New Democracies Barometer
To monitor mass response to transformation across Central and East Europe, the Paul Lazarsfeld Society of Vienna created the New Democracies Barometer (NDB) in 1991, with Dr Christian Haerpfer as scientific director and Professor Richard Rose as international scientific advisor. Funding has come from the Austrian Ministry of Science and Research and the Austrian National Bank.
Cross-national NDB surveys have covered Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia, Belarus, Ukraine, and many comparable questions have also been asked in Austria, Germany -- East and West, and Moldova. Most of these countries have also been the subject of special one-nation CSPP surveys too.
The NDB questionnaire repeats key questions regularly to see how much or how little behaviour and attitudes change as people gain more experience of democracy and markets. In each country a stratified nationwide representative sample of about 1,000 respondents is interviewed face-to-face. Full results of each NDB survey are reported in the University of Aberdeen's Studies in Public Policy:
- NDB V Spring, 1998 SPP 306
- NDB IV Autumn, 1995 SPP 262
- NDB III Winter, 1993/94 SPP 230
- NDB II Autumn, 1992 SPP 212
- NDB I Autumn, 1991 SPP 204
- Trends in NDB Surveys SPP 308
For a full list of NDB studies, click here.
DEMOCRACY AND ITS ALTERNATIVES: Understanding Post-Communist Societies. By Richard Rose, William Mishler and Christian Haerpfer. A book-length analysis of New Democracies Barometer surveys. Polity Press, Oxford and Johns Hopkins University Press, USA.