Citizen Attitudes Towards National and International Problems

From September 2025 through August 2030, I am the primary investigator for a European Research Council Advanced Grant project Citizen Attitudes Towards National and International Problems (CATNIP). The initial stage of the project will seek to improve how political science measures which problems citizens think are most severe and most in need of their governments’ attention. The resulting advances in measurement will enable later stages of the project which will focus on improving our scientific understanding of where these attitudes come from and how they shape citizens’ views of media and politicians. One important application of this work will be characterising how (and which) voters prioritise international problems versus national problems, and the implications of this for how national political leaders engage internationally on questions of climate change, security, migration, and trade. As the project develops, I will post further details on this page.

Work Package 1: Survey Measurement of Public Problem Prioritisation

The first working paper from this project describes new methods for using data where respondents compare pairs of problems to study variation in individual-level attitudes towards problems. This question format has major advantages for comparative research over existing approaches such as Most Important Problem questions and single rating of problem categories, however it is not feasible to ask all respondents all the pairwise comparisons of problem categories necessary to determine their individual ordering of the relative severity of the problems. What I show in this paper is that this is unnecessary, and one can conduct all the kinds of analysis that would be possible with full information on each individual using the partial information revealed by a moderate number of pairwise comparisons per respondent, when combined with model-based measurement and multiple imputation methods.