From multiracial children to gender identity, what some demographers are studying now

When two people of different races have a child together, how do they choose to identify the race of their child on census forms? This was one of the topics explored by researchers at this year’s annual Population Association of America meeting.

The nation’s largest annual demography conference, held in Washington, D.C., last week, featured new research on topics including couples who live in separate homes, children of multiracial couples, transgender Americans, immigration law enforcement and how climate change affects migration. Here is a roundup of five of the many innovative posters and papers from the Population Association of America meeting, some based on preliminary work. They give insight into the questions on researchers’ minds. (To see the conference presentations by our own Pew Research Center experts, check out this page.)
Living Apart Together

As marriage declines in popularity and other kinds of relationships replace it, a category of couple known as Living Apart Together is the focus of new research in the U.S. These LAT couples, whether opposite-sex or same-sex, say they are in a long-term relationship but do not live together. They include older couples who each own homes as well as people who work in different cities. There’s been some research on these LAT couples in Europe, but until recently, less in the U.S.

Susan L. Brown and other scholars at the National Center for Marriage and Family Research at Bowling Green State University in Ohio presented their findings about Americans in this group. Using survey research company GfK’s Knowledge Panel (a large-scale online panel based on a representative, probability-based sample of the U.S. population), they estimate that up to about 40% of adults in dating relationships are Living Apart Together. They classified people in dating relationships as LAT couples if they agreed or strongly agreed with this statement: “Nowadays, many couples are in a committed, long-term relationship and choose to live apart (maintaining separate residences) rather than cohabit or marry. This describes my current relationship with my dating partner.”

When the researchers analyzed the characteristics of LAT couples compared with other people who were dating but didn’t agree with the statement above or were neutral about it, they found that LAT couples are older – about half are 35 or older, compared with only 30% of daters. They suggest that people in LAT relationships are more likely to have been previously married, and to own homes, perhaps in part because they are older. The racial-ethnic profiles of the two groups did not appear to differ. As might be expected, most LATs said it was very unlikely, unlikely, or that they did not know whether they would marry; most other daters said it was very likely or likely they would marry their partner. “LAT relationships are gaining momentum among middle-aged and older adults who may have less to gain from cohabitation or marriage,” the researchers said.
Children of multiracial couples

When two people of different races have a child together, how do they choose to identify the race of their child on census forms? Carolyn A. Liebler and José Pacas of the University of Minnesota analyzed U.S. census data from 1960 to 2010 – a period of dramatic rise in interracial marriage that has resulted in a corresponding growth of the multiracial population. Since 1960, Americans have been allowed to choose their own race on census forms, rather than having enumerators do it for them. Although the census form did not offer people the opportunity to check more than one race box until 2000, the researchers found that some did so as early as 1980.

Their research found that not all interracially married parents checked more than one race box for their young children. Different groups varied in their responses, too. Some factors mattered in how parents did report race: Interracial couples living in the West, the region with the largest Asian and Pacific Islander population, were more likely to report their child is Asian and Pacific Islander, alone or in combination with another race. A child of a white or black male householder was more likely to be reported as the same race as the father.

But other factors, such as whether a parent is Hispanic (an ethnic category, not a race), didn’t make a consistent difference, the researchers found. In general, the share of married people living in a census tract who have mixed-race marriages is not linked to how the child’s race is reported.
Sexual orientation and gender identity

The rise of legal same-sex marriages, headlines about hate crimes and concerns about potential differences in health have been among the factors driving increased interest in gathering better data about gay, lesbian and bisexual Americans, as well as those who are transgender. (This work includes our own survey in 2013.) This week, several dozen members of Congress urged lawmakers to pressure the Census Bureau to expand its data collection about people who identify with these groups.

A growing wave of research is happening, or on the way, according to presentations at a session on new ways of gathering data on sexual orientation and gender identity. In the past five years, 10 federal agencies have collected data about sexual orientation, and five about gender identity, but not all questions were worded the same, according to information gathered by a federal interagency working group.

In July, the National Crime Victimization Survey will begin asking survey respondents ages 16 and older about their sexual orientation and gender identity. The survey, fielded by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, includes 90,000 households a year. The new data will provide information about victimization risks for these groups, and about their access to victim services. But statistician Jennifer L. Truman cautioned that these groups are so small that there may not be a large enough sample to report annual statistics.

The California Health Interview Survey added test questions about gender identity in 2014, and incorporated the ones that worked best in 2015. Adding these questions to a survey did not generally anger respondents or confuse them, said Matt Jans of UCLA’s Center for Health Policy Research. People did not break off interviews, for example, because they were upset about being asked about their sexual orientation or gender identity.
Unauthorized immigration

State laws enacted over the past decade requiring employers to verify that all new hires were eligible to work apparently led to a reduction in the unauthorized immigrant population in those states, according to research by Pia Orrenius of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and Madeline Zavodny of Agnes Scott College. They believe these laws cause some unauthorized immigrants to leave the U.S., especially those who recently arrived, although they had no direct evidence. Meanwhile, the number of newly arrived unauthorized immigrants rose in nearby states, apparently because new arrivals avoided states with E-Verify laws. The researchers said, however, that they did not find evidence that many unauthorized immigrants left an E-Verify state for another state.

In 2007, Arizona was the first state to pass such a law, which requires all employers to use the free online federal E-Verify system. Six other states in the South or Southwest later did so: Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Utah. (Other states passed laws covering only government workers and contractors, but the paper did not analyze those.) Earlier research had found that tougher enforcement laws, including E-Verify, may have been linked to lowered employment and earnings for unauthorized immigrants and that Arizona’s law may have reduced its unauthorized immigrant population.

The new paper used 2005-2014 data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, and was based on a rough, incomplete definition of an unauthorized immigrant – noncitizens ages 20-54, with at most a high school education, from Mexico or Central America. (The estimates by Pew Research Center, which include the entire unauthorized immigrant population, differ from the ones used in this paper.) The researchers said their findings accounted for the recent stepped-up pace of deportations and other factors that might raise or lower unauthorized immigrant numbers.
Climate change and migration

The role of climate change in predicting future migration was the topic of a paper that looked at whether rural Mexican immigration to the U.S. would rise after a drought or long heat wave. Two researchers from the University of Minnesota, Raphael J. Nawrotzki and Jack DeWaard, reported that households initially try to stay where they are and cope with the impact of climate events such as extreme heat waves or droughts, but that migration levels then rise over the next three years before declining.

The researchers said their work accounted for other factors, such as financial need, that might cause people to migrate. They based their research on U.S. government temperature and precipitation records, as well as data collected by the Mexican Migration Project, a survey done in four to six Mexican rural communities each year since 1982. Their work covered 1986-1999, a period of rising Mexican immigration to the U.S. More recently, Mexican immigration to the U.S. generally has leveled off or decreased.

It’s already widely known that drought and temperature increases both are linked to increased emigration. Their new paper, the researchers said, adds the element of timing, to show that programs to help farmers and others cope with climate change will work best if put in place quickly, before climate-induced migration begins to rise.

Couples who meet online are more diverse than those who meet in other ways, largely because they’re younger

A Brooklyn couple who married after meeting through an online dating website.

As online dating has increased in popularity and lost much of its stigma over the past few decades, researchers have speculated that it could change the landscape of dating – and perhaps marriage – in big ways. By providing ways to meet others they wouldn’t bump into in their day-to-day lives, has online dating made its users more likely to choose a partner who is different from them in race or ethnicity, education, political party or income?

A Pew Research Center analysis of recently released survey data from Stanford University finds that couples who meet online are, in fact, more likely to be diverse in some of these dimensions. But this can be explained by the fact that online daters tend to be younger than those who meet offline, and younger people are more likely to be in relationships with people who are different from them, regardless of how they meet.

In the Stanford study (which included 3,394 U.S. adults who are currently married, in a relationship or who have ever previously been in a relationship), the median age of people who met their partners online was 36, compared with 51 among those who met their partners in another way.

Three-in-ten of those who say they met their partner online report that their partner is a different race or ethnicity, compared with 19% of those who met their partner offline. People who met their partner online are also somewhat more likely to say that they and their partner do not identify with the same political party (46% vs. 40%). Of those who say their partner has a different political affiliation, many are in a couple where one person leans to or is affiliated with one party and the other is a political independent or undecided. Meanwhile, there are no significant differences in educational attainment or income between couples who met online and offline.

But after controlling for age, these differences disappear. Looking only at Americans younger than 40, similar shares of those who met their partner online (49%) and offline (48%) say their partner identifies with a different political party. Similar shares (31% and 27%, respectively) say their partner is of a different race or ethnicity. The shares saying they have a different income or education level from their partner are also not significantly different between those who met online and offline.

Previous research suggests that populations with small pools of potential partners – such as people seeking a same-sex partner – are most likely to meet a partner online. The Pew Research Center analysis bears this out. Roughly four-in-ten people in same-sex relationships (37%) report meeting their partner online, compared with only 11% of opposite-sex couples. These differences remain after taking age into account.

People who met their partner online are more likely than those who met offline to identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual (13% of those who met their partner online say they are LGB vs. 4% of those who met their partner offline). This difference is similar among those younger than 40.

Among people who met online, 36% had been married before they met their current or most recent partner, compared with 26% of those who met offline. Among people younger than 40, though, there were no significant differences between those who met online and offline in the share that were previously married.

#MarcaPolítica: How to attract attention, foster loyalty, and earn respect

Rubén Weinsteiner

MADE FOR MINDS

VOTES-CUSTOMERS-REPUTATION
IN THE YOUNG MICROSEGMENTS


Marca Política helps people, companies, and places define, live, and communicate their purpose.



We help attract attention, foster loyalty, and earn respect.



Our method is simple.



1 — Find the core that holds people together. It can be a person, space, an event, or a tradition. Sometimes there is nothing, and we have to build from scratch.



2 — Amplify the core. Give it a modern meaning and a modern use. Make it available to experience by others. Make it attractive to join in and follow. Numbers (inflow, profit, and loyalty score) will grow.

How to sell a country: the booming business of nation branding

These days, every place in the world wants to market its unique identity – and an industry has sprung up to help put them on the map.


Lipetsk is already on the map: right there, on page 23 of the Collins World Atlas, a region of 1.2 million people, dead south from Moscow and not far from the border with Ukraine. But it’s not really on the map: it doesn’t feature in the slim mental atlas most of us carry in our heads; no one we know takes holidays there, and it doesn’t appear in our newspapers. Even in Russia, people may fail to place it. In September, when Natasha Grand was passing through Moscow on her way back from Lipetsk, she told a Russian acquaintance where she’d been. “I don’t even know where Lipetsk is”, he replied, only partly in jest. Some Russians confuse it with Vitebsk, which is in Belarus.






This is why Natasha Grand was going to Lipetsk, though: to define its brand, to mould its image, to put it on the metaphorical map. Natasha and her husband, Alex, are the founders of a London firm called Institute for Identity (Instid for short), which works with the governments of cities, regions and nations. Instid develops strategies to brand places, and although a part of this involves burnishing tourism – coining a tagline, say, or producing a suite of logos for travel literature –the Grands are after deeper rewards. They believe they can fix upon, and excavate, a place’s very identity – or at least an identity, something that can guide a government in figuring out how to rise in the esteem of its neighbours, how to allocate its resources, how best to compose the face it presents to the world.

In the 21st century, nation branding has grown to be busy business, and its practitioners take great pains to emphasise that what they do is different from the more straightforward marketing and advertising work that came before them. A particularly skilled copywriter sold Moses on Israel by calling it “The Promised Land”; Erik the Red named a large block of ice “Greenland” in the hope of tempting more settlers there; Milton Glaser slapped “I ❤ NY” upon a trillion T-shirts; a Las Vegas ad agency cooked up “What happens here, stays here”, the allure of sin encapsulated. To the Grands, this is all mere sloganeering. They regard their line of work as a kind of psychology: counselling for countries, therapy for towns. Look inward, discover yourself, find your place in the world.

The Grands have made a speciality of what might be seen as hard cases: cities and regions across the former Soviet Union. Their client in Lipetsk, the department of tourism and culture, occupies the fifth floor of a dreary building in the region’s administrative centre, a city also called Lipetsk. The head of the department is Vadim Volkov, a man with a square face and a rectilinear torso, who confessed to the Grands that he has a complicated relationship with Lipetsk. He’s from here, from a town called Gryazi – literally, “Dirt” – and said that he loves the region but doesn’t like it. He lived in the US once, working as a restaurant chef in Minnesota, but in his two years there, he never managed to adjust to the time difference, so he came home. He’s reluctant to go to most other places; when his wife took him on an 11-day vacation to Rhodes, he left after four days. “I didn’t know what to do there!” he told me. That’s how much he wants to be in Lipetsk.






At the same time, Volkov thought, Lipetsk needs change. Earlier this year, when his tourism officials were developing a range of representative souvenirs, they found they lacked any coherent image for their region. Lipetsk needs direction, a sense of purpose, Volkov told the Grands. Really, he wished it was more like Voronezh – a bigger city in a neighbouring region, the kind of place people instantly recognise. In English, Volkov imagined a conversation that one of his compatriots might have overseas.

“Where are you from?”

“I’m from Lipetsk.”

“Sorry?”

