Testing the Constitutive Account. Companion research note to What Institutions Say: Study 2 and a programme of eight studies

This note accompanies the essay What Institutions Say: Socialism, Symbolic Institutions and the Quality of Human Relations. The essay proposes that the access rule of a collective institution — its scope, universal or selective, and its verification regime, presumed entitlement or presumed fraud — affects the standing it assigns to people, and through that the trust they extend to one another and to public authority. Six propositions are stated there with the conditions under which each would fail. Several are untested, and the essay does not assert them. This note is where they are carried. It does two things. It reports in full the first attempt to test one of them, a multilevel analysis of European Social Survey Rounds 4 and 8 whose pre-specified hypothesis was not supported, together with the code and outputs needed to reproduce or contest that finding. And it sets out designs for eight studies, each with the result that would count against the proposition it tests, an honest account of what an unaffiliated researcher can and cannot reach, and the ethical constraints that apply — in one case decisively.