Civic Language Explorer & Workbench

Civic organizations spend enormous effort on language and almost no effort checking whether it works. This checks.

There are two products here, built with Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement (PACE).

The Explorer

An interactive dashboard mapping how 5,393 registered voters perceive 21 civic concepts across three measures that are usually collapsed into one:

Positivity — do people view the term well or badly? Ownership — does it feel meant for me, or meant for someone else? Togetherness — does it bring people together, or drive them apart?

A term can score high on the first and fail badly on the second. That gap is the useful finding, and it’s invisible to anyone measuring favorability alone.

Freedom reads positively for 90% of voters, liberty for 83%, community and citizen for 82%. But qualifiers matter enormously: “free and fair democracy” lands at 69% while “representative democracy” drops to 45% and “responsive democracy” to 39% — the same institution, described three ways, with a 30-point spread.

Asked what comes to mind for authoritarian, 52% say abuse of power and 21% say corruption, while 3% say they don’t know what any of the words mean.

And the most common reason people give for not participating more isn’t apathy. It’s time (33%), then money (25%), then the belief that it wouldn’t make a difference (23%).

The Workbench

The second product is the one that’s harder to build and rarer to find: an analysis workbench where civil society communicators evaluate their own language against PACE’s “bridginess” research — testing whether their actual messaging lands across political divides.

Turning someone else’s research finding into an operational tool that practitioners run on their own material is a different skill from building a monitoring platform. Most research dashboards let you look at the findings. This one lets you check your work against them.

Survey data collected by More in Common US on behalf of PACE, November 2025.