring 2020.

The second GPS survey seeks to update the results and expand the comparative framework to cover parties in countries around the globe.

3. The World Values Survey

Pippa Norris has served on the Executive Committee of the World Values Survey Association since 2002, including as Treasurer, and is currently Vice President.

The WVS is a global network of social scientists studying changing values and their impact on social and political life, led by an international team of scholar. The WVS consists of nationally representative surveys conducted in more than 100 countries which contain almost 90 percent of the world’s population, using a common questionnaire.

The WVS is the largest non-commercial, cross-national, time series investigation of human beliefs and values ever executed, including interviews with around 650,000 respondents. Moreover the WVS is the only academic study covering the full range of global variations, from very poor to very rich countries, in all of the world’s major cultural zones. The dataset for the 7th wave of the WVS/EVS survey (2017 to 2022) was released in January 2022. The 8th wave is in the process of being developed, with fieldwork planned to run from 1 Jan 2024 to 31 Dec 2026.

4. The World of Political Science Survey

The first World of Political Science survey (WPS-2019) was launched by Pippa Norris in spring 2019, in conjunction with the European Consortium of Political Research (ECPR) and the International Political Science Association (IPSA). The survey seeks to develop a representative profile of the political science profession across the globe. The first dataset was released for secondary analysis via Harvard’s Dataverse. The second survey, WPS-2023, is in the process of being cleaned and data will be released in May 2023.

5. The TrustGov Project

There is widespread concern that public confidence in democratic institutions and trust in democratic governance is under threat. Any loss of trust and confidence generates considerable concern because of its potential consequences for democracy, including for the political culture, the stability of political regimes, and feelings of political legitimacy. Excessive cynicism is a widely acknowledged problem but in fact risks can also arise where citizens are naively trusting of untrustworthy actors. The TrustGov project, funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council, uses multiple methods with the aims of understanding the links connecting trust and trustworthiness.

6. Trust in European Democracies

Political trust has long been regarded as an important element of regime support and factor of regime stability; it is widely associated with a number of positive outcomes in representative democracies. Political trust drives citizens’ interest and engagement in politics, increases voting turnout and makes law-abiding behavior more common. Political trust is frequently equated to diffuse regime support and thus linked to the effective functioning and stability of the political system.

The proposed research effort will monitor the structural (long-term) drivers of political trust but also emphasize the strategies which can be employed by diverse actors and agencies to strengthen accurate and informed judgments of agency trustworthiness. The objective of this ambitious project is twofold. First, we aim to design and implement a complex research effort to collect comprehensive evidence on the judgments of trustworthiness in a range of European states. Second, the project will develop a comprehensive and transparent toolbox of short-term and long-term policy interventions including recommendations, and methodologies for enhancing trust in political institutions, boosting transparency, and inclusiveness of representative systems in Europe.

While there is a growing concern about the crisis of democracy and democratic backsliding, this research effort will provide an innovative theoretical perspective on the sources of regime support and strategies for trust building in the public domain. The project looks at the different drivers of 'positive high trust in democracy' and 'negative high trust in autocracy'. The project will facilitate development of a new paradigm of political trust and trust-building and will inspire emergence of new insights on the multi-facet origins of political trust and multi-factor nature of trustworthiness. The project has partners in Austria, Czechia, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden, and Ukraine.

The first paper from the project, providing a literature and methodological review, can be downloaded here.