Public perception of state restrictive policy: problems of measurement

The article addresses conceptual and methodological issues in measuring citizens' political attitudes toward restrictive government policies. The first part of the study focuses on integrating disparate groups of research on political support and political attitudes toward various restrictive government measures into a unified category for measuring political attitudes toward restrictive policies. With rare exceptions, empirical studies on compliance based on survey methods and respondents' self-reports can also be included in this category. After consolidating these research groups into a single direction for studying citizens' attitudes toward restrictive policies, the author tackles the issue of validity in empirical studies of this kind. The results of a statistical analysis of studies on restrictive policies published in the Scopus database over the past ten years reveal that the overwhelming majority of contemporary researchers in this field continue to rely on survey-based formats. This raises several questions about the internal and external validity of such studies due to the sensitivity of questions posed to respondents. Additionally, several issues remain unresolved in existing research, such as forming excessively narrow samples, the overt nature of question design for respondents, and challenges in generalizing results in studies that use photo and video materials as interventions. A solution to the problem of validity violations is the use of experimental design, which is applied significantly less frequently in studies on restrictive policies compared to classical surveys. This includes list experiments, support experiments, and factorial surveys. The article also discusses examples of the proper use of such research designs, referencing recent studies.