The Public Pulse

Vision

The Public Pulse Project will issue a series of neutral, evidence-based, systematic reports describing public opinion on key policy issues at the forefront of legislative, policy and journalistic debate. Users of The Public Pulse will find these frequently updated reviews and syntheses on an accessible easy-to-navigate website.

The Public Pulse will not commission primary research, instead using existing surveys which are already published and in the public domain. The Public Pulse will focus exclusively on survey research in the U.S.

Objectives

The Public Pulse centers on the conviction that public opinion is a key component in our representative democracy—a baseline necessity for the way in which the U.S. system of government operates. Elected officials, leaders, journalists, and the general public need to be able to access and understand the broad contours of the views of the entire population. This is particularly important in a highly polarized environment in which fewer and fewer voters can determine the outcome of elections.

Survey research is our primary mechanism for accomplishing this objective.

Rationale

There are more surveys of public opinion than ever before. Many are of high quality and provide important insights into public opinion. Others are of lesser quality. Poll results on any given topic often vary based on question wording, methodology, and other structural factors.

Survey results on public policy are often well reported in major publications and news and media sites and are the focus of academic publications. In other instances, however, survey results are reported without evaluation or vetting and are used to support pre-existing positions or arguments. Survey results are also reported without comparison and contrast to other results on the same topic. On some important policies, there is no systematic reporting or review of any kind.

There are also pressing concerns about survey methodology. Traditional methods with proven validity, still employed by many reputable polls, have become more difficult and more expensive. Nontraditional methods with unproven validity have increasingly lower barriers to entry and have thus become more and more prevalent.

And, even with an assumption of methodological quality, survey results can vary based on question wording and survey context, opening the door to conflicting assumptions or conclusions about public opinion on a given topic.

There is a clear need for neutral, scientific review, evaluation, and summaries of where the public stands on key issues. This follows the lead of medical research, wherein discoveries and published research on a given medical topic are almost always placed in the context of previous research, and frequently augmented by summary meta-analyses and reviews.

Benefits

One benefit of The Public Pulse will be to provide journalists and news organizations with instant access to the state of public opinion when needed after a real-world event or breaking news story. Examples would include a mass shooting incident (where public opinion on gun policy would be important), the breakout of war between Iran and Israel in the Middle East (where public opinion on U.S. support for and sympathy for Israel would be important), or a presidential candidate’s announcement of a major tax cut proposal (where public opinion on taxes and tax cuts would be important).

Format

Each Public Pulse review/synthesis will follow a standardized format, using a prescribed set of focus points. These reviews will provide an in-depth summary statement of where public opinion stands on each topic, accompanied by an assessment of the availability of data on each topic, overall confidence in the ability of the data to accurately reflect public opinion, the impact of question wording on interpretations of public opinion on the topic, the public’s level of knowledge on the topic, evaluation of conflicts in measures of public opinion across surveys, and unknowns or areas of uncertainty in public opinion on the topic.