Dynamics of low-effort responding in ISSP across three decades

Public opinion surveys can serve as barometers measuring the dynamics of prevailing attitudes in societies. Participation in surveys may be seen as especially useful in democratic societies, where the governing elites and their contenders presumably monitor the demand side of the electoral equation. Analysts use various weighting strategies to correct for biases caused during the design and collection stage of the process (e.g., coverage or non-response errors). However, it is more difficult to make adjustments for low quality of responses. One source of low quality of responses is careless and insufficient (low-effort) responding, meaning lack of engagement with the questions. We explore a proposition that one of the reasons for contemporary rates of low-effort responding in Eastern European countries could be that, after the initial surge of optimism about the nature of democracy and expectations about elite responsiveness in the early post-communist era, the surveys stopped being seen as a potentially useful novelty and, as troubles tied to transition settled in, people became disillusioned and perhaps even cynical about the value of carefully considering their answers. In the empirical part of the paper, we analyse available waves of ISSP on multiple themes, covering a period from late 1980’s to early 2019. Using multiple measures of low-effort responding, we look at shares of low-effort responders across particular batteries of questions on particular topics and shares of low-effort responders across whole surveys. We also consider mode of survey administration, reasoning that respondents may be motivated to respond differently based on the immediate situation during which they consider their answers. We then compare these over the years, controlling for a number of individual and country-level measures, and describe the patterns showing sources of differences in low-effort responding.