The Democracy Survey Database
The database will be active soon.
 Since the mid-1990s USAID has funded surveys on citizen attitudes towards democracy, corruption, transparency, participation, and other democratic values in Latin America. Designed by the University of Pittsburgh's Public Opinion Project for Latin America, these surveys generate systematic information for the USAID missions to design and improve their democracy assistance programs. These surveys contain invaluable information on the development of democratic cultures that can be fruitfully analyzed for academic, policy purposes, and further USAID programming.
Although the surveys are country specific and even differ across years, there are identical modules of questions that span years as well as the region and allow for comparative analysis on municipality, state, gender, education, and other levels. In addition, conventional social science research methods informed the research design, the administration of the surveys and the analysis of the findings.
The surveys provide crucial insights into how democratic political cultures develop. In every country in which the surveys were administered, the initial survey established base-line data against which the development of democratic political culture can be measured and assessed. A number of USAID missions have also conducted follow-up studies at regular (usually two-year) intervals in their respective countries to also be included in the database.
With the increasing importance of issues such as conflict, violence, anti-corruption, and other democracy concerns, the surveys have demonstrated great importance within USAID. The surveys offer solid evidence of citizen perspectives on democracy issues. They serve as a critical tool for assessing the state of democracy, which should extend beyond USAID to benefit decision-makers, donor organizations, civil societies, universities, and citizens through public access. The surveys contain a wealth of information that can be analyzed to answer significant questions about the process, prospects, and problems of democratic development by accessing this and other existing databases, as well as other related research.
The idea for the Democracy Survey Database grew out of USAID's Bureau for Latin America and the Caribbean during the late 1990's. USAID had by then funded several surveys on citizen attitudes towards democracy, corruption and related subjects. Because the majority of the surveys were developed from a common framework and included similar questions, the possibility to develop a single integrated, web-accessible database source seemed feasible.
The Database project is a working collaboration between USAID and Vanderbilt University's Center for Latin American and Iberian Studies.
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