AmericasBraometer http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sitemason Content Management System http://www.sitemason.com/ 47 http://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/lapop/AmericasBarometerResearchNotes http://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/files/ldqVEI/americasbarometer.png/main.png 144 Citizens of the Americas strongly favor democracy over any other form of government, but they are deeply concerned about its broken promises. A generation ago, many countries in the region were being run by dictators, some of them brutal, some of them "dictablandas" as they were then called. Today, with the exception of Cuba, all regimes are freely elected, even if classically liberal democracies, with their full range of civil liberties guarantees and human rights protections, have not been achieved in all. Yet, in the transition from dictatorship to democracy, the promises of the latter were often oversold; democracy was all too often tied up in a neat package, including neo-liberal reforms and "marketed," as a panacea; citizens were led to believe that democracy was a certain path to guaranteed jobs, better education and health, protection from crime and liberation from corrupt public officials, among other things. In many countries, however, hopes have been repeatedly frustrated by governments that have failed to deliver on their own promises, and in many countries, citizens are not only fed up, they are questioning the value of democracy itself, asking "what has it done for me." http://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/lapop/AmericasBarometerResearchNotes?id=39935 http://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/lapop/AmericasBarometerResearchNotes?id=39935 Mon, 17 Mar 2008 20:24:00 CST AmericasBarometer Research Notes - LAPOP Since the closing years of the Twentieth Century, many Latin American countries have elected governments that identified themselves with the ideological left: Venezuela in 1999, Brazil in 2002, Argentina in 2003, Uruguay in 2004, Chile and Bolivia in 2005, and Nicaragua and Ecuador in 2006. The movement of Latin America to the left has led journalists, political analysts and political scientists to look for explanations. The most widespread of these suggests that Latin Americans' vote for political parties on the left is a reaction against the neoliberal model implemented in the region mainly during the 1990s. A deeper concern is the implications of this shift to the left for the stability of democracy under these new leftist's governments. This study explores both of these issues using the AmericasBarometer 2006/07 public opinion survey conducted by the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) at Vanderbilt University. http://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/lapop/AmericasBarometerResearchNotes?id=39934 http://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/lapop/AmericasBarometerResearchNotes?id=39934 Mon, 17 Mar 2008 20:21:00 CST AmericasBarometer Research Notes - LAPOP olitical and social tolerance, as measured in the AmericasBarometer, provides an index of the degree to which citizens are more (or less) willing to accept and respect the political rights and civil liberties of minorities or those whom they may disagree with. We measure political tolerance as the belief that critics of the political system should have core political liberties, such as the right to vote and run for office. Most analysts agree that, democracy as a form of government is more likely to persist in an environment where the proportion of intolerant citizens is low. http://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/lapop/AmericasBarometerResearchNotes?id=39933 http://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/lapop/AmericasBarometerResearchNotes?id=39933 Mon, 17 Mar 2008 20:20:00 CST AmericasBarometer Research Notes - LAPOP The 2006/07 AmericasBarometer Survey conducted by the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) at Vanderbilt University included several topics measuring the political attitudes of the citizens within the Americas. Topics included levels of national pride and the perception of common values throughout the hemisphere, including both the United States and Canada. http://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/lapop/AmericasBarometerResearchNotes?id=39932 http://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/lapop/AmericasBarometerResearchNotes?id=39932 Mon, 17 Mar 2008 20:18:00 CST AmericasBarometer Research Notes - LAPOP Since the beginning of the third wave of democratization, many countries in Latin America have undergone a deep re-engineering of their central and historically centralized state, with the purpose of reallocating political power more broadly across their systems. The shift in the balance of power has occurred not only horizontally, by separating the executive from legislative and judicial powers upon the demise of the authoritarian state, but also vertically devolving political, administrative and fiscal power to intermediate and local governments. http://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/lapop/AmericasBarometerResearchNotes?id=39931 http://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/lapop/AmericasBarometerResearchNotes?id=39931 Mon, 17 Mar 2008 20:17:00 CST AmericasBarometer Research Notes - LAPOP Violence and insecurity erode democratic attitudes in several Latin American and the Caribbean nations, according to the 2006 waive of the AmericasBarometer survey carried out by Vanderbilt University. Violent