The Societal Response Index: Measuring Public Response to Sexual Misconduct Disclosure

Núria Rodríguez-Planas

No 12801, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: How societies respond after women disclose sexual misconduct shapes survivors’ well-being, reporting behavior, institutional accountability, and social norms. Yet, no validated measure of society’s collective public response following disclosure exists. This paper introduces the Societal Response Index (SRI), a pre-registered, multidimensional framework with 5 complementary dimensions — volume persistence (VP), secondary victimization, identity exposure, supportive/contested response, and temporal reactivation — and develops and validates its first dimension, VP. Using census-level tweet counts from the X fullarchive API, I construct weekly attention series for fourteen sexual misconduct cases spanning Spain, the United States, and France (2011–2026). VP’s three highest-attention weeks fall within two weeks of a pre-registered milestone for all fourteen cases; same-day detection reaches 75% and within-14-day detection reaches 91%. VP correlates positively and significantly with Google Trends for all cases. The measurement architecture, keyword dictionaries, and event timelines will be released as a public good upon publication. As an illustration of substantive reach, official reporting of sexual offenses tends to rise following case milestones.

Keywords: societal response; public attention; index construction; text as data; sexual misconduct; gender violence; pre-registration; Spain; United States; France (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C43 C55 J16 K14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12801

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