European public opinion and foreign policy. A continuity dataset (1952-1970)

This dataset pools together a series of surveys on foreign and defense policy issues conducted by the United States Information Agency (USIA) of the United States in Germany, Great Britain, France, and Italy between 1952 and 1970. The data have been collected from different sources and merged, to offer a continuity dataset, namely, a dataset that includes a set of questions that have been asked more than once over almost 20 years in all 4 countries. The creation of the dataset had to face important technical challenges due to the obsolete multipunched format in which the original data were often stored and the scarce (and often poorly kept) documentation that accompanied them. Some of these technical problems were overcome thanks to the efforts of several assistants and researchers who retrieved the necessary information, cleaned and transferred these surveys to a readable format. The final product of this effort is a cross-section-time-series data set containing the response over time of approximately 80,000 European individuals from four European countries over almost two decades on issues related to peace and war, foreign and defense policies, European integration, and Transatlantic relations. These data do not only shed a unique light at what the public in Europe was thinking about war and peace during the Cold War but they allow to analyze the relationship between policy-making and public attitudes in a comparative perspective over a long-range period.