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The America’s Pulse Survey is collected each week using participants from the YouGov panel.

If you use our data in your research, we humbly ask that you cite our lab 🙏:

Shanto Iyengar, Yphtach Lelkes and Sean Westwood. (2023). America’s Political Pulse. https://polarizationresearchlab.org/americas-political-pulse/.



All Data Collected (so far)


*Data is distributed under the Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) License.

Notes

What is the file naming convention?

Each file is titled with the following convention: <year>_week<week_number>.csv, where <week_number> is the nth week of that year. We started conducting the America’s Pulse Survey in the 38th week of 2022.

How do I calculate “Affective Polarization”?

In our research (and on our public visualizations), we calculate “affective polarization” exactly as follows:

  1. Define Democrats as anyone where pid7 is 1, 2, or 3
  2. Define Republicans as anyone where pid7 is between 5, 6, or 7
  3. Remove everyone where pid7 equals 4
  4. Remove any rows with missing values in the republican_therm_1 and democrat_therm_1 columns (there shouldn’t be many)
  5. For Democrats, calculate: democrat_therm_1 - republican_therm_1
  6. For Republicans, calculate: republican_therm_1 - democrat_therm_1
  7. Remove anyone with a negative score

The starttime and endtime Variables

The start and end time columns mark when a participant starts and finishes our survey. We often find that participants start our survey to claim a spot in the YouGov panel, but then opt to finish the bulk of the survey later. For this reason, we often use end times for any time-series analyses.

The engagement_measure Variable

September 2022 - June 2023

For the engagement measure, we show participants a passage about a wildlife funding program for a particular state. The passage is then removed, and participants are asked what state (of 7 possible options) the passage referred to. We’ve recoded this data to label participants as “engaged” or “not engaged” based on whether they guessed the correct state.