Global Preferences and Cognition Panel

This proposal details an important extension to the ERC Starting Grant 852526 awarded to the Principal Investigator in 2019, “Behavioral Foundations of Populism and Polarization” (POPULIZATION). The core project of POPULIZATION involves the development of a unique and novel dataset, the European Preferences and Cognition Dataset (EPCD), measuring an array of economic preferences, social preferences and cognitive abilities for the same individual at regular time intervals (6 months) for 3 years. The goals of the EPCD are i) to investigate the distribution of preferences and cognitive abilities in large and representative samples of European citizens; ii) to understand whether these behavioral factors are permanent characteristic of an individual or, rather, shaped by major public events and personal history; and iii) to explore how these behavioral factors affect political behavior and the support for populist parties. The key novelty of the approach is to collect empirical evidence from representative samples of voters from different countries and to combine large surveys with state-of-the-art techniques from experimental and behavioral economics. The project funded by the ERC focuses on European countries: the plan is to conduct repeated online surveys with representative samples of the Italian, French, German, Polish, Spanish and British population. The proposed extension will broaden the scope of the longitudinal study funded by the ERC to include two of the largest democracies in the world – India and Brazil – which have witnessed a dramatic turn to right-wing populism in recent years. The addition of these two countries to the longitudinal study will be of great value to explore the behavioral foundations of populism: contrary to democratic backsliding in Europe, the populism surge in India and Brazil has been driven by elites in response to a previous expansion of democratic rights and social inclusion.

Moreover, with the inclusion of two middle- and low-income countries from the global south, the sample will be much more diverse than originally planned in terms of level of economic development, culture, political institutions, history, and geographical factors. In sum, the additional resources sought with this proposal will allow the Principal Investigator to transform the European Preferences and Cognition Dataset into a more ambitious and farther reaching project, the Global Preferences and Cognition Panel (GPCP). The output of this project will greatly improve our understanding of world citizens' political preferences and how they affect economic and political outcomes. Moreover, after its successful implementation, the GPCP can serve as a platform, open to other researchers, to answer all sorts of different questions in economics, finance and political science, in particular those that require repeated measurements for the same individual.