“A city near Voronezh.”

“Ohhhhh, I know Voronezh!”

The Grands took notes.


Governments are increasingly avid for advisers like Instid. The question of what makes a nation a nation has been forever fraught. Even so, it is inescapable. Every modern nation-state has built itself around some perceived essence, some identity regarded as unique, even if it’s a mixture of truth and lies, elisions and exaggerations.

But since the 1990s, and through the years of Peak Davos, the high sermons of globalisation have worn away this idea – insisting that countries were just shop stalls in a planetwide marketplace, not romantic distillations of some irreducible national spirit. They could be treated, and so ought to behave, like corporations. In an era when money, influence and people could flow anywhere, countries that aspired to be a destination for these energies had to sell themselves hard. A nation’s identity, for perhaps the first time, had to pull the rest of the world in, rather than bind the nation against the rest of the world.

More recently, the results of globalisation – the nature of immigration, the fluidity of capital – have jolted countries’ long-held beliefs of what they are, and confused the idea of what a nation state is meant to be. Like teenagers entering a new school, regions and countries – from Lipetsk to the US – feel compelled to assay their identity, change it up, build it out. What drove Brexit, after all, if not the anger that some genuine British identity – remembered or misremembered – was being drowned within the shallow waters of the European Union?

One consequence of these identity crises has been a reactionary growth of blood-and-soil populism, and another has been the rise of nation-branding. The two are mirror images of a sort: one construes national identity as changeless, its rediscovery a prelude to renewed greatness; the other sees it as a product to be clarified and marketed. But both seek, in different ways, to regain or construct a more distinctive version of a country’s self. The appetite for calling in experts to manage and project national identity has only grown: Simon Anholt, the first pioneer of this field, has worked with more than 50 governments in the past 20 years. The academic journal Anholt founded, Place Branding and Public Diplomacy, is now 13 years old. The International Place Branding Association was formed in 2015; its second annual conference will be held over three days this December in Swansea.


In the former USSR, the Grands have found themselves consulting with cities, regions and countries trying to shuck their Soviet past, but unsure of how to position themselves for the future. Partly for this reason – and partly because Natasha and Alex came to London, respectively, from Belarus and Russia – the Grands have worked on campaigns for Moscow, Minsk and Yerevan, and for Bashkortostan and Primorsky Krai. Vadim Volkov, Lipetsk’s tourism chief, had been impressed with the work Instid had done for the Republic of Tatarstan, right next door to Bashkortostan. He wanted something similar for Lipetsk: a tender was issued, six companies applied, and Instid had the winning bid. This September, the Grands – along with a researcher and a graphic designer – made their first official trip to Lipetsk, to begin the process of discovering the region’s character, and figuring out how to narrate it back to the people who live there.

The term “nation brands” first appeared in articles by Simon Anholt in 1998. Anholt had worked in advertising, at McCann Erickson and then for his own copywriting firm, and his initial observations connected flourishing corporate brands to their nations of origin. As he observed, most successful brands came from countries that were successful brands in their own right. In the Journal of Brand Management, in 1998, he pointed out that the British electronics retailer Dixons “launched its own consumer electronics brand in 1982 under the mock-Japanese name Saisho, because it rightly believed that a British electronics brand would carry little credibility”. Anholt saw no reason why nations, like companies, couldn’t modify the way they were seen. “Countries like Brazil,” he wrote, “have a real chance to join the first world ‘club’ of global brand producers in the 21st century.”

Anholt’s first project to shape a nation’s brand, around the turn of the millennium, came from the Croatian government, when it began attempting to join the European Union. At the time, Croatia worried that the world still associated it with the murderous conflicts in the Balkans the previous decade. Now Croatia wanted to be known as a democratic state with a market economy and a chic Mediterranean vibe.

Through the 2000s, the industry grew quickly. Wally Olins, the late communications maven whose agency worked with Volkswagen, GE and Orange, branched into place branding in the late 1990s. Olins saw the artificial construction of a national identity as a form of “social engineering” – and he thought his set of wrenches and spanners could tune the machinery of a country’s brand as easily as a company’s. “People are people … and that means they can be motivated and inspired and manipulated in the same ways, using the same techniques,” he wrote in 2002. A handful of companies focused specifically on nation-branding, while many others – PR firms, marketing agencies, management consultancies, design gurus – shuffled this new card into their deck of services. To formulate a country’s image, a firm might win a contract worth anywhere from half a million to several million dollars; cities and regions pay proportionately less.

Nations couldn’t get enough of these branding services. Within the hothouse of what became known as the Washington consensus – the idea that developing countries needed only to hand themselves over to the market to secure growth – nations thirsted for foreign investment, so they hustled to make themselves attractive. Keen to be seen as stable and prosperous, the former Soviet republic of Georgia ran ad campaigns in which it measured itself, on metrics such as the history of its viniculture or its smooth bureaucracy, against France or Australia. “And the winner is … ” each campaign concluded, “GEORGIA.” (One ad, confusingly, compared the country to the US state of Georgia.) Germany decided it was “The Land of Ideas”. Jamaica sang out to potential entrepreneurs who were looking for a bold and creative home. When Muammar Gaddafi hired the Monitor Group, a consulting firm, to polish Libya’s brand in 2004, they concluded that the country’s biggest problem was “a deficit of positive public relations”. In a 200-page vision document, Monitor set out a plan for turning Libya into a competitive, egalitarian leader of its region by 2019. Gaddafi was deposed, chased and shot dead by rebels in 2011 – only eight years before he was scheduled to become “a more constructive world citizen”.




Inevitably, countries demand a bespoke logo. “At least with Paraguay, we managed to do without a tagline,” said Jose Torres, the CEO of Bloom Consulting, a nation-branding agency in Madrid. Paraguay’s government, fretting that the country was regarded as a waystation for smugglers and that its economic resilience was being overlooked, hired Bloom last year to renovate its image. Bloom’s five-year strategy included policy recommendations that would light Paraguay up as “an economically fertile country”, but Torres also had to commission an emblem for this endeavour: an open flower, composed of green and blue squares, next to the country’s name in lowercase type. “I always want to tell them: ‘It’s not about the logo!’” he said in mock despair.

Often, countries and cities come to Bloom with specific ideas of what they desire. Paraguay was clear that it wanted to lift its exports and attract more investment. Some governments are after more tourists; others want to appeal to talented workers or students. These are such substantial pies that even a sliver of a slice is well worth seeking. Global flows of foreign direct investment rose from $865bn in 1999 to $1.52tn in 2016. Last year, the tourism sector contributed $7.6tn to the world’s GDP, and it supported 1 in 11 jobs in the global economy. In 2025, tourists will generate $11.4tn, just by booking flights and hotel rooms, drinking aperol spritzes at sidewalk cafes, buying theatre tickets and emergency sunscreen and salt-and-pepper shakers with “A Present from Blackpool” embossed on them.

Even the more abstract aims of place branding have material benefits. Robert Govers, an Antwerp-based scholar who edits the journal Place Branding and Public Diplomacy, related the example of The Hague, the Dutch city that was picked in 1945 to be the home of the International Court of Justice. This association with peace and security was, in a way, implanted by the UN, so a decade ago, The Hague decided simply to roll with it.

“Since then, they’ve done all kinds of stuff to reconfirm their positioning as the city of peace and justice,” Govers, who advised the city on its strategy, said. The Hague’s annual calendar of events is structured to raise funds for a different nonprofit organisation every year. Since 2014, the city has laid on a “Just Peace” festival in September. The Hague’s officials actively solicit organisations to move into their city: the International Criminal Court obtained its first permanent premises there two years ago. Even the rudimentary local startup scene was gently swivelled towards online security.

Utterly by plan, it is now the case that, if you’re putting together any sort of convention or event around the theme of justice or security, you won’t think far beyond The Hague as a destination. Last year, this city of half a million hosted 135 international conferences, a 50% increase from 2015; on average, a conference lasted four days and drew 279 visitors, each of whom spent €1,200 during their visit.

Commercial motives aside, the frenzy for place-branding betrays deeper perplexities. Every country, region and city now finds that it has to be a competitor in the vast, loud souk that is the world’s economy. Some places have never properly played this role before; others have played it so long that they’re unused to being challenged. To be noticed, a place must be distinctive, must appear unique. But this is tricky to achieve when a single, anodyne culture – the culture of the same global market – is flooding the ground everywhere. The global economy has proven that it can be profoundly nasty, and the migration of labour, both departures and arrivals, can alter the texture of a place, unspinning presumptions about its collective identity.

All of this has activated a sense of insecurity, and supplied excuses for varying kinds of nationalisms. The electoral victories of demagogues, the rifts in political opinion, the longings to split away from multilateral blocs, the popular revolts – they’ve all been mustered by people capitalising on the new uncertainties of nationhood.

Natasha Grand’s work requires heroic volumes of conversation, so it’s fortunate that she’s very good at it. She has the rare gift of being interesting when she talks and interested when she listens. In Lipetsk, during the interview with Volkov, she would wait until she was sure that he had wound down an answer, let a couple of silent beats pass just to be doubly certain, and only then pose her next question.

Grand’s life has been divided neatly between Belarus and Britain. She grew up in Minsk in a time of wild transitions, and was 13 during the disassembly of the Soviet Union, which set Belarus afloat as a sovereign nation. “I remember my parents being excited, this immense sense of something big and historic happening,” she said. Around her, she heard people speak of how, centuries before Belarus joined the USSR, their country had looked westwards, involved itself in the affairs of Europe; now there was a chance to revive that relationship.

Matters took another course. In its first election, in 1994, Belarus voted into the presidency a former apparatchik named Alexander Lukashenko, who has contrived to remain in power ever since. The feeling in Belarus after Lukashenko was elected, Grand said, was comparable to the feeling in America after Donald Trump’s election win. When Lukashenko’s victory was announced over the radio, Grand and her family were driving back to Minsk from the countryside. “My dad immediately stopped the car on the shoulder, and we just sat there, for maybe five or 10 minutes, saying nothing. Just letting it sink in, wondering what it meant.”
Minsk, capital of Belarus. Photograph: Ryhor Bruyeu/Getty Images/iStockphoto

That many people in Belarus were not quite prepared to forge unafraid into a post-Soviet future became evident in other ways. Upon independence, Belarus had declared its long-suppressed Belarusian to be the republic’s official language, but it had become so unfamiliar that a backlash ensued. A referendum found that 87% of voters wanted Russian to be on par with Belarusian; the same proportion endorsed a fresh state emblem, similar to the one of Soviet Belarus. The Pahonia, an old Belarusian symbol featuring a knight on a horse, was dropped after four years as the country’s emblem. At the time, Grand was studying diplomacy, and her university was next to a government building. One day she saw the emblems on the building’s pediment being swapped – the Pahonia descending and the neo-Soviet symbol rising. Grand and her classmates watched in silence. One of her friends cried.

These dilemmas of identity left their mark on Grand. It wasn’t that the nation’s mood just flipped, but that she had been unaware of what that mood really was. At the London School of Economics, she tried to explain in her doctoral dissertation, to herself at least, why Belarus chose to hold on to tethers from its Soviet past. “My adviser told me: ‘You wrote your PhD in anger.’” For a few years, she worked as a political risk analyst, evaluating uncertainty and markets in countries where companies wanted to invest. Then, at a seminar, she met Alex, who had been a lawyer for sports federations in Moscow before coming to Britain to do his MBA. “We were always talking about these kinds of things: How do people belong? Why do they belong? How are countries perceived?” she said. “I was more interested in within: Why do people feel they want to belong to a state? He was interested in how countries are projected outwards.” In 2008, the couple registered Instid, and not long after, accepted their first mission: to brand Minsk, her own home town.

On his first day in Lipetsk, Alex Grand saw a man wearing broken black brogues and a blue-and-black tracksuit, sitting on the stoop of a neglected building. The man asked for a cigarette, which Alex didn’t have. Then Alex asked him what there was to see in Lipetsk.

“Nothing,” the man replied glumly.

The city of Lipetsk, half a million people clustered in the middle of an infinitude of farmland, is a dour, half-hearted place. Its Soviet-era apartment blocks are flaking and ill-kempt; the newer towers come styled in generic “urban shab”, with flimsy sliding windows and mean balconies, their hulls crusted with air-conditioners and satellite dishes. Its roundabouts and verges have flowerbeds, but they’re indifferently maintained. The famous fountains of Verkhniy Park are indeed splendid, but Nizhniy Park, nearby, is patched with weeds. For a small city, Lipetsk conveys a sense of sprawl – of large vacant and unlit spaces right within its urban limits.

