Publications

With the stock market hitting new highs and home prices marking their strongest gains since before the bubble burst, it’s starting to feel like a real economic recovery. But which is the better investment over time? That depends largely on your definition of “long term.” As the accompanying charts show, since the formal end of the […]

Today’s report from the Census Bureau on the diversifying American electorate in 2012 confirms an historic turnout milestone first noted last December by the Pew Research Center, but undercuts a number of other widely-reported demographic analyses of last year’s presidential vote. Here are the six most important take-aways from Census Bureau data: 1. For the […]

Optimism in an Era of Growing Inequality and Economic Difficulty Despite an extended period of economic difficulty, Pew Research Center pollsters Andrew Kohut and Michael Dimock show that Americans’ core values and beliefs about economic opportunity, and the nation’s economic outlook, remain largely optimistic and unchanged. There is also little evidence that economic class is […]

More than half of Americans have received government benefits at some point from a major federal entitlement program.

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.

Overview As Pakistan prepares for national elections, the country’s public mood is exceedingly grim. Roughly nine-in-ten Pakistanis believe the country is on the wrong track, and about eight-in-ten say the economy is in poor shape. Meanwhile, concerns about extremist groups have increased markedly. More than nine-in-ten Pakistanis describe terrorism as a very big problem, and […]