Under a peer-to-peer evaluation process established in the late 2000s, every member state in the United Nations faces a periodic review of its human rights record by countries on the UN Human Rights Council. But the issues raised in these reviews can vary substantially depending on which countries are doing the reviewing, according to a Pew Research Center analysis.
When the United States was last reviewed by its UN member peers, for example, countries in the Asian and African regional groups raised concerns about racial discrimination, while Latin American and Caribbean nations emphasized migrants’ rights. States in the Western European and Others Group (WEOG) often criticized the U.S. for its use of the death penalty.
Human-rights reviews of China and Russia also showed differences depending on the region of the reviewing nations. As they did with the U.S., WEOG countries criticized China over the death penalty, but Asian Group nations (including much of the Middle East) didn’t raise concerns about China’s use of capital punishment at all, focusing more often on economic rights and development.
Most Americans believe the health benefits of the MMR vaccine, right, are high and the risks are low, a 2016 Pew Research Center survey found. (Mel Melcon/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
Numerous measles outbreaks across the United States have renewed a debate over whether parents should be required to vaccinate their children. Some parents express concern that vaccinations could be harmful to their children, but scientific consensus on the safety of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine (MMR) remains strong and surveys have found that most Americans see childhood vaccinations as beneficial.
In recent weeks, lawmakers in several states that experienced outbreaks have proposed legislation to remove or restrict the types of exemptions parents can claim for their children based on religious or personal beliefs.
Here are some of the key findings from our research on attitudes about childhood vaccination:
1Most Americans believe the health benefits of the MMR vaccine are high and the risks are low. In a 2016 survey, 73% of U.S. adults said the health benefits of the MMR vaccine are high, while 66% saw the risk of side effects as low. Overall, 88% said the benefits of the MMR vaccine outweigh the risks, while 10% said the risks outweigh the benefits.
2About eight-in-ten Americans favor school-based vaccine requirements. Some 82% of U.S. adults said MMR vaccination should be a requirement “in order to attend public schools because of the potential risk for others when children are not vaccinated.” Meanwhile, 17% of Americans believed that “parents should be able to decide not to vaccinate their children, even if that may create health risks for other children and adults.” Majorities of Americans across demographic and educational groups supported school requirements for the MMR vaccine, although older adults were more likely than their younger counterparts to say vaccinations should be required to attend school (90% of adults ages 65 and older vs. 77% of those 18 to 49).
An Iranian woman lawmaker at a session of parliament in Tehran. (Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images)
Women make up 24% of members of national legislative bodies around the world, a share that has ticked up over the past decade but remains far smaller than their share of the overall world population, according to an analysis of data from the Inter-Parliamentary Union.
At the end of 2008, by comparison, just 18% of the members of upper and lower parliamentary bodies around the world were women. The largest increases in female representation between 2008 and this year occurred in Central America (13 percentage points), the Middle East and North Africa (9 points) and Western Europe (8 points).
Despite this growth, there are fewer women than men holding legislative seats collectively in every world region. As such, no region has reached gender parity in the share of women in its countries’ legislatures.
When accounting for the total number of legislative seats in each country, only three nations – Rwanda, Cuba and Bolivia – have reached or surpassed gender parity. (However, women hold fewer than half of seats in the upper chambers in Bolivia and Rwanda.)
As a region, the Nordic countries – Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden – come closest to gender parity, with women accounting for 43% of parliamentary members. The highest share is in Sweden, where women hold 47% of legislative seats. By comparison, in Denmark, 37% of seats are held by women. Shares in the remaining Nordic countries hover around 40%.
More than two years into Donald Trump’s presidency, white evangelical Protestants in the United States continue to overwhelmingly support him, according to a new analysis of Pew Research Center survey data. Other religious groups, however, are more divided in their views of the president.
Roughly seven-in-ten white evangelical Protestants (69%) say they approve of the way Trump is handling his job as president, according to the Center’s latest polling in January 2019. This is somewhat lower than Trump’s approval rating in the earliest days of his tenure – when about eight-in-ten white evangelicals (78%) approved of his job performance – but is in line with most polls conducted by the Center since the inauguration.
White evangelicals’ support for the president has been consistently high, and many prominent evangelical leaders, such as Jerry Falwell Jr. – the president of Liberty University – have steadfastly stood with the president. Read More →
A challenging aspect of designing opinion surveys in countries with different cultures and languages is making sure we understand what people are thinking about the subject we’re studying, in their own words. So when we began our recent study of mobile phone and social media use in 11 emerging economies, we started by conducting focus groups with diverse participants in four of the countries studied: Kenya, Mexico, the Philippines and Tunisia.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom this week announced a moratorium on executions in his state, a move that will affect 737 inmates on the largest death row in the country. The decision marks a significant change in policy, but not in practice: California is one of 11 states that have capital punishment on the books but have not carried out an execution in more than a decade.
