In the last blog post, I highlighted recent Pew data on Indian views of the United States and China. Today Pew continues its streak of important data about India and public opinion with views of India in a couple dozen other countries. One thing we want to be careful about is attributing too much to year-on-year shifts (surveys can be noisy, response rates can vary, etc) but it’s still interesting and worth keeping an eye on.
First, the overall favorables. I was struck by how evenly divided opinion in the US is (more below), and the lack of high favorables in Australia and South Korea compared to Japan and Indonesia. Not clear how much of this is signal versus noise, but interesting to note.
Second, change since last year (again, take with grains of salt):
Third, after going through some gender and age splits, Pew notes that there isn’t a consistent ideological cleavage in views of India:
This speaks to questions about whether India is perceived more favorably by the Republicans in the US; consistent with my poking into the question way back in 2019, there is some evidence that the American left is more pro-India on aggregate than the right. Given the heightened anti-Indian sentiment (around H1Bs, for instance) in the Trump coalition, this should be little surprise, and certainly doesn’t suggest a strong pro-India mass constituency on the right.
Paul Staniland 