[Séminaire - Les sciences sociales en question] How reliable and how valid are expert surveys?

Expert surveys have become a popular tool to measure across time and space a wide array of political phenomena, from party positions to the quality of democracy. But can we rely on experts’ judgments and what exactly do such surveys measure? Jan Rovny draws from his experience as one of the principal investigators of the Chapel Hill Expert Survey on party positioning to reassess the validity/reliability of such instruments, and René Lindstädt discusses the nature of the measurement problems such data raise.

Speaker

Jan Rovny (Sciences Po, CEE & LIEPP) is co-author of “Explaining the salience of anti-elitism and reducing political corruption for political parties in Europe with the 2014 Chapel Hill Expert Survey data”, Research & Politics, January 2017 (with J. Polk, R. Bakker et al.) and “Measuring party positions in Europe: The Chapel Hill expert survey trend file, 1999-2010”, Party Politics, 2015, 21(1):143-152 (with R. Bakker, C. de Vries, E. Edwards et al.)

Discussant

René Lindstädt (School of government, University of Birmingham) is co-author of “When Experts Disagree: Response Aggregation and Its Consequences in Expert Surveys”, Political Science Research and Methods, 2020, 8(3):580-588 (with S-O. Proksch et J.B. Slapin)

Chair

Nonna Mayer, Sciences Po, CEE, CNRS