ArticlePNAS nexus2026
Public opinion trends in American society: Lessons from social science infrastructure.
Article in PNAS nexus, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
How have individual and national welfare evolved over time in the United States? We use long-standing National Science Foundation-supported surveys-the American National Election Studies and the General Social Survey-to address this question. Our selected examples suggest measures of individual welfare (economic, health, happiness) have remained relatively stable, although with some recent acute declines (e.g. since 2020). More dramatically, beliefs about national welfare such as satisfaction with how democracy works, affective polarization, political efficacy, and confidence in various institutions have moved in negative directions over decades. These trends paint a picture of a stressed nation. They additionally highlight how descriptive survey data can be used to understand and raise questions about American society. Public opinion trends play a vital role in the social scientific process and these data are only available due to generational investments in gold-standard time series survey data.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.