Global Barometer Surveys

The Globalbarometer Surveys (GBS) is the first comprehensive effort to measure, at a mass level, the current social, political, and economic atmosphere around the world. It provides an independent, non-partisan, multidisciplinary view of public opinion on a range of policy-relevant issues. The Globalbarometer represents an indigenous initiative to develop a global intellectual community of democracy studies surveying ordinary citizens. The project’s agenda is built on the premises that public attitudes and orientations toward democracy are crucial to the process of political legitimacy and that political culture operates autonomously as a key factor mediating the impact of socio-economic modernization on the evolution of the political regime, particularly in democracies. Originally inspired by the Eurobarometer, which was funded in the 1970s to track mass attitudes in what was then the European Community; new regional barometers have further developed innovative approaches that have been adapted to world regions undergoing rapid political and economic change. As more regions join the Globalbarometer network, a standard approach is being established to ensure that the data is comparable and reliable. The Globalbarometer Surveys now cover 3 continents, more than 72% of the world’s population, and it is still expanding. The GBS now cover six regions, including Africa (Afrobarometer), East and Southeast Asia (Asian Barometer), South Asia (South Asia Barometer), Central and South America (Latinobarómetro), the Middle East (Arab Barometer), and countries of former Soviet Union (Eurasia Barometer).  Besides Africa, East and South Asia, Central and South America, and the Middle East, the Caribbean region is the possible region that will join the network once surveys get off the ground in the area.

World Values Survey

The World Values Survey (WVS) is an international research program devoted to the scientific and academic study of social, political, economic, religious and cultural values of people in the world. The project’s goal is to assess which impact values stability or change over time has on the social, political and economic development of countries and societies. The project grew out of the European Values Study and was started in 1981 by its Founder and first President (1981-2013) Professor Ronald Inglehart from the University of Michigan (USA) and his team, and since then has been operating in more than 120 world societies representing 94% of the world population. The main research instrument of the project is a representative comparative social survey which is conducted globally every 5 years. Extensive geographical and thematic scope, free availability of survey data and project findings for broad public turned the WVS into one of the most authoritative and widely-used cross-national surveys in the social sciences. At the moment, WVS is the largest non-commercial cross-national empirical time-series investigation of human beliefs and values ever executed. The findings are valuable for policy makers seeking to build civil society and democratic institutions in developing countries. The WVS data is also frequently used by governments around the world, scholars, students, journalists and international organizations and institutions such as the World Bank and the United Nations.

Comparative National Elections Project
The Comparative National Elections Project (CNEP) is a multi-year, multi-county examination of how citizens in democracies around the world receive information about policies, parties, candidates, and politics during the course of election campaigns. The Comparative National Elections Project (CNEP) is a partnership among scholars who have conducted election surveys on five continents. The geographical scope and theoretical concerns of the CNEP have substantially evolved over the past three decades, with essential items from earlier research foci have been retained in the common core questionnaire and merged dataset, creating time-series that for some countries stretch back over more than three decades. Founded in the late 1980s, it now includes 59 surveys from 1990 to 2020 in 30 different countries, with multiple election surveys in 16 countries. The Ohio State University is the host for this CNEP website, and the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at OSU has generously sponsored some of these surveys and research conferences focused on them. Data from most of the surveys conducted through 2018 are freely available to the general public, as is a merged file containing data from 48 national election surveys. Richard Gunther and Paul Beck, both of the Department of Political Science and the Mershon Center at Ohio State, are currently the co-directors of CNEP.

Latin American Public Opinion Project

The Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP), initiated over two decades ago by Mitchell A. Seligson (LAPOP founder and currently Senior Advisor) and directed by Elizabeth J. Zechmeister and Associate Director, Noam Lupu, is hosted by Vanderbilt University. The AmericasBarometer, one of the many and growing activities of LAPOP, is the only survey of democratic public opinion and behavior that covers the Americas (North, Central, South and the Caribbean). It is an effort by LAPOP to measure democratic values and behaviors in the Americas using national probability samples of voting-age adults. These surveys have given rise to scores of studies and publications on various aspects of democratic values and behaviors in the Americas. The project has regularly published in-depth analyses of the data collected in Spanish-language monographs in countries throughout Latin America and in English and French in the Caribbean. Through years of polling in most of the countries of the LAC region, LAPOP has developed a treasure-trove of databases of public opinion information about political viewpoints across the Americas. This data has been the basis of scores of articles in professional journals, and has been the basis of many of the 30+ Ph.D. dissertations that faculty associated with LAPOP have supervised over the years; it has also been utilized by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), World Bank, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and others in reports, indices, and analyses.