crime and insecurity are pressing problems in the Latin American and the Caribbean region, particularly in countries like Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Jamaica, and Venezuela. According to the World Bank, the homicide rate in the Latin American region has increased by 50% since the 1980s, and most of the victims of violence are young people between the ages of 15 and 25. Some Central American countries, for instance, face homicide rates above 50 per 100,000 inhabitants, and Venezuela has experienced more than a 100-percent- increment in the crime rates since 1989. http://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/lapop/AmericasBarometerResearchNotes?id=39930 http://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/lapop/AmericasBarometerResearchNotes?id=39930 Mon, 17 Mar 2008 20:14:00 CST AmericasBarometer Research Notes - LAPOP From November 2005 to December 2006 twelve countries in Latin America held presidential elections whose outcomes generated intense debate about whether the region was under the effect of a shift to the left. Although there are clearly very different shades of the left, six of these new presidents were further to the left than their predecessors (Honduras, Bolivia, Haiti, Peru, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica). In four other countries (Chile, Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela) the left remained in power. In only two of the twelve exhibited a shift to the right. http://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/lapop/AmericasBarometerResearchNotes?id=39929 http://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/lapop/AmericasBarometerResearchNotes?id=39929 Mon, 17 Mar 2008 20:13:00 CST AmericasBarometer Research Notes - LAPOP In his account of social life in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, Tocqueville noted that civic associations functioned as "schools for democracy." In recent years, the importance of civic participation for democracy was re-emphasized by Robert Putnam in his seminal work, Making Democracy Work. According to Putnam, besides its positive effects for the polity as a whole, participation in civic associations has "internal effects on participants themselves."1 Civic participation is expected to foster solidarity and cooperation among individuals who might not know each other well and therefore cultivate generalized interpersonal trust, and teach other key values for democracy, such as respect for the political rights of minorities and disliked groups. Indeed, the promotion of citizens' participation in civil society has been at the core of democratization programs around the world, and certainly in the developmental plans for Latin America. Using the AmericasBarometer 2006/07 dataset by the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP), this report explores whether civic organizations in Latin America serve as "schools for democracy" for those who join them. http://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/lapop/AmericasBarometerResearchNotes?id=39928 http://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/lapop/AmericasBarometerResearchNotes?id=39928 Mon, 17 Mar 2008 20:11:00 CST AmericasBarometer Research Notes - LAPOP Political parties are the mediating structures between society and government in representative democracies. When the links between citizens and parties are weak, this fundamental intermediary role is not in place, and as a result, society and government become disconnected. In many countries of the Americas, however, this lack of connection is a reality. Nonetheless, there remains a reservoir of support for existence of political parties: a majority of citizens believe they are necessary for democracy. How to explain this discrepancy? http://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/lapop/AmericasBarometerResearchNotes?id=39927 http://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/lapop/AmericasBarometerResearchNotes?id=39927 Mon, 17 Mar 2008 20:07:00 CST AmericasBarometer Research Notes - LAPOP Abstract We examine how current and past political violence affect democratic political capital, a set of behaviors and attitudes that contribute to democratic consolidation. Political capital—political participation, holding democratic norms, and support for national institutions—links citizens to and orients them toward the political system. Our analysis explores how political violence affects the development of democratic political capital. Using data from a 2006 survey of 20 Latin American and Caribbean countries, we find that the relationship between violence and political capital is complex: past civil conflict and past and current political violence depress political participation, past civil conflict and past violence lessen democratic norms but increase support for national institutions. Prepared for presentation at the International Studies Association meeting, San Francisco, March 29, 2008. (Draft:Not for citation without permission of the authors.) http://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/lapop/AmericasBarometerResearchNotes?id=39926 http://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/lapop/AmericasBarometerResearchNotes?id=39926 Mon, 17 Mar 2008 19:41:00 CST AmericasBarometer Research Notes - LAPOP http://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/lapop/AmericasBarometerResearchNotes Search AmericasBarometer Research Notes - LAPOP http://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/lapop/AmericasBarometerResearchNotes search_string 15 maria.c.bertini@vanderbilt.edu