There’s a lot of concern today about the health of democracy, both overseas and here in the U.S. Now, a new survey takes a closer look at how people in the U.S. feel about democracy — what it means to them and how we can work to strengthen it.
The Democracy Project is a bipartisan collaboration between Freedom House, the George W. Bush Institute, and the Penn Biden Center. They partnered with a bipartisan group of public opinion firms to conduct a nationwide survey of 1,700 adults this year. They also held 10 focus groups, including two here in Phoenix.
The Show spoke with Jeremy Rosner about this. He’s a partner with Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, one of the firms who designed and conducted the study.
The results, he says, are seemingly contradictory.
More than half of those surveyed said that our democracy is weak, and two-thirds say that it’s getting weaker. So, even though people still seem to cherish the idea and the principles of democracy, they feel our democracy isn’t working the way it should, a feeling that crosses party lines.
