This week's resource falls under the heading of "content you are unlikely to find anywhere else in an easily accessible format." LAPOP's director, Mitchell Seligson, is the Centennial Professor of Political Science and Fellow of the Center for the Americas at Vanderbilt University. But the project is not new; Seligson founded it back in the late 1970s, when he was at the University of Pittsburgh.
Since the 1970s, Seligson, his colleagues and students have systematically surveyed the citizens of Latin America on their political views—specifically on democratic values and their behaviors related to democracy. These surveys and the studies that have emerged from them have sought to determine the extent to which women may be excluded from political participation, the effect of education on tolerance for the rights of minorities, and the effects of government corruption on citizens. The project has regularly published in-depth analyses of the data collected in Spanish-language monographs in countries throughout Latin America. These are all available for free downloading on the LAPOP webpage Studies by Contry & Year.
Through years of polling in most of the countries of Latin America, Seligson and the LAPOP have developed a treasure-trove of databases of public opinion information about political viewpoints across Latin America. This data has been the basis of scores of articles in professional journals, and has been the basis of many of the 25 Ph.D. dissertations that Seligson has supervised over the years; it has also been utilized by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in its efforts to promote Latin American democracy and, perhaps most significantly, by the governments of several Latin American countries. The data produced has been utilized as well by the World Bank in its Governance measures.
A highlight of this website is the AmericasBarometer, "an effort by LAPOP to measure democratic values and behaviors in the Americas using national probability samples of voting-age adults." Some 20 nations were included in the 2006 iteration. You can access the reports by theme or by country and year. Most items are available in Spanish as well as English.
A press release last month highlighted some of the most recent findings:
A strong indicator of the prospects for democratic stability in a given country is citizens’ belief in the legitimacy of their governments and their willingness to respect the right to political opposition. By that standard, the highest scoring countries (on a 0-100 scale) are Canada (68), the United States (64), Costa Rica (50), Uruguay (46) and Mexico (41). At the low end are Nicaragua (25), Haiti (24), Paraguay (20), Bolivia (20) and Ecuador (12).
While the majority of citizens in the Americas believe that democracy is the best possible political system, percentages still vary dramatically, with 91 percent in the United States, 87 percent in Canada, 82 percent in Uruguay, 77 percent in Costa Rica, 69 percent in Mexico and 60 percent in Nicaragua and Peru ranking democracy the best.
More than 15 years after the end of the Cold War, ideology still matters in Latin America, a region that is slightly to the right of the world average (on a 1-10 left/right scale). For the region as a whole, those on the left are significantly less likely to believe in the legitimacy of their political systems and much less likely to believe that democracy is the best possible system.
Countries included in the survey: Mexico, the United States, Canada, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Ecuador, Bolivia, Colombia, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, Peru, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Guyana and Jamaica.
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