Bio
Welcome!
I am a quantitative social scientist. I received a Ph.D. (European Doctor) in political science from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Previously, I was a TMR research fellow at the Mannheim Center for European Social Research (MZES), University of Mannheim. I got specialized training at the University of California Berkeley, University of Oslo, University of Essex, and Research and Expertise Centre for Survey Methodology.
I am the Head of Methodology and Research at the Center for Opinion Studies (CEO), the official institute for public opinion studies of the Government of Catalonia (Spain). I also teach at the Open University of Catalonia UOC (political behavior), and at the Public Administration School of Catalonia EAPC (data analysis and survey methodology). I am a member of the research group "Democracy, Elections, and Citizenship" at the Department of Political Science of the Autonomous University of Barcelona.
My substantive research interests revolve around political behavior, public opinion, cultural values, political sociology, cross-cultural psychology and social epidemiology. Methodologically, I'm specially concerned about age-period-cohort effects, multilevel modeling, time series analysis, causal inference, experiments, and survey methods. More recently, I am becoming interested in cultural evolution, analytical sociology and agent-based simulations of social and political phenomena.
My research appears in a number of journals including British Journal of Political Science, Public Opinion Quarterly, Frontiers in Public Health, European Political Science Review, Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, Social Indicators Research, Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, and International Journal of Public Opinion Research. My book, The Rhythm of Modernization. How Values Change over Time, has been published by Brill in 2019 (International Studies in Sociology and Social Anthropology series, vol. 132).
Recent publications
Rodon, T. & Tormos, R. (2023): "The Burden of a Violent Past: Formative Experiences of Repression and Support for Secession in Catalonia", British Journal of Political Science
Tormos, R. & T. Verge (2022): "Challenging the Gender Gap in Political Interest: A By-product of Survey Specification Error", Public Opinion Quarterly
Recent book
Tormos, R., (2019): The Rhythm of Modernization. How Values Change over Time. Leiden & Boston: Brill Academic Publishers.
In The Rhythm of Modernization, Raül Tormos analyses the pace at which belief systems change across the developed world during the modernization process. It is often assumed that value change follows the slow rhythm of generational replacement. This book, however, reports trends that contradict this assumption in the field of values. Challenging Inglehart’s modernization theory, the transition from traditional to modern values happens much quicker than predicted. Many “baby-boomers” who were church-going, morally conservative materialists when they were young, become unchurched and morally tolerant postmaterialists in their later years. Using surveys from multiple countries over many years, and applying cutting-edge statistical techniques, this book shows how citizens quickly adapt their belief systems to new circumstances throughout their lives.
Link to the presentation of the book here