Just outside the city, a stone column announces the date of its foundation: 1703, when Peter the Great ordered an iron foundry to be built near a deposit of ore. The modern descendant of that factory is a group called Novolipetsk Steel, established in 1931 – the world’s most profitable steelmaker until not so long ago, and still Russia’s biggest, employing 29,000 people in its home plant in Lipetsk. In the absence of anything else, the steel mill seems to hold the region together. Lipetsk Oblast, the regional administrative unit, was created by fiat in 1954, when chunks of five other oblasts were glued into one. The relative newness of this patchwork vexes the region’s authorities, who think Lipetsk Oblast needs a unifying identity. There’s still no way, Vadim Volkov said, that you can talk to someone and figure out, “This is a Lipetsk person.”
Natasha Grand speaking at the City Branding Forum in Uryupinsk in Russia’s Volgograd region in 2015. Photograph: Instid

In pursuit of a place’s identity, the Grands combine several different trades and vocations. At their most casual, they resemble unusually diligent tourists. In Lipetsk Oblast, the team visited half a dozen towns in as many days, where they sought out both the well-known – the sky-blue, golden-domed cathedral in Zadonsk – and the unknown – in Chaplygin, a cheese-making workshop; in Yelets, a museum in the house of the Soviet composer Tikhon Khrennikov; in the middle of nowhere, a small falcon reserve. They never missed a museum. They ate carefully, selecting restaurants and dishes with local flavours. They photographed statues and town squares and graffiti. Their attentions were ready to squeeze the juices of cultural meaning out of everything they saw, lending them the air of semioticians on holiday. They scanned Lipetsk with intent: the architecture, the designs on the menus, the art in the galleries. “Even that hairstyle is telling, in a way,” Natasha Grand whispered once, nudging me to look at a woman with a Reba McEntire do. The woman was a member of the staff at the Lipetsk airport; it had been 15 seconds since we got off our plane.

The days were filled with conversation. The Grands set up interviews that can run for hours. They talked to government officials, of course, but they also met historians, museum curators, restaurateurs, photographers and artists. One evening, they spent 30 minutes talking to a woman who made lace. Another afternoon, the team dropped into the Lipetsk State Technical University, where a class of 15 students spoke about their region and how they wanted, by and large, to leave. There’s very little to do in Lipetsk, they explained. St Petersburg, one of them said – now there’s a city.

At the university, Alex popped a series of word-association questions. “Tell me the first thing that comes into your mind when I say: Lipetsk? Moscow? London? Putin?” The Grands have a plump bank of such questions, deploying them like crafty psychoanalysts. If your city were a car, what kind of car would it be? If it were a man, what kind of job would he have? What’s your favourite Lipetsk joke? In the tourism department’s office, Alex Grand took out a blank leaf of paper and asked Volkov to sketch a house. Volkov was flabbergasted. “Don’t conduct some experiment on me!” he said, and pushed the paper back across the table. “You can draw it yourself. It’s a rectangle with a roof on top.”

Lipetsk proved tough going. Not many of the Grands’ interviewees were inclined to reflection. A local historian admitted it: “Lipetsk has a vague, unstable face.” The old markers of identity – the church, the steelworks – had faded from people’s lives, and nothing had sprouted to replace them. Sometimes it felt as if even Lipetsk’s residents didn’t quite know what to make of their region. The Grands discovered that in 2008, when the Scorpions came here on tour, they played to a feeble audience; most people skipped the gig, thinking it was a cover band, sure that the real Scorpions would absolutely never come to Lipetsk.

Of all their projects, the Grands are proudest of Tatarstan, which has bolstered their reputation among the people who run Russia’s regional governments. The government of Tatarstan, a republic of around 4 million people in south-western Russia, was convinced it wasn’t getting the recognition it deserved, either in Moscow or overseas. In 2013, they hatched a plan to promote the region’s heritage.

When Instid was hired, the government merely wanted a thick book, with glossy photos and text about the artefacts in Tatarstan’s museums. The Grands expanded this meagre vision. They reached into the period of the Bulgar kings, who ruled this region between the seventh and 13th centuries, and distilled a set of attitudes and values that had persisted into modern-day Tatarstan. The people were perfectionists, the Grands decided. They honed their skills and craftsmanship continuously, they were competitive, and valued pragmatism; they also bore a sense of loss about their past, and they prized the material over the spiritual or the intangible.

An image from Instid’s ‘Visit Tartarstan’ campaign

The products of such study – lessons from medieval history, or patter about “mastery,” “decisiveness” and “speed” – can seem amorphous, or even concocted. But they lent structure to some of Tatarstan’s initiatives, Alex Grand said. Schools and universities folded these cues into their syllabuses; architects based blueprints on them. In their annual reports, government officials took to naming sections after the values the campaign celebrated. The tourism sector, which was never encouraged as warmly as industry, received a dose of state enthusiasm: its own ministry, more funds, better training. Even a privately owned truck manufacturer, Kamaz, borrowed Instid’s language of Tatarstani robustness to describe its products. For the Grands, Tatarstan showed what their work on identity could do: shape a government’s budgets and priorities, seep into the consciousness of a populace.

At the heart of the campaign was also Tatarstan’s intense faith in the old-fashioned potency of a national identity. The region’s Tatars, around 55% of the population, are Muslim; its Slavs, making up 40%, are Orthodox Christian. The two communities have been like oil and water, an official told Alex Grand – tolerant but rarely mixing. But an uneasiness had crept in. The year the campaign began, a series of arson attacks targeted churches across the region. One young imam confided to Instid that he was worried about radicalisation – about how local preachers were going to the Middle East and returning with a sterner style of Islam. Tatarstan’s leaders wanted not just to shine an identity outwards, but also to impress it inwards, to stave off potentially dangerous religious and ethnic ruptures. It was the most ambitious form of national myth-making, and the riskiest: to remind people of, or perhaps even to explain to them for the first time, what united them and why they belonged together.

The metabolism of a country is longer and slower than that of a product or a company, so it’s still too early to say if any of these top-down reorientations of identity have stuck in a meaningful way. Fiascos show themselves quickly, though. “Most nation-branding strategies fail, and they fail miserably,” Jose Torres said. “They fail because, mainly, governments don’t have the capabilities to manage these strategies.” The calculations of politics enter into it, or a newly elected government rolls back its predecessor’s ideas, or the venture relies on superficial advertising. Citizens may not feel a connection to a campaign, or may even rebel against it. Robert Govers recalled how, when The Hague sold itself as the city of peace and justice, tourist agencies grew incensed at how the brand left no room for the area’s beautiful beaches. Even so, The Hague is the rare case where a strategy gained its limited objective, and that was possible because the city worked with its already strong image. Otherwise, Govers said, “I haven’t seen many examples where nation-branding has been very successful.”

But if it hasn’t been successful, I asked, why continue to do it?

Because it’s a young field, Govers said, and there’s still room to perform better. “It’s a huge, huge challenge. But we still have to do it, because it’s important.”

Simon Anholt, who blazed the field’s first trails, reserves fierce criticism for the work of most of the actors on this stage: the PR firms and ad agencies for whom a country is the same species of client as Coca-Cola. In the late 1990s, Anholt used to frame place brands in the way advertiser or a corporate marketer would. He once told the New York Times: “Marketing is at the heart of what makes rich countries rich.” Now, though, he scorns marketing. His later work focuses very little on communication and branding, and much more on the abstract business of a country’s positive influence upon the world. He gave me the example of Mexico, whose president, Felipe Calderón, enlisted Anholt as a strategist in 2010.

Anholt visited Mexico several times, and much as the Grands did in Lipetsk, he interviewed historians, filmmakers, journalists and academics. Mexico suffered from a malaise of low self-esteem, he concluded. “It’s spent the last 300 years looking inwards, trying to build a society, to create itself, all while living next door to the most powerful nation on earth.” The world regarded Mexico as a victim – of the drug trade, of natural disasters, of poverty – but Anholt found that the country had, in the past, demonstrated spirit and enterprise. “If you speak to anyone at the WHO, they’ll say the gold standard for managing pandemics is how Mexico managed the swine flu outbreak [in 2009],” Anholt said. He advised the government to “show gentle leadership on things” – in the field of climate change, for instance, by hosting more summits like the Cancún conference of November 2010, by persuading other nations to see global warming as a shared and urgent problem, by speaking its mind more loudly and confidently.
Alex Grand on a research trip to Irkutsk in Siberia. Photograph: Instid

This can sound like generic counsel – “Just do governance well” – and Anholt would agree. Countries need to fix the way they run if their reputation is to shift. A well-regarded country, Anholt thinks, does as much for humanity at large as for its own people. The thought prompted him to launch the Good Country index, which ranks states by the “good” they do for the world. (Sweden is currently first, although some of the metrics lend themselves to argument. In assessing a country’s cultural contribution – a subcategory in which Belgium ranks first – the index subtracts points for overdue payments to Unesco”.)

Indices aside, Anholt bemoans the neoliberal “marketisation of everything” and its consequence, “that countries have to perform as if they were nothing much more than products in a marketplace”. He sounds as if he regrets coining “nation brand”, because he has watched it become “nation branding”: cynical acts of spin, void of any real reforms. “The upsetting thing about this lie called nation-branding,” he said, “is that it encourages so many countries, who really can’t afford it, to blow wicked amounts of money on futile propaganda programmes, and the only people who benefit are these beastly PR agencies.”

The word “propaganda” is not misplaced. Restless preoccupations with national identity or ties to the land have often been prologues to periods of oppression; if a country keeps defining how people belong, it also defines how people do not belong. “Diversity and debate are the lifeblood of liberty. And they are the enemies of branding,” Naomi Klein wrote in 2002, after the American government hired a Madison Avenue executive to spruce up Brand USA overseas. “Unlike strong brands, which are predictable and disciplined, democracy is messy and fractious, if not outright rebellious,” she wrote; the task of gussying up a nation brand “is not only futile but dangerous”.

The direction in which nation branding work tends to flow is problematic as well. Agencies in New York, Madrid, London and Paris dispense advice to governments in Asia, Africa, eastern Europe and Latin America on how best to present themselves – a configuration that can veer easily into cultural imperialism. This imbalance sets up pitfalls for practitioner and client alike. In Lipetsk, Natasha Grand phoned a tour operator to ask how business was going. When he learned that she wasn’t from Russia, the operator snapped: “Why should I tell you anything? Maybe you’re a spy.”

The very notion of a national or regional character – that the people of India and Pakistan, or of Lipetsk and Voronezh, are somehow different, although the borders separating them are just decades old – is endlessly thorny. But the impulse of authorities – churches, kings, governments – to define and manipulate such a character is hardly new. A nation, the philosopher Ernest Renan said in 1882, is “a great solidarity”, and its existence “a daily plebiscite.” It needs to remember – and to forget – things about itself, and we tend to ignore how constant and commonplace this process is. Benedict Anderson, the political scientist, saw this making and remaking as an act of the imagination. The elite classes have been imagining nations into existence ever since the marriage of capitalism to the printing press, he believed, and the communication of identity mattered just as much as the conception of it. This once happened through newspapers and books. Now it happens, at a much more frantic pace, on the banner ads of web pages, at global summits, at investment roadshows, and as product placements in the movies. The exercise is natural or artificial only insofar as the nation state itself is natural or artificial.

At the fount of these flurries of apprehension about identity is the political fear that the nation is being displaced from its position as the most vital unit in world affairs. So much points to this. Trump won his election by stoking the paranoia that America, once supposedly great, had become subservient to transnational interests. Governments struggle to cope with the borderless nature of things that might once have been within their jurisdiction: corporations, taxes, the internet and the media, crime, political influence. Even the eagerness to hire brand experts is, in a way, a reaction to this perceived threat of irrelevance – an attempt by nations and regions to regroup, to define themselves anew. An attempt to insist that they still matter.

Halfway through her stay in Lipetsk, Natasha Grand drove up into the north of the region, to a village that was once called Astapovo. In 1910, the novelist Lev Tolstoy died here. After arguing with his wife, Tolstoy sneaked out of their home, in the adjoining region of Tula, and boarded a train. His third-class carriage was draughty and smoky, so he fell ill and was forced to alight at Astapovo. A doctor put him to bed in the stationmaster’s house, where his chills flared into pneumonia. Reporters and medical specialists streamed into the village, and Tolstoy’s family arrived, but he only lived a week in Astapovo before passing away.





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The railway station’s clock now stands deliberately frozen: 6.05am, his time of death. The stationmaster’s house is a museum, and Tolstoy’s sickroom preserved just as it was in 1910: a small cot in a corner, one chair at its foot, even an outline of the great man’s head, with its bulbous nose and frayed tussocks of beard, traced on the wallpaper by the bed. Tolstoy might easily have made peace with his wife, or he might have taken another train, or he might have sickened later in his journey and disembarked elsewhere. That he wound up in Astapovo and died here was happenstance – like all forms of national character, all origin stories. But Astapovo wrapped itself around this accident of history, trying to cling to its moment of supreme importance. In 1932, the village changed its name. On the map, it is now called Lev Tolstoy.

Why 2020 Democrats Pretend to Be Radical

You’ll hear fire-breathing promises at the debates, but it’s not the candidates who’ve changed that much. It’s the party.


Here’s one way to follow the action on the Democratic presidential debate stage in Miami over the next two days: Listen to what the candidates say, then squint through the haze to read their unspoken thought bubbles. There’s always tension between what politicians say and what they really believe. But in 2020, that familiar gap has taken on a new twist: Many of these candidates are trying to sound more extreme than they really are.

A quarter-century ago, when I first started covering national politics in Bill Clinton’s Washington, it was common for ambitious Democrats to project themselves as more moderate, more cautious, more incremental—less liberal—than they really were inside.


Listening closely to Al Gore, for instance, it was clear he was a more restless ideologue—more radical by intellect and temperament on the subjects he cared most about—than ever would have been wise for an ambitious politician from a conservative Southern state to advertise.

