Las encuestas en las administraciones públicas españolas: evidencias preliminares de un escenario multinivel / Surveys in the Spanish government: P:reliminary evidence of a multilevel stage

What types of attitudinal surveys are produced by public administrations? Who commissions, uses and analyses them? What are their methodological characteristics and for which policies are they used? Do the contents of surveys commissioned by public administrations at different territorial levels differ? We lack any systematic empirical information to answer these questions in the Spanish case. Three public sources (corresponding to the local, regional and national level) are used to establish a preliminary picture of the attitudinal surveys commissioned by Spanish public administrations. This paper makes a comparative description of these surveys and discusses their differing characteristics. We create a new database of 350 surveys, where characteristics of the survey promoters, its contents and technical details are discussed. The surveys carried out at each of the three levels are quite different. The policy agendas of these administrations, their resources and especially the organisational characteristics of these institutions at their creation are the most likely explanations of many of their differences.