Keywords: elections, Pakistan, public opinion, economy, methodology, weighting

This paper explores some of the challenges of measuring public opinion in Pakistan, while also reporting on trends in recent public opinion, using four D3-commissioned face-to-face nationally representative surveys of Pakistan fielded between the middle of 2023 and early 2025. Over the last few years, Pakistan has teetered between a variety of political, economic, environmental, and security emergencies. Severe floods in 2022 and an increase in global fuel prices have forced a balance of payments crisis and protracted negotiations with the IMF. Elections held in early 2024 were marked by widespread accusations of rigging, against the backdrop of Pakistan’s most prominent political figure, Imran Khan, being imprisoned on multiple charges and having his party banned from participation. Additionally, a series of terrorist attacks in Balochistan in late 2024 led the military to ramp up operations in the province, with China potentially supporting these efforts.

This paper presents a summary of frequencies and crosstabulations from these four surveys to explore how the Pakistani public has perceived these events and where they think their country’s economy, security, and society is heading. It also includes an exploration on the use of self-reported vote to weight public opinion data, a topic which has seen renewed interest in the American context following a third consecutive US presidential election in which public opinion polls have systematically underestimated the support of Donald Trump. The authors discuss whether such an approach might be useful for analysis of public opinion in Pakistan.

This paper seeks to generally complement the corresponding paper and presentation of a D3-commissioned national representative survey in Afghanistan despite differences in methodology and domestic conditions between the two.