Trust, facts, and democracy in a polarized world

This episode was recorded before COVID-19 changed everything, but many of the themes we discuss about public opinion polling and the importance of trust and facts to a democracy are perhaps more relevant now than ever before.

We talked with Michael Dimock, president of the Pew Research Center, about how the organization approaches polling in a world that increasingly presents competing partisan visions of reality.

Trust in the media and government has been declining for years, if not longer, and may be exacerbated by COVID-19. What's more concerning for democracy, Pew's Trust Facts, and Democracy project found, is that our trust in each other is also declining.

People don't trust their peers to use good judgement when comes to evaluating information or making political decisions — especially when it comes to people from the opposing political party. Polling done as part of Trust, Facts, and Democracy found that about 60% of adults said they have little or no confidence in the wisdom of the American people when it comes to making political decisions.

What does that mean for democracy? Dimock doesn't shy away from talking about the grim realities of our current political climate, but does offer a few glimmers of hope from the Trust, Facts, and Democracy work.

Additional Information

Pew's Trust Facts and Democracy project

Pew polling on COVID-19

After the Fact podcast from the Pew Charitable Trusts

The McCourtney Institute for Democracy's Mood of the Nation Poll

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Michael Berkman  
From the McCourtney Institute for Democracy on the campus of Penn State University. I'm Michael Berkman

Chris Beem  
And I'm Chris Beem.

Jenna Spinelle  
I'm Jenna Spinelle, and welcome to Democracy Works. Guys. Today we are talking about polling, and joining us is Michael Dimock, the president of the Pew Research Center. Lots to talk about on polls. You know, we are in the middle of an election year, so we're seeing all kinds of polls out there these days.

Chris Beem  
Well, and the Pew poll and the mood of the nation pole that's produced by the McCourtney Institute both are distinct and make some important innovations with respect to how data is collected, stuff like that. But I do think it's worth just kind of talking a little bit about kind of the relationship between polls and democracy generally, because I don't think it's it's quite as benign as a lot of people think it is right.

Michael Berkman  
That's, you know, sometimes. So I'm glad you mentioned the mood of the nation poll and the they are both pew and mood of the nation are both what I would call not horse race polls. Neither is fixated on the election any given time. Both are trying to probe what it is that Americans are thinking about on a range of issues, we use a very different method than pew does. Pew is very high quality poll been around for a number of years, and I think both sort of follow a dictum that I hear from the director of our poll, Eric putzer, which is that polling is just another way of talking to Americans. Yeah,

Chris Beem  
I think ideally, right, right, and ideally, that is what it should be. I've also heard the saw that public opinion polls are neither. They're not public because they're asking you individually, and they're not opinions because they're just asking you yes or no, I think most people, most questions, have a certain aren't, aren't certain, right? They're not four square in one camp or the you

Michael Berkman  
know? And this is a problem with polling, because when you're approached by a pollster, you think you're supposed to have an opinion, right? And sometimes you come up with one on something you've never really thought about before, right? And you are so it can manufacture opinion and precise way by creating, say, a consensus around something that really people hadn't thought much better. Or

Chris Beem  
it just becomes yet another manifestation of partisanship and your kind of partisan identity. I think this because I think most people in my partisan tribe think this when you really haven't thought it through, or you're kind of disinclined to articulate an opinion that might be different, yeah. You know,

Michael Berkman  
as part has become more polarized and more clearly identified with one issue position or another. I think you probably see more of that. You know, I call myself a Republican, so I know there are a series of Republican party positions, policy positions, yeah,

Jenna Spinelle  
and that's part of the reason we wanted to have Michael on the show. Pew has been doing this year and a half, two year long, trust facts and Democracy Project, which gets at some of these issues that are leading to polarization, how people trust the government or not, how increasingly our news sources are diverging based on our partisan identities. And they really kind of dive into some of these issues and examine what conditions are necessary for democracy and how people are feeling about the health of our democracy.

Michael Berkman  
Really glad to see them doing this, especially on these information questions. This is something that we've brought up quite a bit, but we've talked about epistemological polarization. We've talked about, you know, the problems of berating the media, this general issue that we talk about often as being really problematic in a democracy where people aren't in agreement on basic facts, the other thing about what they're talking about right now that I think is really valuable at the at this moment. So we've been talking about the sort of the information issue has to do with concerns about democracy, and so we have seen a lot of polling, mostly from a cross national perspective that looks at overall declines among populations of Western democracies in support of democratic government.