The enormous, diverse 2020 Democratic field is historic for a lot of reasons, but one big change has gone less remarked. There’s abundant evidence that most of these candidates are projecting themselves as more disruptive, more ambitious, more contemptuous of conventional politics, more liberal, than their previous careers actually suggest.

Judging by the campaign so far, the Democratic debates will be generously salted with bold slogans and ideas: “Medicare for All,” a “Green New Deal,” abolishing the Electoral College or reparations for descendants of slaves. In all but a few cases, these will come from people who have defined their public lives by the more prosaic work of coalition-building and consensus, as congenial senators and tough-minded prosecutors and pro-business mayors—ladder-climbing careerists who got where they are through a shrewd sense of what the political market will bear.




Kamala Harris

The shift in sensibility, from hiding to exaggerating those radical bona fides, shines a light on a more profound change: This cadre of Democrats believes the ideological tides, within the party and the country more broadly, have shifted leftward. And in this environment, with candidates desperate for attention and activist support, it is no longer safe to play it safe.

If this calculation is right, it means the end of several decades in which Democrats won nationally by playing good defense—by reassuring skeptics that there was a difference between being progressive and being left-wing, by running partly by making arguments of who they were (sensible, tough-minded, pro-growth, fiscally responsible) that were really arguments about who they were not (George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Jesse Jackson).

The Democratic electorate plainly is clamoring for good offense—no more softening the edges, to hell with patter about civility and common ground—and the competition over two consecutive nights at NBC’s debate state in Miami will be over who can give it to them.


***

Senator Elizabeth Warren was early to enter this derby in March when she told a CNN town hall that she wanted to amend the Constitution to get rid of the Electoral College. Good idea, 12 of her rivals have since said, while five more have said it is something to think about (“open to the discussion,” said Senator Kamala Harris).




Pete Buttigieg

Pete Buttigieg, the moderate and highly credentialed mayor of a small Midwestern city, has said he wants to expand the Supreme Court to 15 seats, blowing up a norm that has prevailed since 1869. A bunch of his rivals, like Senator Michael Bennet, have said that goes too far, and some, like former vice president and current front-runner Joe Biden, have left their position unclear. But many others found it advantageous to at least seem like they were on board. “I’m taking nothing off the table,” said Senator Cory Booker, a let’s-take-a-look stance that was echoed by fellow Senators Kirsten Gillibrand, Harris and Warren.

It’s fair to presume that the South Bend mayor genuinely does believe—in theory, and all things being equal, in a way that they rarely are in real life—that expanding the High Court by six members to reduce undue conservative influence is a good idea. Those who believe he would really intend to make this the hallmark of a President Pete administration might answer: What episodes in the career of this person who has prospered at every turn within establishment institutions (Harvard, Oxford, McKinsey consulting, the U.S. Navy, and so on) suggest an eagerness or proficiency at championing this kind of battle for truly disruptive change at an institution like the Supreme Court?

It’s also possible that he is practicing the offensive-politics equivalent of when Clinton, playing defensive politics in 1996, endorsed a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution, before never mentioning it again after his reelection.

The one candidate on the debate stage—Thursday night, thanks to a random lottery—who can reasonably be presumed to mean what he says even when uttering radical words is Senator Bernie Sanders. He is, after all, a socialist running in the Democratic Party, and he has spent decades waiting for a return to the politics of the 1960s or even the 1930s.




Bernie Sanders

This week, in particular, showed how Sanders is driving the debate and altering the incentives for other candidates. Warren released her plan that called for free college tuition and widespread student debt forgiveness to the tune of $640 billion. An ambitious plan, for sure—until Sanders came out Monday with free tuition and $1.6 trillion to cancel not some but all student debt.

But even Sanders can get caught in the derby of having to project more left in public than he feels when left to his true thoughts in private. In 2016, Sanders said he opposed slavery reparations: “First of all, its likelihood of getting through Congress is nil. Second of all, I think it would be very divisive.” This year, he supports Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee’s bill for a commission to study reparations. Its companion bill in the Senate was introduced by one of the candidates, Cory Booker, and co-sponsored by six others.


***

If you’re looking for evidence of the individual tug of war between candidates’ bold personas and more temperate souls, look no further than the equivocation on the question of Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. Thirteen candidates say they support a version of Medicare for All, one of the most popular new policy slogans on the left. But most stop short of Sanders’ definition of the idea, which would eliminate the current health insurance system in favor of a mandatory government-run system. Harris at CNN town hall in January implied that she would eliminate private insurance; four months later she clarified that’s not what she meant.




Amy Klobuchar

Senator Amy Klobuchar is a co-sponsor of the Green New Deal championed by Senator Edward Markey and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and she’s one of 18 presidential candidates to give rhetorical support to the proposal, with its aggressive timelines for carbon reduction and a federal jobs guarantee. But, as she told The Hill, “I see it as aspirational” and when “it got down to the nitty-gritty of actual legislation … that would be different for me.”

Perhaps no one is laboring over how to handle the swing of the ideological pendulum revealed by this year’s race than the person at the top of every poll so far, Biden. He first won election to the U.S. Senate in 1972, a few weeks before he actually reached the minimum age requirement of 30, and when the liberal tide unleashed in the 1960s was strong enough that even a Republican president like Richard Nixon was swept along to support liberal ideas like the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency.

For most of his career, however, the Delaware senator was governing in an environment in which Democrats generally and Biden particularly had to play defense on certain polarizing issues. It was with a reason that Biden opposed court-imposed busing to desegregate schools—he saw first-hand how much resentment it was causing among working-class white families toward Democrats. In 1994, his leadership in passing a tough crime bill was a triumph for both Biden and Clinton—it advertised a Democratic Party that would not accept the bleeding-heart label Republicans had tattooed on so many liberals.




Joe Biden

He presumably did not foresee that decades later he would be playing defensive politics again—this time from activists in his own party, many of whom were not yet born when he came to the Senate, demanding repentance for what now looks like ideological heresy.

In truth, however, Biden’s predicament—like that of all politicians trying to navigate the ideological currents while balancing ambition and prudence—was entirely foreseeable.

The Cycles of American History was a signature work of the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who argued that recurrent and broadly predictable swings of the ideological pendulum are the essence of American politics. Seasons of liberal activism and heightened concern over the public interest are inevitably followed by seasons of conservative retrenchment and elevation of private interests.

Schlesinger, one of the dominant liberal intellectuals of the mid-20th Century, in the late 1940s wrote a book called The Vital Center, but late in life (he died at age 89 in 2007) he often lamented that cautious progressives were confusing the vital center with the dead center—espousing a middle-of-the-road incrementalism that didn’t offend, but also didn’t inspire.

He would likely note the irony that it was a radical president in Donald Trump who served as catalyst for another liberal swing of the pendulum. And he’d approve of the willingness of the current cadre of Democrats on stage to go on offense and take ideological risks.

This is the path, Schlesinger argued, walked by consequential presidents from Lincoln to the Roosevelts and—though he disapproved of the agenda—on to Ronald Reagan.

“Great presidents are unifiers mostly in retrospect,” Schlesinger told me in 1997, as Bill Clinton was preparing for a second term by promising to bridge partisan divides and unify the country. “The greatest presidents have started by dividing the country on important questions, as a way of uniting the country at a new level of understanding.”

Chamber’s brand

Why Brand Identity Matters for Chambers

Is a Brand Identity important for Chambers? What exactly is a Brand Identity? Can a Brand Identity be explained? These questions are critical to ask yourself. If you can’t accurately define it, aren’t sure how to explain it, but are pretty sure it might be important, could you even come up with Brand Identity for your organization?

Yes. As a matter of fact, you’re probably further along in the process than you realize. It’s just a matter of analyzing what elements are already in place and what is needed to complement those items.

Maybe you’re saying to yourself, “Oh, we have a brand identity. The Board approved the new logo last year.”

Good, you’re already on your way to making sure you have an established brand.The logo is a critical component. It is the foundation of a brand and gives a visual of your organization’s identity.

But what about the rest? What exactly is brand identity? (Spoiler alert: it’s more than just a logo.)

Branding Basics

Branding gives people a mental impression of your Chamber. It makes your organization both recognizable and memorable. Consider the following quotes:

“Your brand is your promise to your customer. It tells them what they can expect from your products and services, and it differentiates your offering from that of your competitors. Your brand is derived from who you are, who you want to be, and who people perceive you to be." – Small Business Encyclopedia, entrepreneur.com

And

"Branding is the art of aligning what you want people to think about your company with what people actually do think about your company. And vice versa." - Jay Bauer, author of the book Youtility: Why Smart Marketing Is About Help Not Hype

Define Your Brand

Defining your Chamber’s brand can be as simple or complex as you want to make it. The easiest way is to ask yourself the following questions:
What are the benefits, features, and unique aspects of your Chamber’s products or services?
What do your members and prospective members already think of your Chamber?
What qualities do you want them to associate with your Chamber?

Don’t be intimidated. It’s really not as complicated as it sounds. Be honest in your answers. Authenticity is key in reaching your target market. Your members’ core values and goals should be at the forefront of your effort (for both this exercise and your overall mission, right?).

So, where do you go from here? You’ve successfully defined your brand, the next step is to capture that definition with a brand identity.

Establish Your Brand Identity

A brand identity should communicate your Chamber’s promise, look, attributes, and personality. Yes, even personality. Business may be the name of the game, but don’t forget that businesses are made up of people and people inherently operate on an emotional level.

Your brand stands for what you are. It should represent the sum of all of your marketing efforts.

Creating a brand identity begins with a variety of elements:

Name: the word or words (e.g. Coca-Cola or Coke)

Logo: the visual trademark ( e.g. Quaker Oats Quaker man)

Tagline: a catchphrase or slogan (e.g. “Snap, Crackle, Pop” – Rice Krispies)

Graphics: a clear and effective picture (e.g. Nike swoosh)

Colors: Owens-Corning is the only brand of fiberglass insulation that can be pink.

Sounds: a set of notes denoting a brand. (e.g. McDonald’s I’m Lovin’ It)

Remember, your Chamber’s brand will be frequently communicated in multiple arenas. Consistency is key. Defining brand identity creates the foundation for the rest of your marketing and brand strategy.

There’s a challenge in defining your Chamber’s identity. It’s easy to emulate what others have done, and that’s always a safe bet. It worked for them. But, that’s them. Remember, personality and authenticity are key. You may think your target market is very similar to theirs, and that could be true. But similar is still different. The differences may be subtle, but they are unique. Your Chamber’s brand should be unique, too. Don’t be afraid to forge your own path.



By the Numbers: Chamber Word-of-Mouth Marketing

Word-of-mouth is so powerful because “we trust each other so much more than we trust businesses.” – Jay Baer

WHAT

Word-of-mouth-marketing (WOMM) is defined as: An unpaid form of promotion in which satisfied customers tell other people how much they like a business, product or service and is triggered when a customer (member) experiences something beyond what is expected.

WHY

83% of Americans have recommended a product or service to someone else.
55% of Americans make product or service recommendations to others at least once per month.
48% of Gen Zs have made a recommendation because they’ve heard good things about the product, service, brand, or company from a friend or family member
30% of Gen Zs have made a recommendation because they’ve overheard someone praising the product, service, brand, or company.
Word-of-mouth drives 13% of sales. WHO

On average, 10% of customers drive over 50% of word-of-mouth marketing.

Take extra time for your advocates—anyone who has shown clear affection for your chamber—making sure to add value by bringing them closer to your organization. Ask for their feedback, invite them to do a case study, and make them feel involved (without having to commit their time). WHERE

Word-of-mouth is different than social media. Be careful about confusing the two. WOMM happens everywhere. It encompasses a variety of sub-categories so it can include social media, but overall, it’s about human interaction.


HOW

Do what you said you would do. If you haven’t fulfilled the promises that were made to members, WOMM will turn on you, becoming your greatest foe. Chatter about a negative experience is incredibly damaging.

It has been said that brand perception is half product, half customer experience. For chambers, the product is the experience, so there is no chance to get it half right. It’s all or nothing, so do it all. WHEN

Piggybacking off of a successful event or after positive media coverage are no-brainers for generating buzz. But for any other time, have you simply asked?

You’ve probably asked members to donate and volunteer their time. Have you directly asked members to tell friends about the organization? It probably hadn’t occurred to them that letting people know is helpful. It’s a great option for those that can’t donate or volunteer. Pay attention to all of your members, but go above and beyond for your advocates. It will come back to you unequivocally.



Website Governance for Chambers

You never get a second chance to make a first impression. And often, the first impression of your chamber happens when a prospective member visits your website.

Precisely why you need to know about website governance.

So, what is it? Website governance is a system for managing your online presence in an orderly way. From a chamber's perspective, website governance lays the necessary foundation for your digital presence. Do it well and you get certainty and stability.

Your chamber’s digital presence should be a top priority. Not only for prospects, but for current members as well. If your site operates smoothly and has a consistent look and feel, current members will also embrace it.




Website governance is not the same as website management. Website governance is about putting policies and procedures in place to ensure a consistent look. It helps to maintain your website and provides a high level of organization. However, don’t confuse it with website management. Whereas management focuses on completing a task, governance determines policies and procedures for maintaining and managing the site.

