TY - THES A1 - Ramirez-Ruiz, Sebastian T1 - The Evidence Interface: How policymakers encounter, engage with, and make sense of scientific knowledge N2 - While evidence can be a critical input for policymaking, our understanding of how it flows from research and expert communities to elite decision-makers remains remarkably limited. Studying these flows, and the relationships that underpin them, is inherently difficult. They are fragmented, politically mediated, and largely unobservable. This dissertation addresses these challenges by advancing a data-extensive computational social science approach, drawing on alternative (largely unstructured) data sources to systematically observe and characterize elite–evidence interactions. This project consists of four studies, involves the creation of new data infrastructures, and provides a foundation for future research and a proof of concept for investigating these dynamics. The first study analyzes behavioral data from nearly 3,700 legislators across 12 countries to examine how elected officials follow and interact with academic researchers on Twitter, revealing that engagement is rare and shaped by partisanship and educational background, though exogenous shocks such as the COVID-19 pandemic can increase attention to medical expertise. The second study maps the evidence cited in 1.2 million policy documents across 185 countries, demonstrating the persistent dominance of research produced in the global North and highlighting systematic epistemic asymmetries in policy-relevant knowledge. The third study introduces the Bundestag Expert Witness Tracker (BEWIT), capturing all public expert hearings in the German Bundestag from 2009 to 2024, and shows how political gatekeeping and transparency reforms shape which experts inform legislative processes. The fourth study develops and validates the INSPIRE instrument, a psychometrically robust measure of scientific evidence consumption literacy for public policy contexts, providing a framework for assessing individuals’ capacity to engage with complex evidence. Together, these studies offer new perspectives on who gets seen and heard, what kinds of expertise gain traction, and how institutional and individual factors can shape evidence use in practice. T3 - Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School - 12/2025 Y1 - 2025 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-60150 U6 - https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-6015 N1 - Parts of this dissertation have been published: I. Ramirez-Ruiz, S. (2025). Politicians from 12 countries rarely engage with researchers on social media, but this can change when expertise gains salience (No. wqbe4_v1). OSF Preprints. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/wqbe4_v1 II. Ramirez-Ruiz, S., & Senninger, R. (2025). Policy documents across 185 countries predominantly rely on evidence from the Global North (No. w8q3y_v1). OSF Preprints. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/w8q3y_v1 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Munzert, Simon A1 - Ramirez-Ruiz, Sebastian A1 - Çalı, Başak A1 - Stoetzer, Lukas F. A1 - Gohdes, Anita R. A1 - Lowe, Will T1 - Prioritization preferences for COVID-19 vaccination are consistent across five countries JF - Humanities and Social Sciences Communications N2 - Vaccination against COVID-19 is making progress globally, but vaccine doses remain a rare commodity in many parts of the world. New virus variants require vaccines to be updated, hampering the availability of effective vaccines. Policymakers have defined criteria to regulate who gets priority access to the vaccination, such as age, health complications, or those who hold system-relevant jobs. But how does the public think about vaccine allocation? To explore those preferences, we surveyed respondents in Brazil, Germany, Italy, Poland, and the United States from September to December of 2020 using ranking and forced-choice tasks. We find that public preferences are consistent with expert guidelines prioritizing health-care workers and people with medical preconditions. However, the public also considers those signing up early for vaccination and citizens of the country to be more deserving than later-comers and non-citizens. These results hold across measures, countries, and socio-demographic subgroups. Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-022-01392-1 VL - 9 IS - 439 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ramirez-Ruiz, Sebastian T1 - The unexpected results of the peace referendum changed conflict termination preferences in Colombia JF - Research & Politics N2 - In October 2016, the Colombian electorate narrowly rejected in a plebiscite the final agreement to end the conflict with the longest-running armed insurgency in the Western Hemisphere, the FARC. The plebiscite’s result provides a unique opportunity to assess dynamics in civil conflict termination preferences. I exploit the unexpected victory of the No vote, observed during the AmericasBarometer fieldwork, to estimate the effect of the uncertainty about the trajectory of the conflict generated by the outcome of the plebiscite. The unexpected defeat of the peace plebiscite did not measurably change the expressed support for the recently rejected agreement. However, it increased the public support for a negotiated rather than military settlement to the conflict, as well as respondents’ willingness to give concessions to FARC members. These findings inform the broader literature on civilian preferences toward civil conflict termination and compromise. Y1 - 2024 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1177/20531680241233793 SN - 2053-1680 N1 - Open Access publication is funded by the Hertie School Library VL - 11 IS - 1 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Munzert, Simon A1 - Ramirez-Ruiz, Sebastian A1 - Barberá, Pablo A1 - Guess, Andrew M. A1 - Yang, JungHwan T1 - Who’s cheating on your survey? A detection approach with digital trace data JF - Political Science Research and Methods N2 - In this note, we provide direct evidence of cheating in online assessments of political knowledge. We combine survey responses with web tracking data of a German and a US online panel to assess whether people turn to external sources for answers. We observe item-level prevalence rates of cheating that range from 0 to 12 percent depending on question type and difficulty, and find that 23 percent of respondents engage in cheating at least once across waves. In the US panel, which employed a commitment pledge, we observe cheating behavior among less than 1 percent of respondents. We find robust respondent- and item-level characteristics associated with cheating. However, item-level instances of cheating are rare events; as such, they are difficult to predict and correct for without tracking data. Even so, our analyses comparing naive and cheating-corrected measures of political knowledge provide evidence that cheating does not substantially distort inferences. Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2022.42 SP - 1 EP - 9 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Munzert, Simon A1 - Ramirez-Ruiz, Sebastian T1 - Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Voting Advice Applications JF - Political Communication N2 - We review the influence of voting advice applications (VAAs) on three core outcomes: turnout, vote choice, and issue knowledge. In a meta-analysis of 55 effects reported in 22 studies, comprising 73,673 participants in 9 countries, we find strong evidence for positive effects of VAA usage on reported turnout (OR = 1.87; 95% CI = [1.50, 2.33]) and vote choice (OR = 1.44; 95% CI = [1.16, 1.78]) as well as modest evidence on knowledge increase (partial correlation = 0.09; 95% CI = [−0.01, 0.18]). At the same time, we observe large heterogeneity in effect sizes, for which study design turns out to be a key driver. Effects are substantively weaker in causally more rigorous experimental studies. We highlight the need for more well-powered experimental research as well as studies focusing on the acquisition of knowledge in VAA usage. KW - Meta-analysis KW - VAA KW - voting advice application Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2020.1843572 ER - TY - RPRT A1 - Munzert, Simon A1 - Ramirez-Ruiz, Sebastian A1 - Watteler, Oliver A1 - Breuer, Johannes A1 - Batzdorfer, Veronika A1 - Eder, Christina A1 - Wiltshire, Deborah A A1 - Barberá, Pablo A1 - Guess, Andrew Markus A1 - Yang, JungHwan T1 - Publishing Combined Web Tracking and Survey Data N2 - Combined survey and web tracking data have great potential for social-scientific research. They allow linking information on online behavior with data on reported offline behavior, opinions, and attitudes. At the same time, ethical, legal, and technical challenges make it difficult to disseminate linked web tracking data to the scientific community. This whitepaper aims to address these challenges by providing guidance for researchers and archivists, discussing legal, practical, and ethical aspects, disclosure risks, and establishing a framework for publishing web tracking data. Recommendations for best practices are also provided based on experiences from a research project funded by the German Consortium for the Social, Behavioural, Educational and Economic Sciences. Y1 - 2023 U6 - https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/y4v8z PB - Center for Open Science ER -