Michael Berkman  
Some of these have gotten quite a bit of play, actually, in the media, ones that have identified that younger people in particular have right. We've talked so we've talked about it a little bit. So I'm glad to see them polling this area, because we actually know less, and we've been working on this in our own poll as well, about how Americans feel about democracy, and in particular, how party enters into it, how trust in institutions, distinctly American institutions. And

Chris Beem  
if you are going to develop a viable set of prescriptions or recommendations for what to do about this. Having good information about what people genuinely think about institutions, about the media, about trust in government, etc, etc, etc, is extremely useful, almost essential, right? So this is a great topic, a great person to bring in. So let's let's hear from Jenna in the interview. You

Jenna Spinelle  
This is Jenna Spinelle here today with Michael Dimock. Michael, thank you for joining us on Democracy Works.

Michael Dimock  
Thanks for having me

Jenna Spinelle  
Before we dive into the trust facts and Democracy Project from Pew, I thought maybe we could talk a little bit about public opinion polling more broadly, and what that looks like today. You know, thinking about our fractured media landscape, the increase in polarization, which, which, I know, are all things that you touch on in the trust facts and democracy work. But I'm just wondering more broadly, how the landscape today impacts the way that pew approaches its polling work, whether specifically on this trust, facts and Democracy Project, or even beyond that,

Michael Dimock  
it's a very interesting time to be in the public opinion polling business for a variety of reasons. One is just the approach to polling, the technologies we can use how to do high quality polling, the opportunities for people to be more engaged in doing polling, sometimes using great approaches and methods, sometimes using less great approaches and methods, and then for consumers, hard to tell the difference. But it's also a really interesting moment to think about the role of the public voice in democracy. You know how what is in what way do elections really function as the ultimate representation of the public's will in a democracy?

Michael Dimock  
And then, what is the added value of understanding how people are seeing events and navigating them? Our focus really turned on this idea that there seems every week, it feels like there's fresh evidence that kind of anchors of democratic governance feel stressed. You know, public confidence in institutions, challenges in the flow of information. And it felt like a window where really talking to people and taking advantage some of the new approaches to survey work, to really listen to how people are navigating and thinking about information and deciding in the end of the day what to trust is front and center, and that's what we've been focused on. Yeah,

Jenna Spinelle  
Does public opinion polling require? Do you think kind of a shared understanding, or kind of a shared view of the world or the country and and what's happening in it? I mean, I think increasingly you can have very different conceptions, very different interpretations of what's going on, depending on which sources of media you choose to follow or not.

Michael Dimock  
Yeah, well, and there's a lot of truth to that, and that's one of the interesting elements of trying to understand how much of a collective sense of the public voice there is. I mean, one of the things that's always motivated me in being in this profession is when I hear a political leader say, the American people want X, the you know, the American public is demanding y. And the answer is never that simple, right? The answer is that public knowledge is more limited. The way you ask the question is going to have a big effect on what perceptions and values people draw on in framing their answer to a policy question.

Michael Dimock  
And ultimately, you know, we are a much more diverse society in every dimension than any statement like that can have. So I always feel like one of the real contributions of polling is to be a little bit of a check on the oversimplification of the public voice, which is really where democracy can be most at risk at times when there's some assumption that the public is unified when it actually rarely is. And this is one of the challenges of being a polling consumer. Because the other thing about polling is, of all the things we try to measure, measuring what's in people's heads is probably the hardest measurement challenge there is because what's in our heads is often complicated and multi layered, and the act of pulling it out of our heads through words is a particular challenge, and there's all sorts of biases and distortions that can come into play in the very act of measuring what's in people's heads.

Michael Dimock  
So you can then look at the whole science of polling and say, Oh, well, that sounds like a terrible idea. Why can you trust any polls? But if you really think about it, that's a really important challenge, because if you believe in democracy. He really thinking seriously about what's in people's heads, I think matters.