How website governance benefits your chamber.
Governance lays the website foundation and its productivity.
A well-structured site encourages your members to return, and prospects to join.
Chamber employees will have clear guidelines on what is expected.
No matter how little information your site contains, website governance benefits everyone.

Here are the three main areas that work together to increase your success:
Policies – Policies should be clear and consistent and cover privacy, accessibility compliance, rules, laws, social media usage, content review and so on.

Example: When linking to or attaching documents to web pages, they must be in PDF file format.
Standards – Establish standards to guide copywriters and designers as well as ensuring consistency in both voice and design.

Example: Standards are often outlined by a Brand Guideline Manual.
Processes – Clearly state the procedures that ensure any policies and standards are incorporated in any changes to the site.

Example: Outline the process for each blog post to include URL optimization, descriptions, and titles.

Implementing these three pillars of governance will reduce inconsistencies and safeguard the integrity of the site’s voice and visual presence.

How to start: Your chamber probably has some sort of governance system in place without realizing it. But it’s still helpful to start from the beginning, determining the model that works best for your website.

Choose a model based off of any or all of these factors: chamber, goals, culture, and website type.

The most common website governance models are:
Advisory Board
Management Team
Policy Board
Cooperative

Models are usually broken down into two main components.
Resources – Encompasses people, tools, budget and process
Activities – Encompasses development, maintenance, leadership and infrastructure

If one model isn’t a good fit, try another. No matter how you go about it, implementing structure will keep your chamber on the path to success.

A Simple Tactic to Appeal to Prospective Young Members

In an article recently featured in Minnesota Meetings and Events magazine, ChamberMaster’s parent company, GrowthZone, explored benefits that attract young professional members.

This demographic has high expectations for their memberships; with the influx of millennials and Gen Z into the workspace, membership-based organizations must continue to consider their offerings carefully.

Providing benefits that young professionals really want is critical. But more importantly, communicating these benefits is key.



Of all the benefits chambers should promote in order to attract young members, resume building is particularly enticing.

Job opportunity is a primary motivation driving young professionals to seek out chamber membership. The ability to expand their resume by serving in leadership roles or on a committee is compelling.

Complementing resume-building options with professional development programs allows members to participate at a variety of commitment levels. From the smallest engagement (answering questions in an online forum) to major participation (speaking at an event), young professionals can take advantage of numerous professional development and networking opportunities.

By providing young professionals with the tools to become leaders in their industry, chambers validate their value. This, in turn, increases recruitment and retention numbers.




A Chamber Mission Statement: What it is (and isn’t)

Writing a chamber mission statement isn’t difficult; the key is to make sure you have a clear understanding of what it is (and isn’t). Keep yours simple, make it compelling, and ensure it’s measurable and remains relevant. Mission statements for chambers are essential to planning and can be as short as one sentence, or a brief paragraph.

EXAMPLES:

PayPal: “To build the Web’s most convenient, secure, cost-effective payment solution.”

Trip Advisor: “To help people around the world plan and have the perfect trip.”

Coca-Cola: “To refresh the world in mind, body and spirit. To inspire moments of optimism and happiness through our brands and actions.”

Walt Disney: “To be one of the world's leading producers and providers of entertainment and information. Using our portfolio of brands to differentiate our content, services and consumer products, we seek to develop the most creative, innovative and profitable entertainment experiences and related products in the world.”

A mission statement is not the same as a vision statement. Essentially, a Mission Statement defines an organization’s identity (who we are) and purpose (what we do); it’s in the present and doesn’t change. Conversely, a Vision Statement is about promoting growth and setting goals; it’s forward-thinking (where we want to be) and can evolve and change. Practice by taking a run at writing your own, personal mission statement about yourself. It should be unique, clear, and succinct. It’s a quick way to learn and it can be fun. What have you got to lose?



Writing a Press Release for Chambers

The purpose of a press release is to get attention, make news, and generate publicity. It’s cost-effective marketing (free) and they can be used to create brand awareness for your chamber.


The Basics of Crafting a Press Release:

Make it newsworthy; it’s not an ad, it’s a news article
Use an attention-grabbing headline
Be time sensitive – no one wants old news
Stick to one topic
Write it in a professional tone, or even better, write it like you’re a reporter
Proofread it and then have someone else proofread it

Key Components of a Press Release:
Letterhead (identify that it’s from your organization)
Date
“For Immediate Release” under the date
Headline: Limit it to 15 words
Subtitle (optional): Keep it short
Lead paragraph: Your organization’s location (city, state) in bold type and the 5 Ws (who, what, when, why, where) of the story
2nd Paragraph: Supportive information and at least one quote
Other paragraphs: Additional, relevant, non-essential information
Call to Action: An exact, complete, non-embedded URL (not “Click Here to visit website”) in one of the paragraphs
Conclusion: A brief description of your organization
Media Contact Information: Name, email, phone, and website

A Press Release Should Not:
Be longer than 1 page
Have a lot of formatting
Include exclamation points (unless it’s a direct quote)
Exaggerate
Use the words: I, we, our, me

Distribution of a Press Release:
Develop a media contact list of people you will send the release to
Send the release to an actual person, or at least to a specific news department
Use a detailed subject line in your email (not simply “Press Release”)
Post the release on your website
Share the release on social media

Incorporating all of this into your chamber’s press release should result in a well-organized, relevant article that is newsworthy.


How to Sell Chamber of Commerce Memberships

Hate selling memberships? You’re just human.




Whether it’s membership renewals, event sponsorship, or convincing people to serve on the board, people in the chamber world are always selling. And for most people, selling is just plain uncomfortable.

Check out these tactics on how to talk with people about your chamber:

Consider this: If you don’t like to sell, you’re perfect for the job. You just need to stop thinking that sales are bad for the customer.

Chances are you love your chamber, believe in its mission, and you know it’s valuable to members.

Approach sales prospects with the mindset that you are there to partner with them to help solve a problem.

Yes, selling is uncomfortable. But, partnering with someone to help solve a problem is human nature. You don’t have to be a salesperson, you just have to be human.

Public Highly Critical of State of Political Discourse in the U.S.

Reactions to Trump’s rhetoric: Concern, confusion, embarrassment

The public renders a harsh judgment on the state of political discourse in this country. And for many Americans, their own conversations about politics have become stressful experiences that they prefer to avoid.

Large majorities say the tone and nature of political debate in the United States has become more negative in recent years – as well as less respectful, less fact-based and less substantive.

Meanwhile, people’s everyday conversations about politics and other sensitive topics are often tense and difficult. Half say talking about politics with people they disagree with politically is “stressful and frustrating.”

When speaking with people they do not know well, more say they would be very comfortable talking about the weather and sports – and even religion – than politics. And it is people who are most comfortable with interpersonal conflict, including arguing with other people, who also are most likely to talk about politics frequently and to be politically engaged.

Donald Trump is a major factor in people’s views about the state of the nation’s political discourse. A 55% majority says Trump has changed the tone and nature of political debate in this country for the worse; fewer than half as many (24%) say he has changed it for the better, while 20% say he has had little impact.

Perhaps more striking are the public’s feelings about the things Trump says: sizable majorities say Trump’s comments often or sometimes make them feel concerned (76%), confused (70%), embarrassed (69%) and exhausted (67%). By contrast, fewer have positive reactions to Trump’s rhetoric, though 54% say they at least sometimes feel entertained by what he says.

Pew Research Center’s wide-ranging survey of attitudes about political speech and discourse in the U.S. was conducted April 29-May 13 among 10,170 adults. Among the other major findings:

Broad agreement on the dangers of “heated or aggressive” rhetoric by political leaders. A substantial majority (78%) says “heated or aggressive” language directed by elected officials against certain people or groups makes violence against them more likely. This view is more widely shared among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents than Republican and Republican leaners.

Partisans demand a higher standard of conduct from the other party than from their own. Majorities in both parties say it is very important that elected officials treat their opponents with respect. But while most Democrats (78%) say it is very important for Republican elected officials to treat Democratic officials with respect, only about half (47%) say it is very important for officials from their party to treat Republican politicians with respect. There is similar divide in the opinions of Republicans; 75% say Democrats should be respectful of GOP officials, while only 49% say the same about Republicans’ treatment of Democratic officials.

Uncertainty about what constitutes “offensive” speech. As in the past, a majority of Americans (60%) say “too many people are easily offended over the language that others use.” Yet there is uncertainty about what constitutes offensive speech: About half (51%) say it is easy to know what others might find offensive, while nearly as many (48%) say it is hard to know. In addition, majorities say that people in this country do not generally agree about the types of language considered to be sexist (65%) and racist (61%).

Majority says social media companies have responsibility to remove “offensive” content. By a wide margin (66% to 32%), more people say social media companies have a responsibility to remove offensive content from their platforms than say they do not have this responsibility. But just 31% have a great deal or fair amount of confidence in these companies to determine what offensive content should be removed. And as noted, many Americans acknowledge it is difficult to know what others may find offensive.

Talking about Trump with people who feel differently about him. The survey asks people to imagine attending a social gathering with people who have different viewpoints from theirs about the president. Nearly six-in-ten (57%) of those who approve of Trump’s job performance say they would share their views about Trump when talking with a group of people who do not like him. But fewer (43%) of those who disapprove of Trump say they would share their views when speaking with a group of Trump supporters.
What’s OK – and off-limits – for political debates

While Americans decry the tone of today’s political debates, they differ over the kinds of speech that are acceptable – and off-limits – for elected officials to use when criticizing their rivals.

Some language and tactics are viewed as clearly over the line: A sizable majority (81%) says it is never acceptable for a politician to deliberately mislead people about their opponent’s record. There is much less agreement about the acceptability of elected officials using insults like “evil” or “anti-American.”

Partisanship has a major impact on these opinions. For the most part, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to say many of the insults and taunts are never acceptable. For example, 53% of Democrats say it is never acceptable for an elected official to say their opponent is anti-American; only about half as many Republicans (25%) say the same.

As with views of whether elected officials should “respect” their opponents, partisans hold the opposing side to a higher standard than their own side in views of acceptable discourse for political debates.

Most Republicans (72%) say it is never acceptable for a Democratic official to call a Republican opponent “stupid,” while far fewer (49%) say it is unacceptable for a Republican to use this slur against a Democrat. Among Democrats, 76% would rule out a Republican calling a Democratic opponent “stupid,” while 60% say the same about Democrat calling a Republican “stupid.” See Chapter 2 for an interactive illustration of how people’s views about the acceptability of political insults vary depending on whether or not they share the same party affiliation of the elected officials casting the insults.
Large shares have negative reactions to what Trump says

Majorities of Americans say they often or sometimes feel a range of negative sentiments – including concern, confusion, embarrassment and exhaustion – about the things that Trump says.

Positive feelings about Trump’s comments are less widespread. Fewer than half say they often or sometimes feel informed, hopeful, excited and happy about what the president says. A 54% majority says they at least sometimes feel entertained by what Trump says, the highest percentage expressing a positive sentiment.

Democrats overwhelmingly have negative reactions to Trump’s statements, while the reactions of Republicans are more varied. Among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, at least 80% say they often or sometimes experience each of the seven negative emotions included in the survey.

A 59% majority of Republicans and Republican leaners say they often or sometimes feel concerned by what Trump says. About half also say they are at least sometimes embarrassed (53%) and confused (47%) by Trump’s statements.

By contrast, large majorities of Republicans say they often or sometimes feel hopeful (79%), entertained (78%), informed and happy (76%) and other positive sentiments in response to the things Trump says.

No more than about 10% of Democrats express any positive feelings toward what Trump says, with two exceptions: 17% say they are often or sometimes informed, while 35% are at least sometimes entertained.
Republicans see a less ‘comfortable’ environment for GOP views

Republicans say that members of their party across the country are less comfortable than Democrats to “freely and openly” express their political views. In addition, Republicans are far more critical than Democrats about the climate for free expression in the nation’s educational institutions – not just colleges, but also community colleges and K-12 public schools.

Just 26% of Republicans say that Republicans across the country are very comfortable in freely and openly expressing their political opinions; nearly two-thirds of Republicans (64%) think Democrats are very comfortable voicing their opinions. Among Democrats, there are more modest differences in perceptions of the extent to which partisans are comfortable freely expressing their political views.

There are smaller partisan differences when it comes to opinions about how comfortable Republicans and Democrats are expressing their views in their local communities. Yet these opinions vary depending on the partisan composition of the local community. Republicans and Democrats living in counties that Trump won by wide margins in 2016 are more likely than those in evenly divided counties (or those that Hillary Clinton won decisively) to say Republicans are very comfortable expressing their views.

Republicans’ concerns about the climate for free speech on college campuses are not new. The new survey finds that fewer than half of Republicans (44%) say colleges and universities are open to a wide range of opinions and viewpoints; Democrats are nearly twice as likely (87%) to say the same.

Republicans also are less likely than Democrats to say community colleges and K-12 public schools are open to differing viewpoints. By contrast, a larger share of Republicans (56%) than Democrats (40%) say that churches and religious organizations are very or somewhat open to a wide range of opinions and viewpoints.

