In January 2018, as Donald Trump completed his first year as president, Bright Line Watch conducted its fourth expert survey on the state of U.S. democracy. At the same time, we conducted an identical public survey – our second – with a nationally representative sample of Americans. This approach allows […] Read more »
Here’s Just How Little Confidence Americans Have In Political Institutions
Trust in the institutions that have been the pillars of U.S. politics and capitalism is crumbling. That is one finding from the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll, which shows that Americans have limited confidence in its public schools, courts, organized labor and banks — and even less confidence in big business, […] Read more »
What we learned about American democracy in 2017
This time last year, I was trying to figure out a year-in-review piece that would make sense of all we had seen, without knowing much about what to expect from the Trump presidency. In retrospect, this seems like nothing so much as a failure of imagination: The rapid transition from […] Read more »
6 In 10 Black Americans Say Police Unfairly Stopped Them Or A Relative
A new poll out this week from NPR finds that 60 percent of black Americans say they or a family member have been stopped or treated unfairly by police because they are black. In addition, 45 percent say they or a family member have been treated unfairly by the courts […] Read more »
Wide Partisan Gaps Over How Far the Country Has Come on Gender Equality
Women in the United States have made significant strides toward closing the gaps that have kept them from achieving equality with men. But the country is sharply divided over how much work remains to be done, and those divisions are rooted mainly in the growing partisan schism that pervades American […] Read more »
The Health of American Democracy: Comparing Perceptions of Experts and the American Public
Given widespread concern about the possible erosion of democracy in the United States, Bright Line Watch has conducted expert surveys since early 2017 asking thousands of professional political scientists to identify the dimensions of democracy they see as most important and to rate how well the U.S. is performing on […] Read more »