The proposed research project is dedicated to understanding the potential influence of macro determinants on public interest in topics of surveillance. Comparative analysis will be conducted in 26 countries of the European Union (except Malta and Bulgaria - for which there is no available data in Google tool). The level of public interest was estimated based on number of Google searches. The following specific topics were examined within the two groups: (1) The first group describes “institutional-personal” strategies to search for information; in this group we have checked number of searches about Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, WikiLeaks and NSA – people and organizations directly related to the topics of surveillance. We called this group “Data Leaks” because they symbolise two sides of the same coin - those that leak data and those that have had their data leaked. All searches were checked in local languages and alphabets. (2) The second “conceptual” group describing the search for information on Data security, Internet surveillance and Data protection law. We called this group “Data Surveillance” as they are all subjects brought to public attention by Edward Snowden and the media and relate closely to the topics of surveillance. All searches were checked in local languages and alphabets.
The level of public interest, within each of the 26 EU countries, was estimated based on number of Google searches for each of the analysed topics, covering a period of 24 months, from March 2013 to April 2015. These data are dependent variables. While national data for this period, such as GDP per capita (data from the World Bank) for 2011, 2012, 2013; the Democracy Index (data from The Economist) for 2011, 2012, 2013 and Interest in Politics for 2012-2014 (data from the Data Harmonization project, dataharmonization.org), are independent variables. The control variables (population characteristics of countries) will also be taken into account.
