Q&A: Do AI and bogus respondents threaten polling’s future?
Courtney Kennedy, vice president of methods and innovation, answers some common questions about the current polling landscape in the U.S.
Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
Read our research on:
Search results for: “what the public knows about the state of the military”
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short reads
Key facts about the U.S. national debt
Private investors are the biggest holders of national debt – $24.4 trillion as of March 2025 – followed by federal trust funds and retirement programs.
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What Makes People Proud of Their Country?
From diversity in Indonesia to food in France, people in 25 countries share in their own words what makes them proud.
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Appendix C: Codebook
Below are the instructions given to researchers who coded the responses to the open-ended question. Keywords listed with each code represent examples indicating how a unit of information could be coded and are not a complete list of all concepts per code. We asked respondents in 24 countries what they think would help improve the […]
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Appendix C: Comparing the Center’s religion trends with those of other major surveys
Pew Research Center has tracked trends in American religion since 2007 via the Religious Landscape Study (RLS) and since 2020 using the annual National Public Opinion Reference Survey (NPORS). But the RLS and NPORS are hardly the only sources of survey data on religion in the United States. Among others, the General Social Survey (GSS) […]
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Majority in U.S. Say Israel Has Valid Reasons for Fighting; Fewer Say the Same About Hamas
57% of Americans express some sympathy with both Israelis and Palestinians, including 26% who say their sympathies lie equally with both groups.
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5. Electoral reform and direct democracy
Free and fair elections are a critical element of a healthy democratic system. And in many of the 24 countries surveyed, reforming how elections and the electoral system work is a key priority. People want both large-scale, systemic changes – such as switching from first-past-the-post to proportional representation – as well as smaller-scale issues like […]
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What Can Improve Democracy?
Amid growing discontent with the state of democracy globally, we asked over 30,000 people what changes would make their democracy work better.
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data essay
A Look Back at How Fear and False Beliefs Bolstered U.S. Public Support for War in Iraq
Twenty years ago this month, the U.S. launched a major invasion of Iraq. President George W. Bush and his administration at first drew broad public support for the use of military force. Yet the campaign soon left Americans deeply divided, and by 2019, 62% said the Iraq War was not worth fighting.
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2. Expert essays on the expected impact of digital change by 2035
Most respondents to this canvassing wrote brief reactions to this research question. However, a number of them wrote multilayered responses in a longer essay format. This essay section of the report is quite lengthy, so first we offer a sampler of a some of these essayists’ comments. What follows is the full set of essays […]