Six in ten citizens of Serbia believe that democracy is the best political system, yet the same proportion believe that democracy in Serbia does not actually work. Citizens, in other words, have not lost faith in democracy as such; they have lost confidence that the state functions democratically. This is what the latest public opinion survey shows, conducted in June 2026 by the Center for Research, Transparency and Accountability (CRTA) and the Democracy Action Lab (DAL) at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL).

The questionnaire was designed by the DAL team in collaboration with CRTA for its adaptation to Serbia. The survey instrument includes questions regarding democratic attachments, political opinions and attitudes, trust in institutions, corruption, foreign policy, partisan preferences, and a set of experimental modules designed to understand the “Democracy Trade-off.” Fieldwork was conducted by Pulse Research (PulsR) between 10 and 24 June 2026, using face-to-face interviews with a representative sample of 2,324 adult citizens of Serbia. We performed a three-stage stratified random sample, representative of the Republic of Serbia (excluding Kosovo). Stratification was done by region (Belgrade, Vojvodina, Šumadija, Western Serbia, Southern Serbia, and Eastern Serbia), settlement type (urban, rural), and with random selection of the sampling unit, household (random route), and respondent (last birthday method). Descriptive statistics and tables use post-stratification with weights by region, settlement type, gender, age, and education. The questionnaire took an average of 30 minutes to collect, with a response rate of 24% and an estimated national margin of error of 2.08%. The methodological approach and analysis plan are pre-registered at the Open Science Foundation (OSF), and ethics compliance falls under the exempt category as reviewed by Stanford's Institutional Review Board (IRB-81600, IRB-82688). As in any scholarly research of this nature, all respondents provided oral consent, and data was de-identified before any analysis.

The survey is a component of a larger, ongoing academic research project, “The Democracy Trade-off.” DAL’s project spans eight countries (Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru, El Salvador, and Serbia), drawing on close to 18,000 respondents in total. Fieldwork in six Latin American countries has already been completed in partnership with Ipsos; fieldwork in El Salvador, carried out with Analítika Centroamérica, is in its final stages. Serbia is the eighth country in this research design, and CRTA and PulsR are our academic collaborators there, responsible for fielding the survey instrument used everywhere else in the study, adapted — as it is in every country — to the local political and institutional context.