Jenna Spinelle  
Yeah, and you're giving people a chance to see how other sets of individuals, or just how the country, or, you know, whatever your your demographic group is, more broadly, sees an issue people who are different than you in some respects, for sure, absolutely,

Michael Dimock  
and that, you know, people are fascinated with polls, because I think, you know, at the end of the day, human beings are social animals, and we actually care what other people are thinking, and we want to know how our view of a situation compares to how other people see the world and see that situation or that candidate or that policy decision or the, you know, that direction of our country. And so the upside of that is, I think we actually do care like the roots of democracy, and valuing and wanting to understand the opinions of others is sort of latent in our minds. But it also means that Polls can almost be like catnip at some way, you know. And one of the experiences that people recount to me is in the weeks and months up to an election, kind of almost obsessively clicking on the website to refresh whether there's a new poll and a new poll. There's a way in which that root interest we have can almost become pathological, if taken too far, right?

Jenna Spinelle  
Yeah. And it also, it seems, maybe sets up this vicious cycle where, if a poll comes out, people read it, digest it, and then, you know, the media covered, and then that's what's in people's minds, and so that might inform how they respond to future polls. Or it kind of can all, like, feed on itself. I feel like, yeah.

Michael Dimock  
And one of the things that we're at risk of in this, as with many scientific measurements, is the false impression of precision, and that's particularly acute with polling information today, because you can go on websites that are aggregating up a whole lot of polls, and it looks like there's so many numbers in there that you assume that it has a level of precision that it really never has. Polls have error to them. Some of it is random error. Some of it, as I was saying before, is the challenge of getting thoughts out of people's heads in a way that's unbiased and not distorted.

Michael Dimock  
And those challenges are real ones. And so when we look at the numbers of polls, we want to think there's a precision and an accuracy there that often doesn't exist. That was certainly one of the challenges in 2016 that left many people feeling almost betrayed right by the media and the polls, or willing to write the entire fields off as fake based on kind of misperception about how precise that data can be. Again, that's not unique to polling. Most scientists and doctors and medical they feel they face the same challenge. People want a lot more precision than data can provide. Sometimes Sure

Jenna Spinelle  
So for our listeners, or for anyone who is consuming these polls, what are some of the things that they can look for to help discern something that is more vetted, more rigorous, more scientific, from something that might not be

Michael Dimock  
I don't have a great answer, because there's so many different methods being used today that there's not a good, clean, singular marker. Oh, you can trust phone polls, but you can't trust online polls or something that is not that simple, because there are good and bad online polls and good and bad phone polls. I think the thing you have to look for, we're unfortunately at a moment in the marketplace where the consumer has to do a little bit of work. And basically the thing you should be looking for is transparency in the methodology, how the sample was drawn, if they can articulate how they know it's a good representative cross sample of the US public, how they did a random sample? That's a good marker. You see a lot of polls today that say, Oh, this is a representative sample of the country, but then they don't really tell you how they can claim that.

Michael Dimock  
And that's a little bit of a yellow flag, not necessarily a red flag, but it's a little bit of a concern if they're not willing to be crystal clear about why they're confident in the full representativeness and inclusiveness of the sample. Another one is how they're weighting the survey. Waiting is a little bit of a technical issue. Sometimes it sounds like the quote, secret sauce of polling, but it's a really tried and true methodology of balancing the sample that you drew to some known parameters and characteristics of the American public, gender, age, race, ethnicity, region, level of education, and look for that last one level of education, because one of the problems in 2016 is a lot of election polls were not balancing their samples to how many college grads, high school grads and non high school grads were in the survey. The reason they weren't is that's never really mattered in American elections.

Michael Dimock  
Over the last 40 years, college grads in high school or less, didn't really vote that differently. So pre election pollsters often didn't really balance. Their samples along those dimensions, but then Aha, in 2016 that becomes one of the biggest factors in the division between Trump voters and Clinton voters. College grads voted for Clinton overwhelmingly in high school or less, voting for Trump overwhelmingly, and surveys that had too many college grads showed Clinton leading by a really disproportionate margin to the actual balance of the American public's views. So unfortunately, there are still pollsters out there who haven't necessarily taken that lesson. So that would definitely be a marker to look for. But again, what I hate to say is you have to kind of dig a little bit below the surface to try to look for those markers.

Jenna Spinelle  
Yeah, that's so interesting, and also interesting too, to think about what those markers might be moving forward. Once we get through 2020 How Might those markers change? Is that something that you think about or try to, like, kind of keep an eye on, to see what other factors might be out there?