Members of both parties generally view their own local communities as places that are open to a wide range of viewpoints. Large and nearly identical shares in both parties say their local community is at least somewhat open to a wide range of opinions and viewpoints (75% of Democrats, 74% of Republicans).


The climate for discourse around the country, on campus and on social media

Seven-in-ten or more Americans say that Democrats, Republicans, liberals and conservatives are at least somewhat comfortable to “freely and openly express their political views” in both their local communities and in the country overall. But there are key partisan differences in these feelings – particularly in views of the national political climate, with Republicans especially likely to believe there is a more stifling environment around speech for Republicans than for Democrats.

Overall, Americans are more likely to see Democrats as comfortable expressing their views in this country than to say this about Republicans. While about half of the public (48%) says that Democrats in this country are “very comfortable” to freely and openly express their political views, a smaller share (36%) says the same about Republicans.

Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are especially likely to feel that Democrats and liberals are comfortable sharing their political views in this country – and also to feel that Republicans are not. Nearly nine-in-ten Republicans (88%) say Democrats are at least somewhat comfortable openly sharing their views, with 64% saying that Democrats in the country are “very comfortable” openly expressing their political views. By comparison, only about a quarter (26%) say Republicans in the country are very comfortable doing this (61% say Republicans are at least somewhat comfortable doing this).

By comparison, there are only modest differences in Democratic perceptions of partisans’ comfort with political expression in the country. Roughly eight-in-ten Democrats say Republicans are at least somewhat comfortable freely and openly expressing their opinions in this country – roughly the same share as say this about Democrats (79% and 83%, respectively).

While Democrats are slightly more likely to describe Republicans than Democrats as very comfortable to freely express their views (45% vs. 37%), the 8 percentage point gap in these perceptions is considerably narrower than the 38 point gap in GOP perceptions.

There are similar patterns in beliefs about liberals’ and conservatives’ comfort expressing their political views in the country. Overall, 83% of Americans say liberals in this country are at least somewhat comfortable freely and openly expressing their views, while 71% say this about conservatives. Democrats are modestly more likely to say conservatives are more comfortable than liberals with expressing their views (85% vs. 79%, respectively). By contrast, about nine-in-ten Republicans (91%) say liberals are at least somewhat comfortable freely expressing their views in this country, while 56% say conservatives are at least somewhat comfortable doing this.

When asked about partisan groups in “your community,” roughly similar shares of Americans say Republicans (37%) and Democrats (40%) are very comfortable expressing their views.

Democrats are about equally likely to say Republicans in their community and Democrats in their community are comfortable to freely and openly express their views: About eight-in-ten say both groups are somewhat comfortable doing this, including about four-in-ten saying they are very comfortable.

Republicans are more likely to say Democrats in their community are comfortable freely and openly expressing their political views than to say this about Republicans: 86% say Democrats are at least somewhat comfortable, while 73% say this about Republicans. However, this difference in perceptions about GOP comfort and Democratic comfort is considerably narrower at the community level than it is for the national environment.
How open people think their community is to Republicans and Democrats expressing their views depends on how red or blue it is

Perceptions of how comfortable partisans are expressing political views in their local communities vary by the political makeup of those communities. For example, 48% of adults who live in counties that Donald Trump carried by 10 points or more in the 2016 election say that Republicans in their local community are “very” comfortable expressing their political views; by contrast, just 30% of adults living in counties that Hillary Clinton won by similar margins say Republicans in their community are very comfortable freely and openly expressing their political views.

An opposite – though somewhat less pronounced – pattern is seen in views of Democrats’ comfort expressing their political views: 46% of adults living in counties that Clinton won by 10 points or more say Democrats in their communities are very comfortable expressing their political views; 37% of adults living in counties that Trump won by 10 or more points say this.

When it comes to Republicans’ comfort of political expression in their communities, both Democrats and Republicans see greater Republican comfort in counties Trump carried by 10 points or more than in counties where the election was closely contested or where Clinton won by at least 10 points.

This same dynamic is present in Democrats’ views of how comfortable Democrats in their communities are to freely and openly express their views (as the Clinton share of the 2016 vote rises, Democrats’ perceptions of the comfort Democrats feel expressing their views increases).

But Republican views of how comfortable Democrats are sharing their political views do not follow this pattern. About equal shares of Republicans who live in solid Clinton counties (49%) and solid Trump counties (46%) say they think Democrats in their community feel very comfortable sharing their political views.
Public sees a deterioration in the tone of national political debate

Overwhelming majorities of the public say that the tone and nature of political debate in the country has become more negative (85%), less respectful (85%) and less fact-based (76%) over the last several years. And six-in-ten say the debate has been less focused on issues than in the past.

Few Americans say there has been positive movement on any of these dimensions over the last several years – just 3% say the tone of national political debate has become more positive, while 2% say it has become more respectful, 8% say more fact-based and 20% say it has become more focused on issues.

About a third of the public (35%) says that the tone of politics has become more entertaining in recent years. Still, nearly half (46%) say it has become less entertaining over this period.

Partisans offer similar evaluations of the current state of political debate in the country. For instance, 86% of both Republicans and Democrats say the tone of political debate has become more negative in recent years, while about six-in-ten in both groups say political debate has become less focused on issues (60% of Republicans, 62% of Democrats). Those who discuss politics more frequently – in both partisan groups – are somewhat more likely than others to view a decline in national political discourse.
Wide partisan differences in views of how open educational institutions, religious organizations are to a ‘wide range of opinions and viewpoints’

Roughly two-thirds of Americans (68%) say colleges and universities are very or somewhat open to “a wide range of opinions and viewpoints,” while a slightly larger majority (73%) say the same about community colleges. About six-in-ten (61%) view K-12 public schools as at least somewhat open to different views, while about half (48%) describe churches and religious organizations this way.

Three-quarters (75%) say their own local community is very or somewhat open to a wide range of opinions and viewpoints.

However, relatively small shares describe any of these places or institutions as “very” open – a quarter (25%) say this about colleges and universities, while roughly the same share (22%) says this about community colleges; 14% describe their own community this way. About one-in-ten say K-12 public schools (12%) and churches and religious organizations (10%) are very open to many different views.

There are wide partisan differences in these views – particularly in assessments of the openness of postsecondary educational institutions. Nearly nine-in-ten Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (87%) describe colleges and universities as at least somewhat open to a wide range of opinions and viewpoints – including 34% who say these institutions are very open. By comparison, just 44% of Republicans and Republican leaners say colleges and universities are either very (15%) or somewhat (30%) open in this way (roughly a quarter say colleges and universities are “not at all” open to viewpoint diversity).

The partisan gap is smaller, though still substantial, in evaluations of community colleges. About six-in-ten Republicans (57%) say community colleges are very or somewhat open to many different opinions and viewpoints, while almost nine-in-ten Democrats (86%) say this.

The partisan gap seen in assessments of educational institutions extends to views of primary and secondary public schools as well. While about seven-in-ten Democrats (71%) describe K-12 public schools as at least somewhat open to differences in opinions and viewpoints, roughly half of Republicans (49%) say the same.

In contrast, Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say churches and religious organizations are open to a range of opinions and viewpoints. A 56% majority of Republicans say this, compared with just 40% of Democrats.

When it comes to their local communities, partisans are in general agreement – about three-quarters of both Republicans (74%) and Democrats (75%) say their local communities are at least somewhat open to a wide range of opinions and viewpoints.

Overall, women (73%) are more likely than men (63%) to say colleges and universities are at least somewhat open. And while just 57% of Americans ages 65 and older say these institutions are at least somewhat open, fully seven-in-ten (71%) of Americans under 65 say this.
Most say social media companies should remove offensive content, but fewer are confident in them to determine what should be removed

Amid public debate about how social media companies should handle controversial content, about two-thirds of Americans (66%) say these companies have a responsibility to remove offensive content from their platforms; 32% say they do not have this responsibility.

While majorities in both parties say social media companies should remove offensive content from their platforms, this view is more widely held by Democrats than Republicans: About three-quarters of Democrats (77%) say this, compared with 52% of Republicans and Republican leaners.

Yet the public does not have very much confidence in social media companies to determine what offensive content should be removed from their platforms.

About three-in-ten Americans (31%) have at least a fair amount of confidence in social media companies to decide which content to remove – including just 4% who say they have a great deal of confidence in these companies to do this.

Among Republicans, 23% have confidence in social media companies to determine what content should be removed; far greater shares say they have not too much (42%) or no confidence at all (34%) in companies to make this determination.

Democrats also largely lack confidence in social media companies to determine what content should be removed, though they are somewhat more likely than Republicans to express at least a fair amount of confidence (37%).

While majorities across demographic groups say social media companies have a responsibility to remove offensive content from their platforms, there remain gender, age and racial differences in the shares who express this view.

Overall, women (72%) are more likely than men (59%) to say social media companies have this responsibility, and gender differences are in evident in both parties.

About six-in-ten Republican women (62%) say this, compared with about four-in-ten Republican men (43%). And Democratic women (79%) are modestly more likely than Democratic men (73%) to say social media companies have this responsibility.

Blacks (74%) are more likely than whites (64%) and Hispanics (66%) to say social media companies should remove offensive content.

Older adults are also more likely than younger adults to say companies have this responsibility: About seven-in-ten of those older than 65 (73%) say social media companies should remove such content; by comparison, 59% of 18- to 29-year-olds say this.

Women – who are more likely than men to say social media companies should remove offensive content – also have more confidence than men in these companies’ abilities to determine what content should be removed. Overall, 36% of women, compared with 25% of men, say they have at least a fair amount of confidence in companies to do this.

About half (48%) of black people express at least a fair amount of confidence in social media companies to determine what content should be removed, compared with just a quarter of whites. Four-in-ten Hispanics say they have at least a fair amount of confidence in companies to make this determination.

Although the youngest Americans are less likely than the oldest Americans to say social media companies have a responsibility to remove offensive content, they have more confidence than older Americans in these companies’ abilities to determine what content should be removed. Nearly four-in-ten 18- to 29-year-olds (38%) have a fair amount or great deal of confidence in social media companies to determine what content should be removed from their platforms, compared with just 24% of those ages 65 and older.

Those who find it important for them personally to use language that other people do not find offensive are more likely to say that social media companies have a responsibility to remove offensive content from their platforms.

Among those who say it is very important for them personally to use language that doesn’t offend others, about three-quarters (77%) say social media companies are responsible for removing offensive content.

But among Americans who say it is not too or not at all important for them personally to use inoffensive language, fewer than half (44%) say social media companies have this responsibility.

The pattern holds within party, particularly among Republicans. Two-thirds of Republicans who say it is very important that they don’t offend others say social media companies should remove offensive content. By contrast, a much smaller share of Republicans (32%) who place lower importance on using inoffensive language say social media companies should remove such content.

Among Democrats, 83% of those who say it is very important that their language doesn’t offend others say social media companies have a responsibility to remove offensive content; a smaller majority (61%) of those who place little or no importance on using inoffensive language say the same.



The bounds of political debate and criticism

The public draws distinctions when it comes to the types of speech and behavior they deem acceptable from elected officials. Wide majorities of Americans say it is acceptable for elected officials to call their opponent uninformed on the issues and to raise their voice in a debate, but there is much lower tolerance for officials personally mocking their opponents or deliberately mischaracterizing their record.

Roughly three-quarters of Americans say it is at least sometimes acceptable to say their opponent’s policy positions are incorrect (73%) or that their opponent is uninformed on the issues (74%). A narrow majority (58%) says it is at least sometimes acceptable for elected officials to raise their voice in a debate. Few see these behaviors as never acceptable.

But there are behaviors that overwhelming majorities say have no place in political discourse. About eight-in-ten (81%) say it is never acceptable to deliberately mislead people about an opponent’s record or to say something negative about the physical appearance of an opponent’s spouse (81%), while 73% say it is never acceptable to criticize their opponent’s appearance – and nine-in-ten or more consider these behaviors at most rarely acceptable.

The public also generally views calling one’s political opponent “stupid” as out of bounds: 62% say this is never acceptable, while an additional 22% say it is rarely acceptable. And about half of the public says it is never acceptable for an official to shout over their opponent in a debate (49%) or to ridicule an opponent (50%), with three-quarters or more saying these behaviors are no more than rarely acceptable.

However, public opinion is more mixed over the acceptability of calling an opponent’s policy positions “evil” – while 35% say this is never acceptable and 34% say it is rarely acceptable, 31% say it is at least sometimes acceptable. Similarly, while 41% believe that it is never acceptable for an elected official to say their opponent is “anti-American,” 31% say this is rarely acceptable and 27% say this is at least sometimes acceptable.
Partisans differ over acceptability of some types of political criticism

Democrats are more likely than Republicans to view a range of behaviors as out of bounds. And some of the largest partisan gaps are over whether it is acceptable for elected officials to call into question the patriotism of their political opponents.

About three-quarters of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (76%) say it is rarely or never acceptable for an elected official to say “they love America more than their opponent does,” including half who say this is never acceptable.

By comparison, 45% of Republicans and Republican leaners say it is rarely or never acceptable for an official to say they love America more than their opponent – including just 21% who consider this completely out of bounds in politics. The pattern of opinion about whether it is acceptable to call one’s opponent anti-American is nearly identical.

