Showing posts with label Pew Research Center. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pew Research Center. Show all posts

Friday, May 22, 2015

Negative Views of New Congress Cross Party Lines 

By Pew Research Center, May 21, 2015, PeoplePress.org

The new Republican-led Congress is drawing harsh reviews from the public – including most Republicans. Just 23% of Americans say congressional Republicans are keeping the promises they made during last fall’s campaign, while 65% say they are not.

Nearly four-in-ten (37%) say the new Congress has accomplished less than they expected, while 4% say it has accomplished more than expected. About half (53%) say its accomplishments are in line with what they expected.

On both measures, the public’s views are far more negative than they were of the Democratic-led Congress in March 2007, after the Democrats regained control of both chambers following several years of Republican control. Views are also much more negative than they were in April 1995, shortly after the GOP had gained control of the House and Senate for the first time in four decades.

The new national survey by the Pew Research Center, conducted May 12-18 among 2,002 adults, finds that just 22% approve of the job performance of Republican congressional leaders, little changed since the summer of 2011. Ratings for Democratic congressional leaders are somewhat better (33% approve).


Read the full story: www.people-press.org

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Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Europe's Jewish Population Continues To Plummet

By Ethan Epstein, Feb. 10, 2015, WeeklyStandard.com

If you ignore the cringe-worthy opening line of this article from the Pew Research Center – the Holocaust did far worse than “decimate” Europe’s Jewish population – you will find some interesting facts. In a nutshell, Europe’s Jewish population continues to decline. There are now approximately 1.4 million Jews living in Europe, compared to 9.5 million in 1939. Only 10 percent of the world’s Jews now live in Europe, and a mere 0.2 percent of Europeans are Jewish.

And apparently, Europe’s Jewish population will only continue to decline. Thousands of French Jews, for example, are emigrating each year, most commonly to Israel.

A Europe without Jews would be almost without precedent; the continent has played host to Jewish communities for millennia. It would also be an immeasurably poorer place, in myriad ways. We’re talking about the culture that produced Kafka, Freud, and Stefan Zweig – in addition to the bagel.


Read the full story:  www.weeklystandard.com

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Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Gun Homicide Rate Down 49% Since 1993

D’Vera Cohn, Paul Taylor, Mark Hugo Lopez, Catherine A. Gallagher, Kim Parker and Kevin T. Maass, May 7, 2013, Pew Research Center

National rates of gun homicide and other violent gun crimes are strikingly lower now than during their peak in the mid-1990s, paralleling a general decline in violent crime, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of government data. Beneath the long-term trend, though, are big differences by decade: Violence plunged through the 1990s, but has declined less dramatically since 2000.

Read more: www.pewsocialtrends.org



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Sunday, November 16, 2014

Giving Up: 40% Women, 28% Men, 39% Youth Don't Want A Job

Paul Bedard, Nov. 14, 2014, Washington Examiner

Nearly four in 10 Americans, or 92 million, are not in the labor force and now there’s a reason why: They have simply given up and don’t want to work.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the largest group of people not in the labor force are those who don’t want a job, a remarkable statement on the nation’s work ethic. The federal job counter said that 85.9 million adults last month didn’t want a job, or 93 percent of all adults not in the labor force.

A Pew Research Center analysis out Friday dug a bit deeper to find out who those people are. Many are younger Americans who seem far less interested it landing a job than previous generations, possibly discouraged by the lack of good-paying jobs.

Read more: www.washingtonexaminer.com



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Monday, October 27, 2014

How We 'Won' In Vietnam--But Are Losing At Home

Photo via Flickr
Glenn Harlan Reynolds, Oct. 27, 2014, usatoday.com

So I guess we won that war after all. According to the Pew Global Poll, 95% of people in Vietnam agree that most people are better off under capitalism, even if there is inequality.

By contrast, only 70% of Americans believe the same thing. (America is out-performed by such other less developed countries as Nigeria, China, Turkey, Malaysia, the Philippines and India). Maybe, quipped an Internet commenter, the Vietnamese should send us some advisers.

