The goal of the survey is to measure attitudes towards the Liberal Script from a global perspective. For the first wave of PALS, this meant that the set of surveyed countries had to cover all regions of the world and, within each region, cover variation in terms of economic and political conditions.

Our country selection followed a two-step logic. In the first step, we sorted the countries based on characteristics from three dimensions: (a) the geographical region distinguishing between Africa, the Americas, Asia (including Oceania), and Europe, following the UN classification; (b) V-Dem’s Electoral Democracy Index which sets apart democratic from autocratic regimes on a continuous scale; (c) a combination of the Human Development Index and the Gini coefficient which adds information on the status of societal development and core socio-economic issues. We restricted our set of countries to those with at least one million inhabitants, and for which we had valid empirical data on all three dimensions. This resulted in a set of 142 countries. We then made use of the logic of experimental research to identify efficient designs: a full factorial design consisted of 16 combinations (41*2² = 16) (i.e., a two-by-two table for each geographic region); the efficient fractional factorial design left us with 13 country-groups, from each of which one country was selected. In a second step, we added a group of 13 additional countries. For these, the rationale was (a) to select interesting cases (i.e., with regards to existing data and literature, coverage of typical typologies, but also geopolitical relevance) and (b) to oversample the group of democratic countries to assess the support or rejection in the context of a dominant Liberal Script.

The below figure shows the 26 selected countries. Originally, Morocco was among the 26 selected countries. However, during the fieldwork phase, the Moroccan government withdrew the official permission to conduct the survey. As a result, Tunisia was added to the country set as a substitute for Morocco.

In a second wave, we interviewed citizens in 10 countries. We selected four new countries that can be described as battleground states when it comes to contestations of the Liberal Script: Hungary, Israel, Serbia, and Thailand. All four countries have experienced severe internal or external contestations in the last decades. We also re-run the survey in France, Germany, Latvia, Poland, Turkey, and the USA. These six countries were expected to be strongly affected by the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine.

Full list of selected countries: Africa: Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Tunisia Americas: Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Peru, USA Asia and Oceania: Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Turkey Europe: France, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden, UK