Publications

Overview President Obama faces an uphill battle in making the case for U.S. military action in Syria. By a 48% to 29% margin, more Americans oppose than support conducting military airstrikes against Syria in response to reports that the Syrian government used chemical weapons. The new national survey by the Pew Research Center, conducted Aug. […]

Updated data on the legislative productivity of the 113th Congress is available here. As Congress gets ready to return from its August recess and address the pressing issue of whether to take action in Syria, it does so amid largely unfavorable views from the public. Seven-in-ten Americans have a “very” or “mostly” unfavorable opinion of […]

Are men losing interest in work? Male labor force participation rates in the United States have been in steady decline since at least 1950 while women’s labor market participation steadily rose before leveling off about a decade ago. Two recent analyses of U.S. Census data document this trend and offer some unexpected reasons why this […]

By Andrew Kohut As President Obama heads to the G20 summit in St. Petersburg this week he remains the most popular world leader. Ordinary citizens in most countries, with some notable exceptions, say they have confidence in him to do the right thing in world affairs and many generally approve of his policies. But over […]

There is a widening gap in support for legal abortion between New England (75%) and the South Central states (40%).

About half of Americans have a favorable view of labor unions, up 10 percentage points since 2011.

In the debate over whether the United States and one or more of its NATO allies should launch a military strike against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad over its alleged use of chemical weapons, much has been made of the need for multilateral sanction for such an effort, either by the U.N. Security Council or NATO.

Using documents obtained from former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, The Washington Post has published the first-ever detailed look at the U.S. government’s intelligence spending — the “black budget,” so called because, though the overall spending figure has been made public since 2007, the specifics have not. For its combination of newsworthiness, clear and efficient presentation […]

Although household-income growth for African-Americans has outpaced that of whites since the 1960s, those gains haven't led to any narrowing of the wealth gap between the races.