What the Balkan Barometer Can and Cannot Rank: A Measurement Audit of the Western Balkans' Flagship Survey

Milos Kankaras

No 6487z_v1, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: The Balkan Barometer, annual since 2015 with roughly 1,000 face-to-face interviews in each of six Western Balkan economies, is cited across the region as what its citizens think. We evaluate it as a measuring instrument from the Regional Cooperation Council's own released microdata for 2023 to 2025, within a total survey error frame. The published percentages reproduce from the microdata (440 of 444 cells within one point). Of the fifteen pairwise economy differences on each of thirty 2025 headline items, 71 percent are resolvable at a design effect of 2.0, but only 40 percent of adjacent-rank pairs are: six points is the least difference at which two economies of 1,000 can be told apart. The WB6 figure is an unweighted mean of six economies whose populations differ tenfold; under population weights it moves by 6 to 12 points on the most-quoted items, including EU membership (64 versus 58 percent in 2025). Of twenty-three headline series present in all three editions, four are comparable throughout; between 2024 and 2025 the changed series moved by 14 points on average against 6 for the stable ones. The 2025 institutional battery is scalar invariant once two cells are freed, police in Kosovo* and courts in North Macedonia; with them freed, Kosovo*'s raw-score lead disappears and the top three economies cannot be separated. The two published editions score 16 of 32 on a documentation checklist built from what the ESS, the Eurobarometer and the AAPOR Transparency Initiative publish routinely; precision, comparability and limitations score zero. We report two database errors and a file anomaly for correction, and close with the four things a technical report would need to contain.

Date: 2026-09-24
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:6487z_v1

DOI: 10.31235/osf.io/6487z_v1

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