Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
After a year marked by riots over cartoon portrayals of Muhammad, a major terrorist attack in London, and continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, most Muslims and Westerners see relations between them as generally bad.
Summary of Findings Public concern over Iran’s nuclear program has risen dramatically in the past few months. Today, 27% of Americans cite Iran as the country that represents the greatest danger to the United States. In October, just 9% pointed to Iran as the biggest danger to the U.S., while there was far more concern […]
Voices from Egypt Reporting by the International Herald Tribune* “There is a combination of reasons for lack of prosperity in certain areas. You cannot exclude the external factor. The Arab-Israeli conflict played a role in hindering economic development, but you cannot blame only the outside factor. There are other domestic factors, like deterioration of education, […]
Summary of Findings In the aftermath of the Dubai ports deal, President Bush’s approval rating has hit a new low and his image for honesty and effectiveness has been damaged. Yet the public uncharacteristically has good things to say about the role that Congress played in this high-profile Washington controversy. Most Americans (58%) believe Congress […]
When President Bush delivered a strong warning against isolationism in Tuesday’s State of the Union address, he was speaking to a recent and dramatic turn in public opinion. A recent Pew Research survey found a decided revival of isolationist sentiment among the public, to levels not seen since post-Cold War 1990s and the post-Vietnam 1970s. […]
Some evidence about relationships has been alarming. Robert Putnam argued in 2000 that people are seeing friends and relatives much less than they were in the mid-1960s. For example, family picnics decreased by 60% between 1975 and 1999, and card playing went down from an average of 16 times per year in 1981, to 8 […]
The existential threats posed by terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction rate as leading long-term U.S. policy concerns, in the view of both opinion leaders and the public. But there also is a widely shared belief that decreasing the nation’s dependence on imported energy should be a major policy objective. Fully 87% […]
Looking into the future, many opinion leaders see China and India, with their huge populations and rapidly expanding economies, as increasingly important partners for the U.S. Pluralities in four of the eight opinion leader groups identify China as a country that will be more important to the U.S. in the future, while pluralities in another […]