There also are substantial partisan gaps in other areas, including the acceptability of ridiculing one’s opponent (59% of Democrats say this is never acceptable vs. 40% of Republicans), calling them stupid (70% vs. 51%) or saying their policy positions are evil (42% vs. 26%). But Democrats and Republicans are in general agreement that deliberately misleading people about their opponent’s record is out of bounds (82% of Democrats and 80% of Republicans say this is never acceptable), as is criticism of a spouse’s appearance (84% of Democrats, 78% of Republicans say it’s never acceptable).
Insults are seen as more acceptable when your party is the instigator

Partisans also have different views of how acceptable these types of political insults are, depending on the partisanship of the political officials involved.




Trump’s impact on the tone of political debate, important characteristics for elected officials

A majority of Americans say that Donald Trump has had a negative impact on the tone of political debate in the United States.

Overall, 55% say that Trump has changed the tone and nature of political debate in the U.S. for the worse since entering politics; fewer than half as many (24%) say he has changed it for the better, and 20% say he has not changed it much either way.

Democrats overwhelmingly say Trump has changed the tone of political debate for the worse. More than eight-in-ten Democrats and Democratic leaners (84%) say Trump has had a negative effect on political debate in this country, including 92% of liberal Democrats and 78% of conservative and moderate Democrats.

Republicans and Republican leaners are more divided in their views: 49% say Trump has changed the tone of the debate for the better, while 23% say he has changed it for the worse and 27% say he hasn’t changed it much either way. A majority of conservative Republicans (58%) think Trump has changed the tone of political debate for the better, compared with 35% of moderate and liberal Republicans.

Aside from the partisan differences on this question, there are significant divides by age and education. Those with higher levels of education are much more likely than those with lower levels to say that Trump has changed the tone of political debate for the worse. For instance, 73% of postgraduates say this compared with 47% of those with no college experience.

And adults younger than 50 (59%) are more likely than those 50 and older (51%) to say that Trump’s impact on the tone of political debate in the U.S. has been negative.

The differences among Republicans over Trump’s impact on the tone of political debate extend beyond ideology.

Among Republicans and Republican leaners, older adults and those without a college degree are significantly more likely than younger adults and those with a college degree to say Trump has changed the tone of political debate in the country for the better.

In addition, Republicans who say they talk about politics with others at least weekly are much more likely than those who talk politics less often to say Trump’s impact on debate has been a positive one (62% vs. 40%).
Majorities say Trump’s comments elicit concern, exhaustion, confusion

When asked about their reactions to the things Trump says, the public reports experiencing negative reactions more frequently than positive ones.

Out of a list of 15 possible reactions, “concerned” is the most frequently reported reaction to Trump’s comments. Overall, 76% say Trump’s comments often (48%) or sometimes (29%) make them feel concerned. Relatively few say Trump’s comments rarely (16%) or never (6%) make them feel concerned.

Other negative emotions also are widely experienced in response to Trump’s comments, including confusion (70% say this happens often or sometimes), embarrassment (69%), exhaustion (67%) and anger (65%).

Feeling entertained is the most frequent positive reaction to Trump’s comments: 54% say they often (21%) or sometimes (33%) feel entertained by what Trump says.

Fewer than half say Trump’s rhetoric at least sometimes makes them feel informed (43%), hopeful (41%), happy (37%), proud (36%) and other positive sentiments.

Large majorities of Democrats and Democratic leaners report that Trump’s comments at least sometimes make them feel each of the seven negative emotions asked about in the survey. For example, 92% say they often or sometimes feel concerned by what Trump says and 89% often or sometimes feel exhausted by his rhetoric.

Conversely, majorities of Republicans and Republican leaners say they at least sometimes experience each of the eight positive emotions included in the survey in response to the things Trump says.

However, emotional reactions to Trump’s rhetoric among Republicans and Democrats are not entirely parallel, with Democrats somewhat more likely to say they have negative reactions than Republicans are to say they have positive ones.

For instance, across the seven negative items, an average of 87% of Democrats say they often or sometimes feel this way because of Trump’s comments. Across the eight positive items, an average of 74% of Republicans say they often or sometimes feel this.

In addition, significant shares of Republicans say Trump’s comments make them feel negative emotions, at least sometimes. Overall, 59% of Republicans say the things Trump says often or sometimes make them feel concerned, 53% say his comments make them feel embarrassed and 47% say they feel confused. About a third of Republicans (32%) say they feel insulted by Trump’s rhetoric, at least sometimes.

By contrast, relatively small shares of Democrats report feeling positive emotions in reaction to what Trump says. While 35% of Democrats say Trump’s comments often or sometimes make them feel entertained, fewer than two-in-ten say they often or sometimes experience any of the other positive emotions.
Public says elected officials should avoid use of heated language

Americans believe there is a link between elected officials’ use of heated or aggressive rhetoric and the possibility of violence against people and groups, and there is broad agreement that officials should avoid this type of language.

About eight-in-ten (78%) say that elected officials using heated or aggressive language to talk about certain people or groups makes violence against those people or groups more likely; far fewer (21%) say this type of language does not make violence more likely.

Majorities in both parties say there is a connection between the language officials use to talk about certain groups and the possibility of violence, but this view is more widely held among Democrats and Democratic leaners (91%) than among Republicans and Republican leaners (61%).

Consistent with this view, 73% of the public says elected officials should avoid heated or aggressive language because it could encourage some people to take violent action; 25% say that elected officials should be able to use heated or aggressive language to express themselves without worrying about whether some people may act on what they say. Among Democrats, 83% say elected officials should avoid the use of heated language because of the possibility that it could encourage violence; a narrower majority of Republicans (61%) also take this view.
Honesty, knowledge highly valued in elected officials; narrower majorities say respect, willingness to compromise are very important

There is widespread agreement among the public that it is very important for elected officials to be honest and ethical (91%), to be knowledgeable on the issues (89%) and to admit when they are wrong (82%).

Roughly two-thirds say it is very important for elected officials to treat opponents with respect (68%) and to be willing to compromise with them (65%).

Among six traits included in the survey, only one – spending time raising money for reelection – is not identified as a valued trait for elected officials. Just 10% say it is very important that elected officials spend time raising money for reelection; 29% say this is somewhat important while a majority (59%) say this is not too or not at all important.

Some traits, such as honesty, are seen as universally important for elected officials across different contexts. However, views of the importance of other traits – notably, willingness to compromise with opponents and treating them with respect – vary depending on one’s own partisan affiliation and the party of the elected official.

Among Americans overall, 68% say it is very important for elected officials to treat their political opponents with respect. Democrats (72%) are somewhat more likely than Republicans (63%) to highly value politicians treating opponents with respect. Similarly, there is a modest partisan divide between the shares of Democrats (69%) and Republicans (61%) who say it is very important for elected officials to be willing to compromise with their political opponents.

There are much more pronounced partisan gaps when respondents are asked specifically about Republican and Democratic elected officials.

Both Republicans and Democrats are far more likely to say it’s very important for the other party’s elected officials to be willing to compromise and to treat opponents with respect than it is for their own party’s elected officials to behave this way.

Nearly eight-in-ten Democrats say it is very important for Republican elected officials to be willing to compromise with Democrats (79%) and to treat Democratic elected officials with respect (78%). However, far fewer value these behaviors when asked about their own party’s elected officials: Just 48% of Democrats say it is very important for Democratic elected officials to be willing to compromise with Republicans, and 47% say the same about Democratic officials treating Republican officials with respect.

A similar dynamic is seen among Republicans. While 78% of Republicans say it is very important for Democratic elected officials to be willing to compromise with Republicans, only 41% feel it is very important for members of their own party be open to compromise with Democrats. Similarly, Republicans are far more likely to say Democratic officials should treat their Republican opponents with respect (75%) than to say Republican elected officials should be respectful toward their Democratic opponents (49%).



The public’s level of comfort talking politics and Trump

Americans are much more cautious about talking politics with others than discussing a range of other subjects, including the weather and sports.

Comfort with talking about the weather is near universal: 95% of the public says that they would be either very (74%) or somewhat (22%) comfortable talking about the weather with someone they don’t know well. Sizable majorities also say they would be very or somewhat comfortable talking about movies and television (90%), the economy (77%) and sports (69%).

The public is less comfortable talking about politics, religion and Donald Trump. Overall, 55% say they would feel at least somewhat comfortable talking about Trump with someone they do not know well; just 25% say they would feel very comfortable doing this. Public comfort talking about religion is similar: 60% would be at least somewhat comfortable discussing this subject, but only about a quarter (24%) would feel very comfortable.

Talking politics ranks even lower on the public’s comfort list. Just 17% say they would be very comfortable talking politics with someone they don’t know well; another 35% say they would feel somewhat comfortable.

Partisans express similar levels of comfort discussing topics like the weather, sports and entertainment, but Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say they are comfortable talking about Donald Trump, the economy and religion.

Two-thirds of Republicans and Republican leaners (67%) say they would be very or somewhat comfortable talking about Trump with someone they don’t know well, while only about half of Democrats and Democratic leaners (48%) say this.

Republicans also are more likely than Democrats to say they would feel comfortable talking about the economy (83% vs. 73%), religion (69% vs. 55%) and politics (57% vs. 49%).
Half say it is stressful to talk politics with people they disagree with

When it comes to political conversations with those they disagree with, the public is split in their reactions: Half say talking politics with people they disagree with is generally stressful and frustrating, while about as many (48%) say it is interesting and informative.

Democrats and Democratic leaners (53%) are slightly more likely than Republicans and Republican leaners (47%) to say political conversations with people they disagree with are stressful and frustrating. The share of Democrats who find these conversations stressful is higher than it was in the spring of 2016 – prior to Donald Trump’s election – when 45% said this. Views among Republicans have changed little over the past several years.

Liberal Democrats are especially likely to say they find political conversations with people they disagree with frustrating: 63% say this, compared with 44% of conservative and moderate Democrats.

There also is an ideological divide in these views among Republicans: Conservatives (52%) are more likely than moderates and liberals (39%) to find talking politics with people they disagree with to be stressful and frustrating.
Offering your views on politics – and Trump – over dinner

When asked to think about being at a small dinner with strangers who disagree with them about Donald Trump, Americans who approve of his job performance are more likely to say they would share their own views about him than are those who disapprove.

Nearly six-in-ten adults who approve of Donald Trump’s job performance (57%) say they would share their views about the president at a small dinner where the other guests are talking about how they really dislike Trump. Only about four-in-ten of those who disapprove of Trump (43%) say they would be likely to share their views in a scenario where people at the table were talking about how they really like Trump.

Similar dinner party scenarios were asked about for three other political topics (note: each respondent was only asked about one scenario). However, for these other topics – minimum wage, gun policy and a border wall with Mexico – there is no gap by issue position in the shares who would volunteer their views. For instance, 74% of those who favor raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour and 70% who oppose this say they would voice their opinions to a group of dining companions who are expressing views opposite to their own.

In addition, for all three issue areas, clear majorities – regardless of their stance on the topic – say they would express their views at the dinner.


A survey experiment: Sharing political views with strangers who disagree

Comfort with conflict is strongly associated with people’s willingness to express their opposing views about Trump and other political topics in a dinner party setting (see appendix for more details on the comfort with conflict scale).

Only about a quarter (26%) of those who score low on a three-question scale measuring comfort with conflict would share their views about Trump over dinner with people who disagree with them. By contrast, 51% of those who fall in the middle of the scale and 76% of those who have high comfort with conflict say they would share their own views about Trump with a group of dinner companions who are expressing the opposing view.

The association between comfort with conflict and willingness to share your own views in a small dinner setting holds across the three other issue areas, though it is especially pronounced in the scenario about views of Trump.

Trump is a particularly difficult dinner conversation topic for those who are least comfortable with conflict: Among those with low comfort with conflict, just 26% would share their views about Trump to a table taking the opposing position. By comparison, 38% of those with low conflict comfort would share their views on the border wall, while about half would share their views about assault-style weapons (50%) or the federal minimum wage (52%). Among those who are most comfortable with conflict, there are more modest differences in willingness to share views in each of these scenarios.

People’s willingness to share their views about Trump varies depending on the partisan makeup of the places where they live.

Trump approvers who live in counties that Trump won by wide margins over Hillary Clinton in 2016 are more likely than Trump approvers who live in more politically mixed places or in counties that Clinton won by wide margins to say they would share their views over dinner with a group of people who don’t like the president. There is a similar – but inverse – pattern in the willingness of those who disapprove of Trump to speak up among a group of people who like Trump.

About six-in-ten Trump approvers living in counties that Trump won by 10 percentage points or more in 2016 (62%) say they would share their views about the president at a small dinner where people at the table are having a conversation about how they really dislike Trump. By comparison, about half of Trump approvers who live in places where the election was decided by less than 10 points (53%) or in places that Clinton won by more than 10 points (49%) say they would share their views in this situation.

This general pattern also is seen among those who disapprove of Trump: 49% of Trump disapprovers who live in counties Clinton won by at least 10 points would share their views of the president at a small dinner where people at the table are having a conversation about how much they like Trump, while 38% of disapprovers who live in counties that were decided by less than 10 points and 39% of disapprovers who live in counties that Trump won by at least 10 points say they would share their own views.

