Methods and Challenges of Comparative Surveys of Political Communication Elites

Comparing similar phenomena in different cultural settings has always been a “tricky problem” in social science as questions of identity and equivalence are at the core of cross-national research (van Deth, 1998, p. 3). Our comparative study of political communication cultures in Western Europe is based on a survey of 2,500 high-ranking journalists, politicians and political spokespersons. Conducting interviews with this group in nine countries under different circumstances was a challenging task. In this chapter we tackle the methodological aspects and the difficulties that arose with the empirical study, and we discuss the solutions of the country teams. First, we addressed equivalence in terms of populations, samples and measurement (Wirth and Kolb, 2004; Van de Vijver and Leung, 1997). We were confronted with the task of defining functional equivalent populations and recruiting the relevant political communication actors. In the first section of this chapter, we discuss the sampling strategy across the nine countries. Related to sampling are issues of interview modes and response rates. We therefore describe the approach to data collection and the national variation in response rates. These questions refer to the validity of the data, which is an important prerequisite of the analyses. The second section of this chapter addresses the potential influences of culture and interview mode on the response behavior of the respondents.