Overall, 30 states, the federal government and the U.S. military authorize the death penalty, while 20 states and the District of Columbia do not, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, an information clearinghouse that has been critical of capital punishment. But more than a third of the states that allow executions – along with the federal government and the U.S. military – haven’t carried one out in at least 10 years or, in some cases, much longer.
California’s last execution took place in 2006. The other states that have capital punishment but haven’t used it more than a decade are New Hampshire (last execution in 1939); Kansas (1965); Wyoming (1992); Colorado and Oregon (both 1997); Pennsylvania (1999); Montana, Nevada and North Carolina (all 2006); and Kentucky (2008).
President Emmanuel Macron, center, visits a vandalized Jewish cemetery in Quatzenheim, France, on Feb. 19, a day of nationwide marches against a rise in anti-Semitic attacks. (Frederick Florin/AFP/Getty Images)
In France, home to Europe’s largest Jewish population, reports of anti-Semitic incidents rose dramatically in 2018. There were 541 cases reported last year – not as high as in some previous years, but a 74% increase from 2017, according to the country’s Ministère de l’Intérieur. And already in 2019, there have been several new high-profile anti-Semitic incidents, including swastikas being spray-painted on graves in a Jewish cemetery.
Prominent though these incidents may be, they run counter to public opinion in France. A 2017 Pew Research Center survey found that a majority of French adults reject negative Jewish stereotypes and express an accepting attitude toward Jews.
In the survey, conducted in France and 14 other Western European countries, the Center asked whether people agreed or disagreed with two strongly worded negative statements: “Jews always pursue their own interests and not the interest of the country they live in,” and “Jews always overstate how much they have suffered.” Roughly seven-in-ten or more French respondents either completely or mostly disagreed with these statements, while about one-in-five completely or mostly agreed with them.
To gauge the extent of anti-Jewish sentiment in another way, the survey also asked Western European adults if they would be willing to accept Jews as neighbors or members of their family. Nine-in-ten French adults said they would be willing to accept Jews as neighbors, while roughly three-quarters (76%) said they would accept Jews as members of their family. These figures are at or near the median for the 15 countries where both questions were asked. (In Germany and the United Kingdom, where reported anti-Semitic incidents rose nearly 10% and 16% last year, respectively, the shares of adults saying they would accept Jews as neighbors and relatives were somewhat similar to those in France.)
On balance, French adults who identify as Christian are slightly more likely than people who identify as religiously unaffiliated (that is, atheist, agnostic or having no particular religion) to agree with anti-Jewish stereotypes, and they are slightly less likely to say they would accept Jews as relatives and neighbors. For example, 88% of Christians in France say they would accept Jews as neighbors, while 94% of the religiously unaffiliated in France say this. Respondents identifying with right-wing political ideology are considerably more likely to agree with the negative statements about Jews. The survey did not reach enough Muslims – who constitute France’s third-largest religious group, after Christians and the religiously unaffiliated – to allow for a nationally representative sample of their views.
It may seem counterintuitive that survey results would show widespread French acceptance of Jews less than a year before anti-Semitic incidents would rise. But general population survey data and statistics concerning anti-Semitic acts measure two different things. The former reflect a snapshot at a specific time of the attitudes of a nationally representative sample of adults, while the latter record reported events over time.
The number of Jews in France – as well as in the rest of Europe – has been declining since World War II. Some of this decline is due to emigration: In some recent years, France has been the largest origin country for immigrants to Israel – with 7,238 French emigrating there in 2014 and 7,328 doing so in 2015, according to the Jewish Agency for Israel. While estimates of France’s Jewish population vary, the number of Jews is France is believed to be as high as 500,000, or a little less than 1% of the country’s overall population.
The low share of Jews in France may help explain their relatively low profile across the country. A little over half of French adults (55%) say they know someone who is Jewish – lower than the 81% of French respondents who say they know an atheist and the 79% who say they know a Muslim. And just 33% of French respondents say they know “a great deal” or “some” about the Jewish religion, lower than the 42% who say they know “a great deal” or “some” about Islam and the 77% who say that about Christianity.
Knowing someone Jewish or knowing “a great deal” or “some” about Judaism are associated with somewhat higher levels of willingness to accept Jews as relatives, according to the Center’s survey. For example, 83% of French adults who say they know someone Jewish also say they would accept Jews as members of their family, while 67% of French adults who do not know anyone Jewish say this.
