Mitchell A. Seligson’s research while affiliated with Vanderbilt University and other places

The study of political participation in Latin America has, until very recently, been too narrowly conceived by social scientists, focusing largely on elites and violence. The former is illustrated by studies of the military (Lieuwen, 1961, 1966; Johnson, 1964; Horowitz, 1967; Fagen and Cornelius, 1970; Schmitter, 1973), the Church (Dillon Soares, 1967; Solari, 1967; Petersen, 1970; Suchlicki, 1972), industrialists (Cardoso, 1967; Polit, 1968; Petras and Cook, 1973), and large landholders (Whetten, 1948; Carroll, 1966; Feder, 1971; Cockroft, 1972). Attention to violent forms of political participation is found in studies of revolution and the military coup d'état (Payne, 1965; Needler, 1968; Von Lazar and Kaufman, 1969; Moreno and Mitrani, 1971; Kohl and Litt, 1974). Those studies that have centered on nonviolent mass participation (Horowitz, 1970) have generally been limited to elections (for example, Martz, 1967; Petras, 1970), political parties (Fitzgibbon, 1957; Ciria, 1974), and labor unions (Payne, 1965; Angell, 1972; Erickson et al., 1974). As a result of the narrowness of these approaches, we have only a partial image of the faces of the Latin American citizen political activity; we have underestimated the scope of such activity and have failed to investigate its many forms.

When citizens approach political decision-making tasks, they carry with them differing values and preferences, yielding heterogeneity in their assessments. This study explores one source of variation, the negativity bias, a response tendency in which individuals characteristically react more strongly to highly-salient negative information than to comparable positive information. In political science, most prior research on the negativity bias has been of two forms, either treating the bias as a universal, or seeking to identify correlates of individual-level variation. We advance a third track, one in which the individual-level negativity bias is viewed as a source of heterogeneity in the outcome of judgmental processes. If individual-level variation, labeled here as dispositional negativity, manifests itself in political decision-making, then variation in dispositional negativity may prompt otherwise similar citizens exposed to identical information to produce disparate responses. To explore this, we present a conceptual framework that clarifies the potential role of dispositional negativity in political judgment. Expectations arising from this framework are tested with data from vignette experiments included on two surveys: one with a national sample of Costa Ricans, and a second with respondents from three U.S. states.

While the positive effect of education on political tolerance toward minorities is well-known, we understand far less about education’s impact on tolerance across varying contexts. Utilizing multilevel statistical techniques, we find an interactive effect indicating that education at the individual level has a greater effect on political tolerance toward those who identify as homosexuals in wealthier countries. The results suggest that (1) completing additional levels of schooling may be insufficient to promote tolerant attitudes toward this minority and (2) more investment in education leads to stronger impacts. We support this finding by showing that where educational expenditures are greater, the average impact of secondary education is larger. The study uses individual data from 26 countries in the 2014 AmericasBarometer as well as indicators from the World Bank DataBank and Freedom House.

Coups d’état, once a common end for democracies in the Americas, have declined sharply in recent years. This article investigates whether overall public support for coups is also in decline. Examining 21 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean from 2004 to 2014 helps to evaluate two alternative theses on democratization: Mainwaring and Pérez-Liñán’s 2013 normative regime preferences theory, which inquires (but does not test) whether public opinion can signal to elites a reluctance or willingness to support a coup; and classic modernization theory (Inglehart 1988; Inglehart and Welzel 2005). We find a substantively meaningful effect of democratic attitudes on coup support and a weak effect for national wealth, from which we infer that evolving elite values and preferences are paralleled at the mass level and that together, those two trends play a stronger role in the consolidation of democratic regimes than does modernization.

This chapter provides some of the notable efforts made in advancing high quality scientific survey research in Latin America and the Caribbean. It also addresses the increasingly serious challenges that data collection in the region has to confront, namely, high and increasing levels of crime and violence, frequent difficulties in obtaining comprehensive high quality census data and census maps, and restrictions on freedom of expression, particularly in the media. The chapter discusses techniques for addressing these challenges, as well as for using new technology to greatly improve the quality of data via reduction of fieldwork error and interview fabrication. It deals with the goal of sharing techniques for overcoming, or at least minimizing, the difficulties imposed by these challenges to data collection both within and outside the Latin America and Caribbean region. Yet, when the design is explicitly national in scope, challenges arise when census data and census maps are out of date or unavailable.

This study offers new insights into the complex and underexplored nature of reported threats. Combining the theoretical framework of speech act analysis with the concept of reported speech, the study finds six categories of reported threats, uncovering ones that have been overlooked by existing scholarship thus far. The texts presented are derived from audio-recordings of 847 interviews carried out in four Central American countries: El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Panama between 2010 and 2014. References to threats and threat narratives came from school teachers, community leaders, police officers, clergy, and members of municipal violence prevention committees. The interpretation of indirect and implicit threats are made in the social context of communities under siege, that is, under constant attack by local gangs, many of whom are connected to national gangs and international narcotrafficking cartels. The credibility of the different types of threats is evaluated, using Goffman’s (1981) insight into the complexity of speaker roles in face-to-face interaction. © 2016, International Pragmatics Association. All rights reserved.

Executive Summary. The results of the 2014 AmericasBarometer in Costa Rica document a concerning trend away from a mass public that largely displays high levels of attitudes consistent with stable democracy. In assessing two components of a set of attitudes that LAPOP has validated as conducive to democratic stability, we find that support for the political system has increased while political tolerance has declined. We trace the recent decline in political tolerance to partisan conflicts, which have left their imprints on the Costa Rican public.

Discrimination on the basis of skin color persists as a serious social and political problem in many of the world's nations. Although numerous consequences of such discrimination have been enumerated, considerably less is known regarding the bases of perceived discrimination. In this study, individuals' perceptions that they have been the targets of skin-color discrimination are examined. Using 2010 AmericasBarometer data from six nations, a multifaceted account of the possible bases of perceived discrimination is devised and tested. Three classes of predictors are considered: (1) variables related to a person's skin color, race, and ethnicity; (2) extraneous demographic and psychological factors; and (3) aspects of the individual's regional social and political context. Results reveal that both skin color and racial and ethnic self-categorization strongly correspond with perceived discrimination, with additional, more modest, effects identified for socioeconomic status (wealth), personality (agreeableness), and the composition of a person's regional context.