But there are some lessons to be learned here, one of which is that history plays out slowly. (Though it's probably a myth, Chinese premier Zhou Enlai supposedly once said about the French Revolution, it's "too early to say" how it has turned out.) Had you asked people in 1974 about support for capitalism in Vietnam 40 years later, few would have predicted that 95% of Vietnamese would support capitalism today. The lower level of support in America might have surprised some folks, too, though maybe not.

Read more: www.usatoday.com

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Thursday, July 24, 2014

Democrats Losing Their Moral Clarity On Israel

via www.sodahead.com
By Jeff Jacoby, Jul. 21, 2014, Bostonglobe.com

THE PEW Research Center last week released a new survey of American attitudes in the Middle East. The results weren’t surprising. In the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, 51 percent of Americans say they sympathize more with Israel. Only 14 percent feel greater affinity for the Palestinians.

Pew’s findings demonstrate the strength of pro-Israel feeling in the United States. The poll was conducted amid the current fighting with Hamas, but the bottom line hardly changed from Pew’s last survey in April, when it reported that in the 36 years it has been sampling public opinion, “sympathy toward Israel has never been higher.”


But below the surface, America’s Israel-friendly consensus is splitting along the same left-vs.-right fault line that has polarized so many other issues. While support for Israel is overwhelming among Republicans and conservatives, it has been shrinking among Democrats and liberals. “The partisan gap in Mideast sympathies has never been wider,” reports Pew, with 73 percent of Republicans sympathetic to Israel in the ongoing conflict, but just 44 percent of Democrats. Respondents identifying as liberal Democrats were five times as likely as conservative Republicans to sympathize more with the Palestinians.

Thus is the Democratic Party losing its way on one of the great moral issues of our time.


Read the full story:  www.bostonglobe.com

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Friday, July 4, 2014

By Pam Tobey, Jul. 2, 2014, Washingtonpost.com

News about the violence and instability in Iraq is not of great interest to Americans — but neither is the World Cup, except among millennials.

In a new Pew Research Center Poll, more Americans are following news about problems with care at veterans’ hospitals than instability and fighting in Iraq. If you include those following it fairly closely, the World Cup appears quite far on down the interest list, just above news on recent Supreme Court rulings. Mind you the poll was taken before Tuesday’s big match.



Read the bulk story:  www.washingtonpost.com

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Monday, June 30, 2014

By Bill Muehlenberg, Jun. 29, 2014, Barbwire.com

There is no greater persecution being experienced today than that of Christians. A recent report by the Pew Research Center found that “Christians continue to be the world’s most oppressed religious group, with persecution against them reported in 110 countries.” This should come as no surprise to globally-aware Christians.

Christians have always been the subject of persecution, repression and hatred. But if anything, it seems to be getting worse of late. And the number one reason for such persecution of course is the political ideology of Islam. More Christians are tortured, imprisoned and killed by Muslims than by anyone else. But of course atheist regimes are doing a pretty good job here as well.

The numbers speak for themselves, and are most revealing. Consider as but one example the hellhole that is atheistic North Korea. Most people suffer there big time, but especially the Christians. One short article about recent public executions there is most disturbing:

Tragic news coming from North Korea today. According to South Korean newspaper JoongAng Ilbo, as many as 80 people were publicly executed in North Korea this month for minor offenses such as owning a Bible. The alleged “criminals” were put to death in seven cities across North Korea, averaging ten per city. The victims had their heads covered by white bags, were tied to stakes near a stadium, and shot by authorities repeatedly with machine guns. North Korean officials forced a crowd of over 10,000 people, including children, to witness the killings.

“I heard from the residents that they watched in terror as the corpses were (so) riddled by machine-gun fire that they were hard to identify afterward,” the JoongAng Ilbo source said. The massacre marks the first time during Kim Jong-un’s reign where public executions have taken place, a troubling sign for the future of the totalitarian country. Government officials suggest that the executions were meant to quell the recent spread of capitalism in various cities across North Korea. North Korean law permits executions for conspiring to overthrow the government, treason and terrorism. But the country has also been known to order public executions for minor infractions such as religious activism, cellphone use and stealing food, in an effort to intimidate the public.