As a result, in counties that Trump won by 10 percentage points or more, there is a 23 percentage point gap between the share of Trump approvers (62%) and disapprovers (39%) who would express their views of the president at a dinner with those who disagree with them. By comparison, in counties that Clinton won by at least 10 points, Trump approvers (49%) and Trump disapprovers (47%) are about equally likely to say they would share their views if they were in this situation.
Why would you participate in – or avoid – contentious discussions about Trump?

When those who say they would share their views at a small dinner with people whose views of the president differ from their own are asked why they would share, about four-in-ten Trump disapprovers (39%) and a similar share of Trump approvers (35%) say they would do so because it’s important to for others to know where they stand.

Strongly held views about the president are also mentioned by sizable shares in both groups as a reason they would speak up, though Trump approvers are more likely than disapprovers to say this: 34% of Trump approvers who would share their views in these circumstances cite positive views or praise of Trump as the reason why they would participate in the conversation, while about a quarter of Trump disapprovers who would do so (24%) mention deeply negative or strong criticism of Trump as a reason.

Among those who would share their views, 25% of Trump disapprovers and 15% of Trump approvers explain that they would do so because the conversation might be productive.

Relatively few people who would engage in a conversation about Trump with people who have a different view of him than they do would do so in the expectation that they could change others’ minds about him (10% of disapprovers and 14% of approvers who say they would share their views cite this as a reason).

The most common reasons given for not sharing personal views of Trump at a dinner with strangers who feel differently is a desire to avoid confrontation or discomfort: More than half of those who say they would avoid sharing their views about Trump mention something along these lines as a reason why, with similar shares of Trump approvers (56%) and disapprovers (57%) saying this.

Though less common a response, 10% of Trump disapprovers who would not share their views and 17% of approvers who would not share their views cite a criticism of those who have different opinions of the president than their own – particularly a sense that these groups are closed-minded or judgmental – as their reason for keeping their opinions to themselves.
Those most comfortable with conflict more likely to be politically engaged

Comfort with conflict is associated with many attitudes about discourse and politics, including the willingness to share views of Trump in social settings. (See appendix for more details on the comfort with conflict scale.)

Those with higher levels of comfort with conflict are among the most active in politics. They are more likely than groups who are less comfortable with conflict to say they follow what’s going on in government most of the time, to say they always vote and to talk about politics frequently.

For instance, over half of Democrats and Republicans with high levels of comfort with conflict say they talk politics weekly or more often (55% and 54%, respectively). Smaller shares of those with low levels of comfort with conflict say they talk politics weekly or more.

Comfort with conflict is also predictive of some other views about political discourse. For example, Republicans and Democrats with high levels of comfort with conflict are also more comfortable talking about politics with someone they do not know well. And they are more likely to say that political conversations with those who hold opposing views are interesting and informative rather than stressful and frustrating.
Most say they don’t enjoy seeing political opponents get caught up in scandals

About two-thirds of Americans (66%) say that they do not enjoy seeing elected officials they dislike getting caught up in scandals or facing personal setbacks, while 32% say they enjoy this.

Though enjoyment at watching politicians they dislike face scandals is a minority position in both parties, Democrats (36%) are somewhat more likely than Republicans (28%) to say they enjoy this.

And among Democrats, liberals (41%) are more likely than conservative and moderate (32%) Democrats say they enjoy seeing political opponents face personal setbacks. There are no ideological differences among Republicans in these views.

In both parties, men are more likely than women to say they enjoy it when elected officials they dislike face setbacks. Among Democrats, 43% of men and 31% of women say they like it when politicians they dislike get caught up in scandals or face setbacks; among Republicans, 33% of men and 22% of women say the same.

Democrats ages 18 to 29 are especially likely to say they enjoy seeing elected officials they dislike get caught up in scandals and face personal setbacks: 46% Democrats say this, compared with about a third of Democrats in older age groups.

Republicans who express higher levels of comfort with conflict are more likely than those with lower levels of comfort to say they enjoy when opposition faces personal setbacks. Among Democrats, there are no significant differences in these views by comfort with conflict.

Within both parties, those who talk politics frequently are somewhat more likely than those who talk politics less often to enjoy seeing officials they dislike face setbacks.


The personal side of speech and expression

A large share of Americans say it is important to them personally to use language that does not cause offense, and an even larger majority say they are confident that the language they use is not offensive to other people.

About eight-in-ten (79%) say it is very (42%) or somewhat (37%) important to them personally to use language that other people do not find offensive. Relatively few (19%) say this is not too or not at all important to them.

Large majorities of both Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (83%) and Republicans and Republican leaners (74%) say it is very or somewhat important that they do not use language that others find offensive. But Democrats are more likely to say this is very important (47% vs. 35%).

Americans are broadly confident that they do not use offensive language: Nearly nine-in-ten adults say they are very (42%) or somewhat (45%) confident that the language they use is not offensive to other people. Comparable majorities of Republicans and Democrats say they are at least somewhat confident that the language they use is not offensive to other people (87% and 88%, respectively).

There are notable demographic differences when it comes to views on the personal use of offensive language.

Women, older adults and those with a postgraduate degree are especially likely to place high importance on using language that is not offensive to others. Women and older adults also tend to express higher confidence that the language they use is not offensive.

Almost half of women (47%) say it is very important to them personally to not use offensive language. Slightly more than a third of men (36%) say the same. There is a similar gap between the shares of women (46%) and men (37%) who say they are very confident that their own language is not offensive.

Among those ages 65 and older, 56% say it is very important for them personally to not use offensive language. By contrast, just 30% of those ages 18 to 29 say this is very important to them personally. Older adults also are more confident than younger adults that the language they use is not offensive to others: 53% of those 65 and older and 47% of those 50 to 64 say they are very confident that the language they use is not offensive; this compares with 38% of those ages 30 to 49 and just 31% of those 18 to 29.

Higher levels of education also are associated with greater concern over not using offensive language. About half of those with a postgraduate degree (52%) say it is very important to them not to use language others find offensive, compared with 43% of those who have a college degree, 37% of those with some college experience and 41% of those who have a high school diploma or less education. There are only slight educational differences in the shares saying they are very confident that they use language that is not offensive to others.

Within both political parties, there is a gender gap over the importance of using inoffensive language. Republican men (28%) are significantly less likely than Republican women (43%) to say it is very important to them personally to use language that is not offensive. And Democratic men (43%) prioritize this less than Democratic women (51%).

Younger Republicans and Democrats are both less likely than older adults in their respective parties to say it is very important to use language that other people do not find offensive. The size of the partisan gap is largely consistent across age groups, with Democrats expressing greater concern about this than Republicans.

Among Democrats, those with a postgraduate degree are significantly more likely than those with lower levels of education to say it is very important to them personally to use language other people do not find offensive. By contrast, there are no meaningful differences among Republicans by levels of educational attainment.
Have people changed how they discuss sensitive conversation topics?

When it comes to conversations around subjects like race, gender and religion, a narrow majority (55%) say they have not really changed how they talk about these subjects, while 45% say they are more careful with the language they use now than they used to be.

On balance, Republicans are more likely to say they have not really changed how they talk about these subjects (61%) than to say they are now more careful with the language they use (39%).

By contrast, Democrats are evenly split in their views. Half say they are more careful now than they used to be, while an identical share say they have not really changed how they talk about these subjects.

Younger adults are more likely than older adults to say they are more careful with the language they use to talk about subjects like race, gender and religion than they used to be.

Among adults ages 18 to 29, 52% say they are more careful with the language they use now, compared with 43% of adults ages 30 and older.

While there is no significant gender gap overall, Democratic men are more likely than Democratic women to say they are now more careful with the language they use when they talk about these subjects (54% vs. 46%, respectively). There are no differences between the views of Republican men and women.
Race, education differences in feeling ‘unfairly judged’ for language use

Overall, 35% of adults say they often (7%) or sometimes (28%) feel unfairly judged by others because of the language they use to express themselves. A larger share (64%) say they rarely (38%) or never (25%) feel unfairly judged by others because of how they express themselves.

While there are differences in these perceptions by age and race, there are no differences based on partisanship.

Roughly four-in-ten of those ages 18 to 29 (42%) and ages 30 to 49 (39%) say they often or sometimes feel unfairly judged by others because of the language they use to express themselves. Among those ages 50 to 64, 34% report feeling this way and just 24% of those 65 and older say they often or sometimes feel unfairly judged by others because of the language they use.

Hispanics (45%) and black people (38%) are significantly more likely than whites (30%) to say they feel unfairly judged by others because of the language they use to express themselves.

Among adults overall, those without a college degree (38%) are more likely than those who have graduated from college (29%) to say they often or sometimes feel unfairly judged by others because of the language they use to express themselves.

This education pattern is present among both whites and blacks. Among whites, 34% of those without a college degree say they often or sometimes feel unfairly judged because of the language they use to express themselves, compared with 23% of those who have graduated from college.

Similarly, black adults without a college degree are more likely than those who have graduated from college to say they at least sometimes feel unfairly judged by others because of how they express themselves (40% vs. 32%).

There are no significant differences among Hispanics on this question by level of educational attainment.

Overall, 36% of adults say that when they are around people with different racial and ethnic backgrounds than their own, they often (6%) or sometimes (30%) feel the need to change the way they express themselves. A majority of the public says they rarely (37%) or never (26%) feel the need to change how they interact with others of different racial backgrounds.

There are significant differences in these views by race and ethnicity. Four-in-ten blacks and Hispanics say they often or sometimes feel the need to change the way they express themselves around people with different racial and ethnic backgrounds than their own; a somewhat smaller share of whites (33%) says the same.

There is little overall difference in these views by level of educational attainment. However, black adults with a college degree are significantly more likely than blacks without a college degree to say they feel the need to change the way they express themselves when they are around those with different racial backgrounds than their own (48% vs. 37%).

This education pattern among black people can also be seen in the share who say they never feel the need to change the way they express themselves around people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds. Overall, 44% of blacks with a high school diploma or less education say they never feel the need to change the way they express themselves around people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds; blacks who have some college experience but no four-year degree (32%), or who have a four-year college or postgraduate degree (20%), are much less likely to say they never have to change the way they express themselves.


The challenge of knowing what’s offensive

Majorities of the public say there is not agreement in the country over what is considered sexist (65%) or racist (61%) language; and about half (48%) say it is hard to know what other people might find offensive.

There’s a modest partisan divide over whether it’s easy or hard to know what others might find offensive. Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are somewhat more likely to say it’s hard (53%) than easy (46%) to know what other people might find offensive. By contrast, a narrow majority of Democrats and Democratic leaners (55%) say it’s easy to know what others might find offensive; 44% say it’s hard to know.

Postgraduates (59% to 40%) and college graduates (55% to 45%) are more likely to say it’s easy than hard to know what other people would find offensive. Those with some college experience or no more than a high school diploma are about evenly divided over how easy it is to know what others find offensive. Democrats with higher levels of education are more likely than less-educated Democrats to say it’s easy to know what others might find offensive. Among Republicans, there are no significant differences in views by level of education.

Six-in-ten of those who say it’s very important to them personally to use language that other people do not find offensive say it’s easy to know what people would be offended by. Smaller shares of those who say it’s somewhat (47%) or not too or not at all important (41%) to them personally to use inoffensive language say it’s easy to know what others find offensive.

By 61% to 38%, more Americans say people generally do not agree over what is considered racist language.

Black people are somewhat more likely than whites and Hispanics to say people agree about what is considered racist language. Still, just 44% of blacks say that people generally agree on what is considered to be racist language, while 53% say people do not agree on this. Majorities of whites (63%) and Hispanics (59%) say people do not agree on this.

Among Republicans and Republican leaners, 65% say people generally do not agree over the definition of racist language; 58% of Democrats and Democratic leaners say the same

Similar to views on what constitutes racist language, just 34% say people agree on what is considered to be sexist language; a far larger share (65%) says people do not agree about this.

There is no gender gap in views on this question: 65% of women and 64% of men say people generally do not agree over what sexist language is.

Among partisan groups, 67% of Republicans and Republican leaners and 63% of Democrats and Democratic leaners say people do not generally agree over what constitutes sexist language.

There are large partisan and racial differences when it comes to views on the care people should take with language and how quick people are to take offense.

When asked to choose which statement better describes their views, 60% say that too many people are easily offended these days over the language that others use; a smaller share (39%) says people need to be more careful about the language they use to avoid offending people with different backgrounds.

Views among whites and blacks are nearly the opposite of each other. About two-thirds of blacks (65%) say that people need to be more careful about the language they use to avoid offending others; 34% say that too many people are easily offended over language these days. Among whites, views are the reverse: 66% say that too many people are easily offended over the language others use, compared with 33% who say people should be more careful with their language. Among Hispanics, 54% say people are too easily offended, while 45% say people should be more careful with their language.

There is a wide partisan gap on this question. A large majority of Republicans and Republican leaners (82%) say people are too easily offended. By contrast, Democrats and Democratic leaners are more likely to say that people should be more careful with their language to avoid causing offense (56%) than to say that people are too easily offended over the language others use (42%).

Among Democrats, blacks are substantially more likely than whites to say that people need to be more careful with their language. About two-thirds (67%) of black Democrats say this, compared with 55% of white Democrats.