Advantages and limitations of panel surveys

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The day’s session is devoted to panel surveys, their advantages and limitations.Panels have been used in the social sciences since the 1930s, thanks to the pioneering work of Paul Lazarsfeld and the Columbia school. Today, there are many large-scale national and comparative panels (SHARE, SILC, Household panel surveys, for example), but they do not often include political questions. France was rather late to this field, with the exception of the early electoral panels of 1958 and 1965-1967, as well as the pioneering youth panel of Anne Muxel in 1986. Although the CEVIPOF (Centre de recherches politiques de Sciences Po) does have a long tradition of electoral panels (2007, 2002, ENEF 2017 and 2022), it has mostly focused on short periods of time and data are often not available. One recent major achievement in the field is the ELIPSS (Études longitudinales par Internet pour les sciences sociales) project. But these panels also have their limitations.Drawing from his work on political involvement based on large-scale panels, Paul Marx (University of Duisburg-Essen, Visiting Professor at CEE) talks about his longitudinal approach, based on comparative panel surveys, and shows how it captures better than cross-sectional data the political impact of income change or unemployment. Nonna Mayer (Sciences Po-CEE, CNRS) discusses the pros and cons of these techniques in political science research in general.