Mitchell A. Seligson

Centennial Professor
Professor of Sociology (by courtesy)
Director, Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP)

Mitchell A. Seligson is the Centennial Professor of Political Science and Professor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University and serves as a member of the General Assembly of the Inter-American Institute of Human Rights. He founded and directs the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP), which conducts the AmericasBarometer surveys that currently cover 26 countries in the Americas. LAPOP has conducted over 100 surveys of public opinion, mainly focused on democracy, in many countries in Latin America, but has also included projects in Africa and the Balkans. For details, see www.LapopSurveys.org. Prior to joining the faculty at Vanderbilt, he held the Daniel H. Wallace Chair of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh, and also served there as director of the Center for Latin American Studies. He has been a Fulbright Fellow and has received grants and fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the National Science Foundation, The Mellon Foundation, The Howard Heinz Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, USAID and others, and has published over 140 articles, 14 books and more than a 35 monographs and occasional papers. He served on the National Academy of Sciences panel studying the impact of foreign assistance and democracy, and is an appointed member of the Organization of American States (OAS) Advisory Board of Inter-American Program on Education for Democratic Values and Practices, and is a founding member of the International Advisory Board (IAB) of the AfroBarometer, and of the editorial board of the European Political Science Review (Cambridge University Press) and the Journal of Democracy en Espanol. He also serves on the Editorial Board of Comparative Political Studies.