Michael Dimock  
Yeah, absolutely. I've been doing this long enough that we've moved in the last 10 years from a period of sort of relative stability to a period of enormous change in innovation and polling. And that is both good and bad and in a lot of ways, and it's kind of scary if you're in the industry, but it's there's a lot of reason for optimism in it from a consumer's perspective. It just makes things hard, because we went from a period where there was a really sound fundamental methodology that you could look for random digit dialed telephone surveys were sort of the bread and butter. There were people who were doing auto dialed polling. There were people who were playing around with online polling, but neither one were really kind of tried and true and tested, but now you're seeing an enormous array of different approaches.

Michael Dimock  
For me, I think you're right. The markers that we'll be looking for four years from now, 12 years from now, are going to continue to change and evolve. Some things that people are doing today that don't really have super reliable properties. Some of those are just math problems. We're going to figure those out. But also the technology by which we reach people and interview people is changing so quickly, it could be that in another four years or eight years, a lot of high quality surveys are being done over text messages, because it turns out that's a pretty easy way to reach people, and it's a more natural way for people to communicate than being on a telephone call or sitting in front of a laptop for 20 minutes. So I think we're going to continue to see a lot of evolution in standards and approaches to that fundamental question of, how do you get people's thoughts out, get them to engage with you in an honest way and make sure that you're including people from the full spectrum of the nation?

Jenna Spinelle  
Sure, well, maybe we'll have you back on in a couple of years to talk about some of those things, but let's pivot and talk about the trust, facts and Democracy Project. This is such a broad range of work that Pew has done around these topics, and as I've been looking through it in preparation for this conversation, I was struck by kind of lack of trust in each other that seemed to come out. I think we've heard for a while that trust in government, trust in the media, has been consistently decreasing, but now it seems that distrust extends to how we feel about one another, which seems to me to be pretty detrimental to democracy if you're thinking about it as a system of self government that we're all kind of in together.

Michael Dimock  
I couldn't agree more. I think that's one of the, probably the root finding of this investigation that really inspired us to think about how to approach and untangle what's really going on behind it, and then we saw it in two different survey questions that we did. One was where we asked people about how important a range of different things were to the health of our democracy, and then how well we're living up to those in America. And one of those items was, how important is it that voters are knowledgeable in our democracy?

Michael Dimock  
And of course, 78% say that's very important, and the rest say it's at least somewhat important. But only 39% say that even describes our country fairly well today, that voters are knowledgeable, so that's a big gap, right? Very important for a good democracy, but not barely describing us well at all. And that's a trend that we picked up on in another survey question that we've been tracking for over 20 years, and it goes like this, how much trust and confidence do you have in the wisdom of the American people when it comes to making political decisions? And when we started that question in the 90s, it was two to one, great deal, good deal of confidence. Now it's two to one the other direction, with people saying not much or no confidence in the wisdom of the American people when it comes to making decisions. So that's sort of a troubling root trend in terms of not just the institutions or the process of politics, but the very voice of the public itself.

Jenna Spinelle  
And is this tied at all to increasing levels of partisan animosity? So because. Someone is of a different party than I am, therefore they don't know what they're talking about, or they're not informed, or they have the wrong idea about whatever the issue might be. Yeah,

Michael Dimock  
it's really true. I think there are two root issues behind this trend that we've seen, and one is the information trend and the sense that people feel that this misinformation and disinformation is prevalent, and it's widespread, and while I'm comfortable that I can navigate it pretty well and tell good information from bad, I really doubt that the rest of my fellow citizens are able to do that well, and so that makes me nervous. So that's one trend that's feeding into this, and the other is political, partisan animosity, partisan antipathy, the deepening divide at a social level and how we view each other as Democrats and Republicans, and so that's above and beyond how people perceive political leaders like Trump or Nancy Pelosi. That's really about the perceptions we have of each other and this growing sense of distance between Republicans and Democrats, that is to the point of a much higher level of psychological stereotyping caricaturing the other side.

Michael Dimock  
So we find that Republicans, when we ask Republicans, well, do you think Democrats in this country are more of this, less of this, or about just like the rest of us, they would describe Democrats as more unpatriotic, more immoral, more lazy. Like these are really root trade attributions that are caricaturing a group of people at a deeper level than just saying I disagree over what the policies ought to be, or, you know, what tax rates ought to be, or what the role of government is. These are really personalized attributions and the same in the other direction, Democrats saying that Republicans are more closed minded, less intelligent than other Americans. When you see people of the other side, and it's not that you just see them as folks who are equally share core values with you, but maybe have differences of opinion over leadership personalities or policies. But now really seeing that deeper level of social distinction, then it is harder to look at the body politic and say, Yeah, I ultimately trust the wisdom of the American public.

