Laura Silver

Laura Silver is an associate director at Pew Research Center. She is an expert in international survey research and writes about a variety of topics, including global attitudes toward China, views of democracy and opinions about foreign policy. She has been a lead author of many innovative reports, including a data essay comparing U.S. and Chinese soft power, a report based on an open-ended question about what would improve democracy and a report exploring what makes life meaningful. She also regularly uses secondary data to look at international trends such as the ages of world leaders, demographic patterns in China and the vote share of populist political parties in Europe. She has designed and implemented multiple focus group projects as well. On the quantitative side, she is involved in all aspects of the Center’s research process, including designing survey questionnaires and sample designs, managing fieldwork, processing and analyzing data, and writing reports.

Prior to joining Pew Research Center, she was a foreign affairs research analyst at the U.S. Department of State in the Office of Opinion Research, where she designed and implemented surveys in East Asia. In this role, she was awarded Best New Analyst by the Bureau of Intelligence and Research for her public opinion analysis. She received a dual Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication and the political science department at the University of Pennsylvania where her work focused on American public opinion of China, particularly in the context of presidential elections. Her work has been published in journals such as the International Journal of Public Opinion Research and International Studies Quarterly. She regularly shares findings on international public opinion with U.S. and international media outlets and has been quoted by The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post, BBC, Deutsche Welle, Foreign Policy magazine, South China Morning Post, Radio Free Asia and Voice of America, among others.