In 1987, the Pew Research Center developed a political typology to better understand the nature of American politics, classifying people on the basis of their political value orientations, partisanship, and political activism. In every presidential election year since that time, Pew has revisited its typology, updating it to reflect the changes in the nation.

Pew's political types are defined by their political, social, economic, and religious beliefs. In this questionnaire, Pew employs a "balanced alternative" format which sometimes forces the respondent to choose between two answers, neither of which accurately reflect his or her views. In such cases, respondents moderate their stance by indicating how strongly they hold a given position. In another attempt to correct for this possible distortion, Pew employs a sophisticated statistical and factor analysis to devise the typing.

The descriptions of this year's ten political types result from analysis of Pew polling data and do not necessarily apply across the board to each member of each type: The categories are more like composite sketches than personal portraits. Individuals are not types, and the descriptions are not intended to brand any one group or to be divisive. Even the best generalizations from the most carefully-gathered data cannot capture the complexity and nuance of our political views. Not every "staunch conservative," for example, is "distrustful of government" (as Pew concludes)--but enough are this way to make the generalization significant. Keeping all of this in mind, we hope you find Pew's election 2000 typology valuable, informative, and thought provoking.

The data and analysis reported here derive from Pew's November, 1999 and September, 2000 typology surveys. For more on the methodology, results, and analysis of this survey, the full reports are available online. Pew's October, 2000 survey was their last before election 2000, but did not figure into the scoring of this typology.

· October, 2000 typology survey
· September, 2000 typology survey
· November, 1999 typology survey