Jenna Spinelle  
Yeah. And this ties to something else that I know Pew has studied and that we've we've talked about on this show before, which is the kind of increasing role that politics and our partisan identities play in our lives, thanks to, some might say, the decline of kind of civil society organizations people who have opposing points of view don't get to come together in groups that are not focused on politics. Or, as Andrew Sullivan said when he was on our show, that because of the decline of religion in our lives, for some people, politics is now their religion. Or they might not think of it explicitly that way, but it kind of functions that way, and that that's the tribe, the community you feel most connected to is increasingly based on your partisan identity. And I know that Hugh has done work both in this kind of trust facts, democracy world, but also significant body of work on the role of religion in American life. And I'm wondering what you make of some of these arguments based on the work that you've done.

Michael Dimock  
Yeah, it's a fascinating question as to the kind of causal mechanism behind this. Is party rising in our identity because of the decline of other things, or is party rising because of what's happening in the environment that's re emphasizing party as this sort of root, fundamental divide in our society? I tend to think it's more of the latter, I think that there's a lot that's changing in the information environment that's prioritizing partisan signals and partisan identities in our lives in more of a constant drum beat than was the case 10 years ago, 20 years ago and 30 years ago.

Michael Dimock  
And really, keep in mind, this is a long term trend, right? This is not a Trump effect. This is not something over the last five to six years. This is a very long kind of March that we've been on in our society that's been going on. One of the reasons I'm not sure I could say that it's the decline of other sort of social capital networks is that you see this rising partisanship across the board. You can look among Americans who are still regular churchgoers, and you see this happening. And you can look among those who are less regular churchgoers, and you can see this happening. So it's not like the rise of partisan identity is unique to the people who are lacking other forms of social capital. It's happening everywhere, right? So that suggests to me that it's a broader environmental trait that's going on. And one of the things we really see in this is that people feel that they're hearing, well, two factors in the environment that are going on. One is sort of the morselization of info. Information, right?

Michael Dimock  
That basically, most Americans are walking through news through most of their waking hours. Right? It's sort of hitting us in various ways and shapes and forms. It's not something that's captured in the paper, over the breakfast table, in the evening news to over caricature previous era. It's sort of walking around us on our cell phones and in the ether and in our podcasts and all over the place, and that note of partisanship is sort of hitting us over and over again, in part because local news has become sort of a lower volume in that mix than it used to be, right? And local news is typically less structured around the Republican, Democratic battle. But as the economies have changed, local news has struggled. I think that the balance of news that people are absorbing is far more tilted toward this national dialog.

Michael Dimock  
And to be honest, that national dialog has pretty much one note to it. Over the last 20 years, almost every story is framed in terms of what the partisan battle is over the issue. And I think that that environmental change of the overall mix of news, as well as its sort of pervasiveness, is probably one of the biggest factors in this.

Jenna Spinelle  
You know, those of us who work in the democracy political space, as you and I do, and certainly our listeners are concerned about these things too, and I wonder how much we tend to over emphasize some of these issues we've been talking about, because I was also struck reading through the trust facts and democracy work that 62% of respondents were concerned about the ability of Democrats and Republicans to work together. 52% expressed concern about the way that their systems operate. But those still rank below things like health care, the opioid or drug addiction problems, education. So can you speak a little bit more to where some of these issues about trust in and polarization and all these things we've been talking to, I mean, in the minds of people that are not in this, like democracy, world that we inhabit, where do these issues fall on the grand scale?

Michael Dimock  
Yeah, I'm glad you raised that, because there is a way where, when you're deep in this, you feel like it's truly existential to the future of our democracy. And it is absolutely true that most Americans have much more practical and tangible concerns that they would like to see our institutions focus on solving, and that even in their day to day lives, they're much more concerned about many other issues related to the economy, related as you mentioned, the opioid crisis, climate change and environmental issues have been rising in the American public's focus. This is not the singular note that's crystalizing everybody's minds today at the public level, although the frustration with what people perceive as a gridlocked political process over partisanship touches on all of those different fronts, because there is a public perception that our government is becoming incapable of taking any real action because of these trends and these changes and the way the institutions are operating and the way that political leaders are operating, and whether that perception is a reality, is a whole nother set of interesting questions about how institutions actually function, and the long history of American political policy making.

