The Kellogg Institute at the University of Notre Dame has partnered with the Center for Global Democracy at Vanderbilt University to fund the 2025-26 AmericasBarometer Survey after a loss of funding from the United States Agency for International Development.
AmericasBarometer is a project under the Latin American Public Opinion Project. “[LAPOP] was designed as a series of surveys that would provide essential data on people’s support of democracy, but not only democracy, also institutions. It is broadly used by academics and practitioners, as a unique source of information about public opinion in Latin America,” global affairs professor Laura Gamboa said.
Political science professor and director of the Kellogg Institute Aníbal Pérez-Liñán shared that about 70% of funding for AmericasBarometer came from USAID. After the loss of this funding, the Center for Global Democracy and the Kellogg Institute have come together and agreed to each pay for half of the cost of conducting the survey for this year. Vanderbilt’s contribution is expected to go toward the researchers and Notre Dame’s contribution is expected to go toward the fieldwork.
“The hope for future years is that Vanderbilt and Notre Dame will continue to collaborate in supporting AmericasBarometer, but, eventually, we are hoping that we will be able to find new sources of funding,” Pérez-Liñán said.
In discussing the funding arrangement for this year, Gamboa was supportive. “It is a far cry from a definite solution to the main problem, but it will certainly help and save LAPOP in the long term,” Gamboa said.
Both Pérez-Liñán and Michael Coppedge, a professor of political science, emphasized the ways that this project positively positions Notre Dame within the larger conversation of democracy.
“The AmericasBarometer is a very important piece in the plans for the democracy initiative, because it positions Notre Dame to be a very important university, a very important player, in the community of comparative research around themes of democracy, polarization, democratic values and so on across the Americas," Pérez-Liñán said.
Coppedge shared that funding a highly-regarded survey reflects well on the University. “One of the goals of the Democracy Initiative is to strengthen the whole university’s reputation for being a center for democracy studies, for being a center of scholarship on democracy. We already have a really good reputation in political science for studying democracy, but I think this would give us a big shot in the arm because this survey project is, in my judgment, the best, highest quality survey project on Latin American politics,” he said.
Most of the countries in the Western Hemisphere are surveyed, with the exception of Cuba, sometimes Venezuela and a few small island nations. “It is hard to get public opinion data in authoritarian countries and you do not want to expose interviewers and you do not want to expose people answering the questions,” Gamboa said.
Coppedge said some people are exaggerating the trend of democratic backsliding. “If you average levels of democracy around the world by year, there is a dip there, and it is statistically significant — we can conclude that this is not just normal variation that you might see from year to year that happens by chance. There's definitely a trend there, but I don't want to exaggerate how bad the trend is. Most countries don't change their regime most of the time in most years, and that is still true,” Coppedge said.
Even if there isn't strong evidence of declining democratic performance, Coppedge believes that data on perception of government legitimacy serves an important purpose.
“There is a separate valid question, which is ‘how legitimate do people think their government is?’ and that is somewhat independent of how well it actually performs,” said Coppedge citing China, Italy and France as countries in which the public faith in the government does not match the level of democracy within such governments.
In order to track such changes, Gamboa said it is “so important to have regular measurements of public opinion and it is not like you can go back in time and do them once you get funding. This is something that needs to happen and needs to happen right now.”
The data is available to the public and used by a variety of audiences, including academics, researchers, teachers and journalists.
