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An increasing age of respondents and cognitive impairment are usual suspects for increasing difficulties in survey interviews and a decreasing data quality. This is why survey researchers tend to label residents in retirement and nursing homes as hard-to-interview and exclude them from most social surveys. In this article, I examine to what extent this label is justified and whether quality of data collected among residents in institutions for the elderly really differs from data collected within private households. For this purpose, I analyze the response behavior and quality indicators in three waves of Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe. To control for confounding variables, I use propensity score matching to identify respondents in private households who share similar characteristics with institutionalized residents. My results confirm that most indicators of response behavior and data quality are worse in institutions compared to private households. However, when controlling for sociodemographic and health-related variables, differences get very small. These results suggest the importance of health for the data quality irrespective of the housing situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparative analyses frequently examine respondents' self-rated health (SRH), assuming that it is a valid and comparable measure of generic health. However, given SRH's vagueness, this assumption is questionable due to (1) manifold nonhealth influences, such as personal characteristics including optimism, interviewer effects on the rating, and cultural contexts, as well as (2) potential gender, age-or country-specific expectations for one's health or frames of reference. Conceptually, two major components of SRH can be distinguished: latent health and reporting behavior. While latent health exclusively refers to objective health status, reporting behavior collectively refers to non-health characteristics (NH) affecting SRH. The present paper is primarily concerned with the latter and aims to identify whether and how NH bias SRH, including possible differences by gender, age, and country of residence. The presented analyses are based on data from 16,183 participants in five countries drawn from the fifth wave of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). Latent health is controlled via a wide array of health indicators and the residuals are examined with a model covering NH from three different sources: the interviewer, the respondent, and the country of residence. To identify subgroup-specific response behaviors, all analyses are carried out separately by gender, three age groups (50-64, 65-79, and 80+ years), and country of residence. The analyses uncovered influences of - among others-the interviewer's SRH, the respondent's life satisfaction, and the country of residence on SRH, while other factors differed by subgroup. The amount of explained variance due to such reporting behavior (with a mean of seven percent) can be deemed meaningful, considering that controlling for latent health already explains around half of SRH's variance. The greatest source of non-health influences was respondent characteristics, with the interviewer and country having smaller effects. These results illustrate the importance of taking NH into account when using SRH measures. Future research on complementing SRH with factual questions in survey design is advisable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The gender gap in voting for far-right parties is significant in many European countries. While most studies focus on how men and women differ in their nationalist and populist attitudes, it is unknown how the socio-economic and political promotion of women is associated with the gender gap in far-right political orientation. The following paper compares the effect of four different spheres of gender equality on this gender gap. By estimating multilevel logit models for more than 25 European countries and testing the mechanism via a socially conservative attitude toward gendered division of work, I find that the visible field of representation in particular—measured by the share of women in parliament and women on boards—is associated with a gender gap in far-right orientation. This paper contributes to the literature in two important ways: first, it combines policy feedback with cultural backlash theory, enlarging the scope of both theories; second, it demonstrates the importance of gender equality policies for the study of the far-right gender gap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Informal work, defined as work performed without a formal contract, lowers productivity, reduces tax revenue and hampers economic growth. Reducing informal work is a policy objective in developed and developing countries alike. Yet, particularly since the onset of the global financial crisis in 2008, most socio-economic policy reforms across Europe have reduced the generosity of unemployment benefit schemes and deregulated employment protection. The authors argue that, while such reforms may have contributed to reducing unemployment, they might also have increased the incidence of informal work. Using European Social Survey data for 2004-12, they find that labour protection is effective in reducing informal wage employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Higher response rates are commonly assumed to be associated with higher survey quality. Nevertheless, increasing response rates without attention to response quality may result in an increase of measurement error if it is associated with reluctance to participate in surveys. This article examines the nature of the relationship between reluctance and response quality. The question is studied in a cross-national context using data from the European Social Survey, Round 3, conducted in 2006–2007. Hypotheses are tested separately and compared across four countries: Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden. A measure of response quality, satisficing, is developed through latent class analysis using the indicators of “don't know,” straight-lining, inconsistent, and “extreme + middle” responses. To explore the relationship between the latent variables of reluctance and satisficing, before and after controlling for cognitive ability, structural equation modeling is used. The findings suggest that the relationship between reluctance and response quality is present but spurious, being completely explained by cognitive ability. The observed effects are not only consistent but also invariant in their magnitudes across the countries. The implications of this study for future data collection are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Political scientists have long debated whether “issues” influence vote choices. It is now generally agreed, however, that policy preferences and evaluations of party performance have some limited impact on vote decisions. It has also been shown that the influence of issues varies both between individuals and between elections. This article adds to our understanding of these issues by examining how the European issue influenced individual vote decisions at each general election since 1974. We use Manifesto Research Group (MRG) data to show that the effect of Europe on individual vote decisions increases as the parties became more polarized and decreases as they converge on the European issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]