Michael Dimock  
But that perception is certainly very strong and acute right now, and that can kind of accelerate these skepticisms about democracy, the value of democracy, or the trustworthiness of democratic decisions and election outcomes. And then when you layer on top of that, really much more structural reasons for concern, like, Could our election information be hacked, or are the fundamentals of our electoral process, whether it's how the votes are counted in Iowa or the fairness of the Electoral College, or whether gerrymandering is distorting the public's view. You layer on those other more structural concerns with this sense that the current system is dysfunctional, you're in a position where, even though the public's focus may be on the issues that they are seeing not getting solved, you can imagine ways in which that could feed into a fundamental skepticism about democratic outcomes in elections, right?

Jenna Spinelle  
So people are frustrated. They are skeptical, as you just said, about the ability of their fellow citizens to make good decisions and all of these things that we've been talking about. But how do they feel about the prospect for change moving forward? Are people hopeful that the American spirit of okay, we can figure out a way to get past this. Is that prevalent here? Or how are folks feeling about how we move forward?

Michael Dimock  
Yeah, I think a couple of the rays of light in public opinion, what public opinion can tell us is that while there's so much of this around the. Political decision making, the political processes and government, public trust in each other in the more root ways, like if you dropped your wallet, do you think somebody would return it to you? Or if there were a crisis, would people help out? Those haven't eroded over time in the way that these more political perceptions have. And so even though we're feeling more divided and more alienated along partisan lines when it comes to political conversations, that hasn't necessarily carried over into a sort of erosion of root level civic trust, and I think that is the area, and even when we ask people in our surveys where they see hope, it's in that space, which is we said, you know, one question, because one of the things we were able to do better now with the surveys is really just pose more open ended questions to our respondents and give them space to voice their views in their own words, rather than us putting words in their mouths.

Michael Dimock  
And we said, how much do you think that trust in each other can be improved? Or is this just the new normal? And the response from our survey respondents was overwhelmingly positive. 86% said, Yes, this can be improved. And when we said, well, how? And just left it open like you, tell us, what do you think could be done? The answers tended to center around building off of those other elements of community you referred earlier to social capital, connectedness, other areas of commonality. We need to talk to each other more. We need to find areas that we agree on and build from those. We need to reduce the volume of this hyper politicized information. I think people are conscious of how that frame is affecting their views of issues. You know, is reinforcing that sense of distance. So people talk about trying to find ways to step out of that kind of vortex of information flow as a potential solution to all of this. So there's a sense of optimism in there, a sense that if we can reconnect at that civic level, and if we can catch up with this information revolution that we've been experiencing as a society, and this is the US and around the world, we haven't adapted to what's been in a complete revolution of information. And I think there's a sort of hope in there that as we learn to adapt, learn to navigate more effectively, that that solutions will start to arise. Right?

Jenna Spinelle  
That is one of the more hopeful things we've heard on the show lately. So

Michael Dimock  
thank you. Thank

Jenna Spinelle  
you for that.

Michael Dimock  
The only thing I would add is these trends are not unique to the United States, and we're doing survey work all around the world in other advanced democracies, in developing nations, Asia, Latin America, Africa and East or Western Europe. And I think one of the key elements is that America is not entirely unique in all of this. And another lens that that global perspective brings in is some of this is linked to a broader kind of sense of uncertainty that citizens around the world are feeling. It's an uncertainty related to the foundations of our economies, the sense that people, especially in more advanced economies, don't look at a future of continued growth. Most publics in advanced economies are looking at a future that feels far less certain for them and their children's generation, and that has an effect on their sense of confidence, their sense of stability, not to mention that their confidence in short term economic conditions has been shaken since 2008 where even if people feel the economy is better Today, they still don't feel at ease that their retirement accounts, that their college plans for their kids, etc, those deeper fundamentals are as secure as they felt in the past.

Michael Dimock  
So there's this kind of vibration out there that is a part of this, and you're seeing that show up in a lot of different countries, and it's correlated with people's confidence in elections and confidence, and their sense of the stakes of political decisions, their willingness to be engaged in global affairs, concerns about everything from migration to global trade to everything, all kind of get pulled into this. So I would only say that there are a lot of elements of this story that are really unique to the American trajectory, dynamic history, kind of political landscape, cultural landscape, but there are also elements of this that really are part of a much larger signal that we're going through all over the world. And the more we talked with folks through these focus groups, and then ultimately through the survey work we did, we're using that. The same concern people have in suburban Washington, DC, you know, like this really is a broader phenomenon than the one that we tend to look at when we look at ourselves,

Jenna Spinelle  
right? Well, this is all very interesting work. Michael, thank you for sharing it with us and for taking the time to join us today.

