Establishing a Baseline: Bringing Innovation to the Evaluation of Cross-National Probability-Based Online Panels

A number of countries in Europe and beyond have established online or mixed mode panels with a web component based upon probability samples of the general population. This paper evaluates data from the Cross-National Online Survey (CRONOS), a cross-national online panel of ESS respondents in three countries. By comparing the CRONOS data, both with external benchmarks, and with the face-to-face data from the ESS, we assess data quality in terms of representativeness and differences in attitudinal and behavioural characteristics without confounding the findings with other changes such as mode effects. Our findings suggest that the CRONOS sample is not extremely divergent from the target population or to the ESS. However, there are sometimes cross-national differences suggesting cross-national comparability might be different when compared to using similar estimates from a face-to-face survey.