Most of the United States’ 10.7 million unauthorized immigrants live in just 20 major metropolitan areas, with the largest populations in New York, Los Angeles, Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth, according to new Pew Research Center estimates based on government data.
The nation’s unauthorized immigrant population is highly concentrated, more so than the U.S. population overall. In 2016, the 20 metro areas with the most unauthorized immigrants were home to 6.5 million of them, or 61% of the estimated nationwide total. By contrast, only 37% of the total U.S. population lived in those metro areas.
The number of unauthorized immigrants in these 20 metros has declined sharply since 2007, when 7.7 million of them lived in these areas. These metro areas account for much of a national decline of the U.S. unauthorized immigrant population over the past decade.
By far the biggest unauthorized immigrant populations in 2016 were in the New York (1.1 million) and Los Angeles metro areas (925,000). Both metros had unauthorized immigrant populations that exceeded the statewide total in every state except California and Texas. No other metro area approached a million. Meanwhile, the smallest unauthorized immigrant populations among the top 20 areas were in Austin and Charlotte (100,000 each).
People protest the possibility that the Trump administration may overturn Temporary Protected Status for Haitians in front of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office on May 13 in Miami. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Many immigrants who have time-limited permission to live and work in the United States under a program known as Temporary Protected Status (TPS) face an uncertain future as the White House seeks to end their permission to stay in the country.
Roughly 318,000 people currently have this protected status after fleeing their countries because of war, hurricanes, earthquakes or other extraordinary conditions that could make it dangerous for them to live in that country. Nearly all had been expected to lose their benefits either this year or next, although that now depends on the outcome of lawsuits challenging the government’s decision to terminate TPS benefits. Federal officials have said that TPS is meant to provide temporary rather than long-term relief.
The Department of Homeland Security said last year that it would not extend Temporary Protected Status for immigrants from six of the 10 nations that are now eligible. Of those six nations, one – Nepal – faces TPS expiration this year. TPS had been scheduled to expire this year for four others – Sudan, Nicaragua, Haiti and El Salvador – but the government has extended it through Jan. 2, 2020, after being blocked in court. Also, immigrant advocates recently filed a separate lawsuit challenging the decision to end TPS for those from Nepal and Honduras. Only those from South Sudan, Syria, Yemen and Somalia have received TPS extensions with the possibility of future extension.
In all, immigrants with Temporary Protected Status were about 3% of the 10.7 million unauthorized immigrants living in the U.S. in 2016, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of government data. Yet this share was higher for some countries: Immigrants with TPS accounted for about a quarter of unauthorized immigrants from El Salvador (27%) and around 13% of those from Honduras in 2016, for example. (This analysis assumes that immigrants with TPS are in the U.S. without authorization.)
A woman uses her mobile phone to record a gathering in New Delhi, India, to celebrate the holy fasting month of Ramadan. (Burhaan Kinu/Hindustan Times via Getty Images)
The use of smartphones and social media increased rapidly in the past decade in the United States, and these digital technologies have also become common in parts of the developing world. A new Pew Research Center report analyzes public attitudes and experiences related to these technologies in 11 emerging economies – including the benefits and challenges that digital connectivity brings to people’s lives and societies.
Here are seven takeaways from the report:
1Mobile phone users see a mix of benefits and pitfalls related to their devices. Mobile phone users in each of the 11 countries surveyed are more likely to say their phone is something that frees them rather than something that ties them down. Meanwhile, a larger share of mobile phone users in seven countries believe their phone helps them save time rather than waste time – although in certain countries like the Philippines, a larger share view their phones as a time waster. People in these countries are also somewhat divided when assessing how reliant they are on their mobile device. Kenyans, South Africans, Jordanians, Tunisians and Lebanese who use a mobile phone are more likely to say their phone is something they couldn’t live without. But in the six other countries, larger shares say they don’t always need their phone.
2Majorities say mobile phones and social media have mostly been good for them personally, but somewhat less so for society. A median of 70% of adults across these 11 countries say mobile phones have been a mostly good thing for society, while a smaller share (57%) say the same of social media. A similar pattern exists when assessing how these technologies impact them personally. A median of 82% say that mobile phones have been mostly good for them in their personal lives, compared with 63% who feel this way about social media. In contrast, a median of 19% say that social media has been mostly bad for them personally, and 27% say it has been mostly bad for society. Read More →
Most Americans believe the health benefits of the MMR vaccine are high and the risks are low. In 
