More in Common — Perception Gaps Research
Summary
More in Common is the international nonprofit whose research program documents the systematic overestimation of polarization in democratic publics — the perception-gaps finding — and supports better campaign messaging calibrated to the real median voter, not the imagined extreme one.
Body
More in Common is a transnational research and narrative-change organisation that studies and counters democratic polarisation; it runs country teams in the US, UK, France, Germany, and several other democracies and publishes research-grounded narrative interventions [source: more-in-common]. The organisation’s name reflects its vision - democratic societies in which people believe that they have more in common than what divides them - and its mission is to understand the forces driving polarisation and find common ground to tackle pressing challenges [source: more-in-common]. It draws from groundbreaking research to test narrative solutions, working with partners that have the capacity to make a difference at scale, and helps build the larger field of efforts to strengthen democratic societies against the threats of polarisation and division [source: more-in-common].
Featured research on the home page illustrates the breadth of the portfolio: Destin Commun in France combined a 3,000-person representative survey with in-depth qualitative research to highlight common references, memories, and everyday experiences that bind people together across social, generational, and political divides [source: more-in-common]. A 2026 US study interviewed over 10,000 Trump voters over ten months and identified four distinct types - MAGA Hardliners, Anti-Woke Conservatives, Mainline Republicans, and the Reluctant Right - with implications for messaging and engagement strategy [source: more-in-common]. A UK study (After Choosing Sides, 2024-2026 polling and focus groups) tracked British attitudes towards the Israel-Palestine conflict and argued the fallout is likely to have lasting effects on attitudes towards civil debate, free speech, and democratic institutions [source: more-in-common].
A campaigner reaches for it when sourcing research on democratic polarisation and for narrative-change projects that are research-grounded rather than intuition-driven [source: more-in-common]. Treat as link-only; the research is published under country-specific reuse terms by default. [source: more-in-common]
Use it for
Auditing your campaign’s target-voter model against survey data; deciding whether to write for the base (turnout/engagement) or the median (persuasion); grounding values-based, common-ground messaging claims.