Monday, April 30, 2007

Weekly Debate: How popular are L. American leaders?

Yesterday, Ecuadorian-based polling firm Cedatos released a report comparing the national popularity polls of several Latin American leaders. According to Cedatos’ figures the three most popular leaders are Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, Colombia’s Alvaro Uribe, and El Salvador’s Tony Saca with over 70% approval ratings. Meanwhile, the bottom three according to Cedatos are Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez (41%), Costa Rica’s Oscar Arias (39%), and Paraguay’s Nicanor Duarte (33%).

(Note that Cuban leader Fidel Castro was not included in Cedatos' report and the most unpopular leader of the Western Hemisphere is U.S. President George W. Bush with a paltry 29%).

So who is your choice for the most popular leader in the Americas? Do you agree with Cedatos’ findings? Is the data accurate? What do you think?

Let us know your opinion by leaving a comment to this post and/or by voting in our poll located on the sidebar (closes on May 7).

Links- El Tiempo, Cedatos, Angus Reid Consultants


6 comments:

ew01 said...

Wow. Where did that Venezuela poll number come from? I'd never seen the Hinterlaces poll. Yesterday the Venezuelan (opposition) polling firm Datanalysis released far different numbers--they put Chavez's popularity at 65%. Here's a link: http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/index.cfm/fuseaction/viewItem/itemID/15556

It looks like this Ecuadorian firm did a survey of surveys, so they were able to pick and choose the results they wanted.

Anonymous said...

Hinterlaces is another well-known opposition polling outfit in Venezuela. Apparently they are being even more brazen than Datanalisis in their misinformation campaign against the Chavez government. There is no way those numbers are accurate, based on other polling coming out of Venezuela.

Anonymous said...

I would be interested to see how the numbers seperated along socio-economic lines.

Justin Delacour said...

Yeah, looks pretty bogus to me. Chavez's approval rating hasn't been below 50% since prior to the August 2004 referendum.

Erwin C. said...

I believe Cedatos' figures comes from polls conducted by them or firms allied to them. (Note that Cedatos is part of the gallup network).

I would've expected Chavez' poll numbers to be closer to the 50% since he's seems like such a polarizing figure.

Did anybody else get surprised by the figures showing Paraguay's president to be the least popular leader in L. America?

Anonymous said...

The venezuela numbers were from Hinterlaces (1) and whole thing does look arbitrary and bogus (2).

1.http://www.cedatos.com.ec/contenido.asp?id=1981

2.http://www.brazzilmag.com/content/view/8262/54/