Even with the coronavirus, some Americans deeply distrust the experts. Will they take precautions?

Republican voters are still far more likely than Democrats to believe the coronavirus pandemic has been exaggerated, their skepticism egged on by Fox News and even Republican officeholders. That’s true even after President Trump took emergency measures. But partisanship isn’t the only barrier to getting Americans to listen to scientific […] Read more »

Beware the Deadly Contagion Spread by Blowhards

… As we wrestle with the new coronavirus, let’s learn lessons from the 2009-10 H1N1 swine flu outbreak in the United States. At first, polls back then showed that both Democrats and Republicans were about equally concerned with the outbreak. That makes sense: Why should our political party shape how […] Read more »

Climate Change in the American Mind: About 7 in 10 Americans think global warming is happening

Our latest national survey finds that the highest percentage of Americans since our surveys began are “extremely” or “very” sure global warming is happening. Additionally, an increasing percentage of Americans understand that most scientists think global warming is happening. The report includes many other interesting findings, including how often Americans […] Read more »

Americans broadly accept climate science, but many are fuzzy on the details

Americans remain shaky on the details of climate science even as they have grown increasingly concerned about human activity warming the Earth, according to a national poll by The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) that probed the public’s understanding of climate change. The rising alarm is one […] Read more »

Party Cues in the News: Elite Opinion Leadership and Climate Skepticism

Supporters of the Republican Party have become much more skeptical of the science of climate change since the 1990s. We argue that this phenomenon can be explained by a model of top-down persuasion by party elites. We construct aggregate measures of climate skepticism from nearly 200 public opinion polls at […] Read more »