Faculty Research Report on American Public Opinion
The University of Louisville Department of Political Science conducted a two-wave poll of the American mass public over the course of 2022 with the goal of examining both the broad contours of attitudes about the state of democracy and elections, as well as topics ranging from climate change attitudes to perceptions about the legitimacy of political institutions like the Supreme Court. The multi-wave nature of the data allowed us to track, for example, particular attitudes about elections and political candidates over time, providing a unique view into the temporal dynamics of mass opinion across the span of a campaign. Furthermore, each individual wave also included a variety of experiments that facilitated a different view of the causal relationships between various political attitudes, predispositions, and behaviors. Combined, the two-wave study makes for a rich window into some of the most pressing political questions of our time that is theoretically deeper and methodologically more sophisticated than the horserace polling one is typically exposed to during a campaign cycle.
Below we, provide a report on findings from the first two waves of this project. After the third and final wave of data collection has been completed, the full dataset and additional materials will be made accessible to the public. In the meantime, interested UofL students and faculty should contact Dr. Adam Enders (amende01@louisville.edu) if they are interested in utilizing the data for purposes of class projects, theses, or teaching.