The survey “Public Attitudes towards the Liberal Script” (PALS) is a global comparative public opinion survey originally conducted in 26 countries from all regions of the world with more than 50,000 respondents. In a second wave of data collection, data collected in 10 countries by interviewing more than 10,000 respondents. PALS measures attitudes towards the Liberal Script – whether it is accepted or contested – as well as individual characteristics potentially related to such attitudes.

While contestations of the Liberal Script are usually observable through actors like protest movements, political parties, or political regimes and their resulting actions, the extent to which the population supports contestants or defendants of the Liberal Script is often less clear. Yet, the enactment and survival of a script crucially depends on the acceptance and support of the script by the members of a society. Citizens’ views are thus important for understanding contemporary contestations of the Liberal Script, as a lack of support represents a window of opportunity for opponents of the Liberal Script. Investigating the extent of this window of opportunity constitutes the first goal of PALS.

A second key goal of the survey is to extend our understanding of the Liberal Script and its contestations from a Western focus to a more global perspective. The selection of countries for the survey was tailored towards including the most heterogeneous set of countries from the beginning. The survey should cover all regions of the globe and as many political and cultural contexts as possible. Moreover, the questionnaire was developed in a de-contextualized manner making it applicable to very different societies.

Lastly, an additional motivation stems from the state of existing comparative efforts to measure public opinion. We identified a lack of global comparative research that explicitly focuses on issues regarding liberalism, liberal values, and institutions while not being confined to the Global North. The existing comparative surveys tend to produce solely observational data. As some of the research questions of SCRIPTS are causal in nature, we included survey experiments in PALS that allow for causal identification.

Examples of the kind of research questions that can be addressed using the data from the survey are: Which elements of the Liberal Script are supported, which are strongly contested, and how do individuals from different countries or different social groups differ in their preferences? Do people make a distinction between desirable and liberal characteristics of a society? What is the role of authoritarian values concerning the acceptance or contestation of the Liberal Script? What do people perceive necessary to live a self-determined life, and what is deemed a threat to societies? All these questions are of major importance in current debates, regardless of whether they are academic in nature or taking place in public discourse.