Understanding America

Overview

The Americans who become policymakers and pundits are, generally speaking, drawn from a remarkably narrow sliver of the national population. They tend to be academically gifted and career-oriented. Their lives tend to follow a particular script that takes them far from home, to selective colleges and then white-collar jobs in a small set of coastal cities. They get married to each other and have children on a schedule conducive to their professional goals.

None of these characteristics are necessarily bad ones—to the contrary, in many cases they are quite admirable, and ones useful to effective policymaking. The problem emerges when the people exercising political power all have the same characteristics and, in contact only with each other, come to assume that the people they serve must all be like that, too.

At American Compass, we work to understand the wide range of values that shape American lives and the ways those conflict with the assumptions that guide national policy debates. We develop tools to help policymakers better understand their constituents and the areas in which their policy agendas are falling short.

For instance, rather than generating the usual partisan fodder, our public opinion surveys explore Americans’ life circumstances and priorities. Our Home Building Survey examines the family structure and caregiving arrangements that Americans of different education and income levels prefer, while our Not What They Bargained For Survey examines the employment conditions of American workers and the labor-management relationships they desired. A two-part survey, Failure to Launch and Failing on Purpose studies the paths that young Americans take through the education system and the purposes they and their parents most want that system to fulfill.

We also publish a range of qualitative and quantitative analysis on the state of American politics and society. Our Party Foul collection features leading scholars from both the left and right critiquing the “deadly sins” of their own parties, while our Compass Point essay series includes discussion of issues like overreliance on experts. Each of the entries in our Atlas series provides a data-based view of some element of the American landscape, from economic growth to inequality to higher education.

We are especially proud to have published The Edgerton Essays, a collection of two dozen essays by working-class Americans answering in their own words the question, “What do you wish policymakers knew about the challenges facing their families and communities?” As the collection’s editor, Patrick T. Brown, wrote in its conclusion, “Political leaders, researchers, and commentators will all need to work harder if they want to understand the daily concerns of politically disconnected voters in the middle of the income distribution and develop an agenda that speaks to them.”