Dominicans most trust the media, the Catholic Church again, polls

Santo Domingo.- The mass media and the Catholic Church are the institutions Dominican society most confide in, the survey “Barometer of the Americas 2010” conducted in 26 countries of the continent says.

The 2010 results mirror those of previous surveys conduced by different pollsters.

The media reached a 72.8% positive rating and the Catholic Church 69.7%, followed by the neighborhood boards (64.5%), the Evangelical churches (63.1%) and president Leonel Fernandez (61.8%), which surpasses all Government agencies in credibility.

In the public scope, Fernandez’s 61.8% surpasses all government agencies in credibility, with the political parties and the National Police having the two lowest ratings. The Armed Forces surpassed the latter by nearly 20 percentage points.

The poll stresses that although 54.5% of the Dominican population surveyed said it favors a political party, their credibility average reached only 33.1 points in the scale of 100 points.

Barometer of the Americas is a survey of the Latin America Public Opinion Project (LAPOP), aimed at measuring the democratic values and political behavior in the Americas with probabilistic national samplings, whose results for 2010 will be disclosed at 6:30 p.m. today in the Hotel Santo Domingo.

It says the Dominican Republic is Latin America’s countries which have been able to bear the crisis without highly negative impacts, but notes that a large number of Dominicans lost their jobs in 2010, which led to lowering their income.

“In the Dominican case, as far as the economic part, we have found that in the regional context the Dominican Republic has one the highest levels of deprivation and income, according to the report, the people interviewed in terms of the conditions in their homes, which indicates that the economic crisis has had a real impact in the economy of the homes,” said the political scientist Rosario Espinal when providing the details of the survey