Rap, Robyn and Pamela Paxton. 2021. “How Accurate are Self-Reports of Voluntary Association Memberships?” Sociological Methods and Research 50(2):866-900.
Questions on voluntary association memberships have been used extensively in social scientific research for decades. Researchers generally assume that these respondent self-reports are accurate, but their measurement has never been assessed. Respondent characteristics are known to influence the accuracy of other self-report variables such as self-reported health, voting, or test scores. In this article, we investigate whether measurement error occurs in self-reports of voluntary association memberships. We use the 2004 General Social Survey (GSS) questions on voluntary associations, which include a novel resource: the actual organization names listed by respondents. We find that this widely used voluntary association classification scheme contains significant amounts of measurement error overall, especially within certain categories. Using a multilevel logistic regression, we predict accuracy of response nested within respondents and interviewers. We find that certain respondent characteristics, including some used in research on voluntary associations, influence respondent accuracy. Inaccurate and/or incorrect measurement will affect the statistics and conclusions drawn from the data on voluntary associations.
Hughes, Melanie, Pamela Paxton, Amanda Clayton, and Par Zetterberg. 2019. “Global Gender Quota Adoption, Implementation, and Reform.” Comparative Politics 51:219-238.
Over the last fifty years, gender quotas have transformed the composition of national legislatures worldwide. But a lack of systematic cross-national longitudinal data limits the questions researchers are able to ask about quotas. This article introduces a new dataset—QAROT (Quota Adoption and Reform Over Time)—the first global dataset on gender quota adoption, implementation, and reform over time. Theoretically, we clarify important issues in extant quota research. The dataset moves beyond traditional categorizations of quota policies with new measures of quota design, quota thresholds, placement mandates, sanctions for non-compliance, and quota effectiveness. We also create a single-variable measure of the presence of an effective quota to be used by comparative politics researchers to control for this powerful institutional feature.
Aksel Sundström; Pamela Paxton; Yi-ting Wang; Staffan I Lindberg. 2017. “Women's Political Empowerment: A New Global Index, 1900-2012.” World Development 94:321-335.
The political empowerment of women is a societal process crucial to development and progress. The V-Dem women’s political empowerment index (WPEI) provides information about women’s civil liberties, civil society participation, and political participation globally. Spanning from 1900 to 2012, three dimensions of empowerment, and over 170 countries, it is among the most comprehensive measures of women’s empowerment available. This paper presents a conceptualization of women’s political empowerment and provides an overview of the construction of the index and operationalization of its three sub-dimensions: Women’s civil liberties, civil society participation, and political participation. Compared to other indices measuring women’s empowerment, such as the GDI, the GEM, the GII, and the CIRI data on human rights, the V-Dem index allows more precise measurement and is superior in temporal scope and coverage of countries of the Global South. The paper demonstrates the benefits of this new index and its sub-dimensions through several empirical illustrations.