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Department of Political Science

Mitchell A. Seligson

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 is the founder and Senior Advisor of the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP), which conducts the AmericasBarometer surveys that currently cover 27 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 an appointed member (2007-present) of the OAS Network of Democracy Practitioners. He 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 Español. He also serves on the Editorial Board of Comparative Political Studies. He has been awarded a Danforth Foundation Kent Fellow, the Social Science Research Council Foreign Area Fellowship, and was awarded the Grace L. Doherty Latin American Fellowship by Princeton University.

Representative publications

  • Kaitlin Cassell, Mitchell A. Seligson and John A. Booth, “Support for Coups in the Americas: Mass Norms and Democratization,” forthcoming, Journal of Latin American Politics and Society, December, 2018
  • “Reported Threats: The Routinization of Violence in Central America,” co-authored with Susan Berk-Seligson, Pragmatics, Volume 26, No. 4, pp. 583-607. December, 2016.
  • Damarys Canache, Mathew Hayes, Jeffery J. Mondak and Mitchell A. Seligson, “Determinants of Perceived Skin-Color Discrimination in Latin America,” Journal of Politics, April, 2014, Volume 76, No. 2.  pp. 506-520.
  • Development and Underdevelopment: The Political Economy of Global Inequality, 5th edition, co-edited with John Passé-Smith.  Boulder, CO:  Lynne Reinner Publishers, 2014.
  • Jeffery J. Mondak, Matthew V. Hibbing, Damarys Canache,  Mitchell A. Seligson, and Marry R. Anderson. "Personality and Civic Engagement: An Integrative Framework for the Study of Trait Effects on Political Behavior." American Political Science Review 104.1(2010): 1-26
  • Jeffery J. Mondak, Damarys Canache, Mitchell A. Seligson, and Matthew V. Hibbing “The Participatory Personality: Evidence from Latin America,” British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 41, pp. 211-221, January, 2011.