Michael Dimock  
It's been great talking with you.

Michael Berkman  
You know, I'm struck, Chris, because we're in the middle of an election season that we're right. We are. You hear me assuming they don't cancel it for the play, right? But there's, you know, it's worth thinking about just a little bit in the context of what we've been talking about with pew, about how you should be interpreting polls during the campaign. Well,

Chris Beem  
I know it's a failure of mine, and I think it's a failure of most people who probably listen to the podcast, that it's hard not to just say, what's the latest, what's the next poll? What happened this time? Hold on

Michael Berkman  
to the latest poll. So you know I've been talking and it's very interesting what Pew is finding on a set of questions here on election poll. And the advice is, actually, usually don't pay attention to any one poll.

Chris Beem  
Don't pay attention to any one poll. You're looking for the average you're looking for the Yeah,

Michael Berkman  
it really makes a lot of sense to pay attention to websites that aggregate polls. They do them in some different ways. I think, to throw a plug for another podcast, I think Nate Silver's 538 probably does the most sophisticated aggregation of polling, because what they're doing is not only weighting any particular poll by, say, the size of its sample right of course, determines, of course, how strong inferences you can draw from it, but also on the quality of the poll and the historic bias of the poll. Because I think, yeah, they know that some polls tend to be because of whatever may be precise to them as to how they choose likely voters or whatever, more likely to lean Democrat, more likely Republican. So look at sites that average across polls. Don't get too excited about anyone. So

Chris Beem  
I wanted to also talk about this point that Jenna raised, let's call it the Andrew Sullivan argument, that one of the explanations for the condition of American political culture right now is the fact that the traditional institutions of American civil society, the kind of social institutions where people meet outside of politics, Have all declined, and so now politics has filled that void, and politics has become a kind of religion that's the 25 cent version of everything's partisan, right? And so his argument, Michael's argument, is he's not buying that, because even those people who remain connected to institutions of American civil society, particularly churches, manifest that same kind of polarization. So it doesn't matter if you're in American civil society or not, you're still partisan.

Michael Berkman  
I mean, I think also, you know, we recently polled in mood of the nation on what people value about a democracy, and we found partisan splits, Democrats value different things than Republicans,

Chris Beem  
even though they say and they will both affirm the same war, both affirm that

Michael Berkman  
they value it, right? But what? Yeah, I mean, Republicans tend to be much more oriented around freedom and those sorts of protections within the Constitution,

Chris Beem  
and they mention Second Amendment a lot more frequently,

Michael Berkman  
yeah, well, or just freedoms, yeah. More broadly, and Democrats are much more likely to mention majoritarian kinds of institutions, voting, majority rules, equality, equal views to that kind of thing. Yeah? So even democracy is a contested term.

Chris Beem  
So even in the midst, even when we see unanimity, we may not really be seeing unanimity. And this speaks directly to the fact that allowing people to speak for themselves and polling instruments ends up producing a better result. I think we get a different result.

Michael Berkman  
I want to end the podcast by saying we're better than what Pew is doing. Pew is a phenomenal polling term, and I rely on their poll findings all the time.

Chris Beem  
Well, then just we're doing something different, right? But it's also, I would put those two yours and pews and a variety of other ones in the same kind of group. Well, we'll take that, right? I mean, well, I bet you, I bet you will. But ones that take the democratic impulse within polling serious. Yes, absolutely,

Michael Berkman  
about what people are thinking about, about what they're feeling, about politics and about the state of the world and and not in an effort to drive news stories right, not in an effort or replace news stories, make news stories or election coverage. I mean, I think in the areas of election, polling drives the news. A newspaper or media source of some kind pays for a poll, they're going to use it

Chris Beem  
right as with a variety of issues and phenomenon. This year, it's about buyer beware and try to find the good stuff and make sure you focus during. Exactly there, and I think that's enough for today, huh? Well, thanks again to the redoubtable Jenna Spinelle for her interview, and thanks to all you for listening. I'm Chris beam.

Michael Berkman  
I'm Michael Berkman.

Chris Beem  
This has been Democracy Works

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