Consider also Open Doors International which has released a Top 10 Violence List of countries in which Christians have experienced the most violent persecution for their faith in Jesus Christ. It documents just how great a price believers around the world are paying for their faith:

The World Watch Top 10 Violence List, which is based on persecution incidents between Nov. 1, 2012, and March 31, 2014, is topped by Nigeria. The others, in order, are: Syria, Egypt, Central African Republic (CAR), Mexico, Pakistan, Colombia, India, Kenya and Iraq.
Read the full story:  www.barbwire.com

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Thursday, June 12, 2014

By Kevin Glass, Jun. 12, 2014, Townhall.com

A fascinating new poll out today from the Pew Research Center reports on how they've tracked Americans' beliefs on political issues over time. It's wide-ranging and deep and a fascinating look at what Americans believe. One of the most important parts is how the two coalitions - Republicans and Democrats - have changed over the last twenty years. And it takes a sledgehammer to myths that liberals have been telling themselves.

Myth #1: Polarization is asymmetric

Asymmetric polarization, as espoused by analysts like the Brookings Institute's Thomas Mann, goes something like this: Democrats have created a big tent governming majority that tolerates lots of different views and, as a result, has a kind of "moderate center" that has remained relatively consistent; while Republicans have exiled the centrists in their party as grassroots voters have taken over and made their party more extreme all on their own.

That's flatly not true.

The typical measurement of asymmetric polarization comes from a Congressional metric called DW-NOMINATE, which at its heart measures how often elected representatives in Congress vote with each other. The flaw here is that it doesn't take into account the relative leftness or rightness of a proposal being voted on. If there were a vote in Congress to repeal the 2nd Amendment, for example, with all Republicans voting against and Democrats split evenly between for and against, would be a data point contributing to Republicans becoming more "extreme" and Democrats being relatively centrist. DW-NOMINATE has certain utility in evaluating legislative coalitions, but as an actual measure of how left-wing or right-wing any coalition is, it's severely lacking.

Pew's survey finds a lot of interesting trends in the Republican Party, but one thing is certain: Democrats have gotten much more liberal over the last twenty years. Pew actually measures how people feel about a lot of different issues, not just how their votes cluster. Democrats moved noticably leftward in the late 90s. What is true is that Democrats stagnated throughout the Bush years in how Pew measures how liberal they are - they remained relatively consistent. But in the Obama era, Democrats have veered sharply leftward, as shown in these two images; watch how far the median Democrat jumps from 2010 to 2014:




Read the full story:  www.townhall.com

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Tuesday, April 1, 2014

By Heather Mac Donald, Nov. 7, 2012, The National Review
The call for Republicans to discard their opposition to immigration amnesty will grow deafening in the wake of President Obama’s victory. Hispanics supported Obama by a margin of nearly 75 percent to 25 percent, and may have provided important margins in some swing states. If only Republicans relented on their Neanderthal views regarding the immigration rule of law, the message will run, they would release the inner Republican waiting to emerge in the Hispanic population.  

If Republicans want to change their stance on immigration, they should do so on the merits, not out of a belief that only immigration policy stands between them and a Republican Hispanic majority. It is not immigration policy that creates the strong bond between Hispanics and the Democratic party, but the core Democratic principles of a more generous safety net, strong government intervention in the economy, and progressive taxation. Hispanics will prove to be even more decisive in the victory of Governor Jerry Brown’s Proposition 30, which raised upper-income taxes and the sales tax, than in the Obama election. 

Read the full story:  www.nationalreview.com



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Saturday, March 22, 2014



By Guy Benson, Mar. 21, 2014, Townhall

Four years ago today, chants of "yes we can!" echoed throughout the House chamber. A new dawn had broken in America. Tens of millions of uninsured Americans would finally have access to quality, affordable health coverage, healthcare spending would fall, healthcare-related deficits would contract, everyone pleased with their existing arrangement would be protected, and everyone's rates would drop. Some of us didn't buy any of it, but those who did -- or said they did -- cheered and partied the night away:




In spite of their now-infamous promises, the bill Democrats passed was unpopular with the American people at the time, and remains so to this day. Pew Research:






Read the full story:  www.townhall.com

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