A Shifting Landscape: A Decade of Change in American Attitudes about Same-Sex Marriage and LGBT Issues

This national survey of more than 4,500 Americans finds that support for allowing gay and lesbian people to legally wed has jumped 21 percentage points over the last decade, from 32 percent in 2003 to 53 percent in 2013, transforming the American religious landscape in the process

What Americans (Still) Want From Immigration Reform: American Public Opinion March-November 2013

Throughout 2013, there has been consistent bipartisan and cross-religious support for creating a path to citizenship for immigrants living in the United States. Today, 63% of Americans favor providing a way for immigrants who are currently living in the United States illegally to become citizens provided they meet certain requirements, while 14% support allowingthem to become permanent legal residents but not citizens, and roughly 1-in-5 (18%) favor a policy that would identify and deport all immigrants living in the United States illegally. This support for a path to citizenship has remained unchanged from earlier this year, whenin both March and August 2013 an identical number (63%) supported a path to citizenship for immigrants currently living in the United States illegally

Citizenship, Values, & Cultural Concerns: What Americans Want From Immigration Reform

In February 2013, Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), in partnership with the Brookings Institution, conducted one of the largest surveys ever fielded on immigration policy, immigrants, and religious and cultural changes in the U.S. The survey of nearly 4,500 American adults explores the many divisions -- political, religious, ethnic, geographical, and generational -- within the nation over core values and their relationship to immigration. The new survey also tracks key questions from surveys conducted by PRRI in 2010-2011. This report presents the results of these surveys

The Diversity of Latino Ideology

Ideology in American politics is usually measured along a liberal-conservative continuum depending on a person’s position on issues such as the role of government in the economy and the regulation of social behavior. This framework has been a poor fit for understanding Latino political behavior. This dissertation argues that to understand Latino political behavior it is necessary to understand Latinos’ ideological thinking. I argue that Latinos’ shared cultural traits and their core beliefs (rooted in a common experience) inform three distinct Ethno-Ideologies: pan-ethnic, co-ethnic and ethnic. These Ethno-Ideologies sort Latinos depending on how much in common they think share with other Latinos. To test the theory, I use data from the 2006 Latino National Survey, the largest nationally-representative survey of Latinos. These data are supplemented with qualitative insights from focus groups conducted with Latinos in Phoenix, Arizona. The findings suggest that ideological thinking among Latinos in the U.S. is more rooted in the experience in which the core beliefs are based than in their shared cultural traits