A new study finds that Arizonans react strongly to different civic language terms — more so than the rest of the country — and that the perceptions can enhance or hinder collaborative community conversations. 

The Arizona Civic Life Partnership, a strategic statewide initiative led by Center for the Future of Arizona (CFA) and the Arizona Center for Civic Leadership at the Flinn Foundation, released the report, Civic Language Perceptions Project: An Arizona Snapshot. It explores how Arizonans understand and react to key civic terms and offers insights for organizations working to improve civic engagement across the state.  

What is the Civic Language Perceptions Project?

In early 2022, PACE released data seeking to understand people’s perceptions of the language associated with civic engagement and democracy work. Between November 21-28, 2021, PACE fielded a nationally representative survey of 5,000 registered voters to poll 21 terms commonly used in civic engagement and democracy work.

Vitalyst Health Foundation sponsored an oversample of 601 Arizona residents to look more closely at how Arizonans perceive and associate civic language. With both the national and Arizona data in hand, we observed some interesting takeaways, and themes emerged through a series of data visualizations. In order to deepen our understanding of the data, probe the findings, and explore what resonated with communities across the state, the Arizona Civic Life Partnership launched a series of community dialogues in 2022-2023.

Arizonans are more extreme in their perceptions towards civic terms than Americans overall. For the words where the national population is most positive (unity, liberty, justice, citizen, Arizona residents are even more positive towards those terms. The converse is true as well – the words where the national population is least positive (civic infrastructure, civil society, privilege, pluralism), Arizona residents are even less positive.

Read the full announcement and press release here. Read the full report here.