Politics is a trial in which those in government - and those who aspire to be - make proposals, debate alternatives, and pass laws. Then the jury of public opinion decides. It likes the proposals or ...actions or it does not. It trusts the actors or it doesn't. It moves, always at the margin, and then those who benefit from the movement are declared winners. This book is about that public opinion response. Its most basic premise is that although pubic opinion rarely matters in a democracy, public opinion change is the exception. Public opinion rarely matters, because the public rarely cares enough to act on its concerns or preferences. Change happens only when the threshold of normal public inattention is crossed. When public opinion changes, governments rise or fall, elections are won or lost, old realities give way to new demands.
Public opinion in the United States contains a paradox. The American public is symbolically conservative: it cherishes the symbols of conservatism and is more likely to identify as conservative than ...as liberal. Yet at the same time, it is operationally liberal, wanting government to do and spend more to solve a variety of social problems. This book focuses on understanding this contradiction. It argues that both facets of public opinion are real and lasting, not artifacts of the survey context or isolated to particular points in time. By exploring the ideological attitudes of the American public as a whole, and the seemingly conflicted choices of individual citizens, it explains the foundations of this paradox. The keys to understanding this large-scale contradiction, and to thinking about its consequences, are found in Americans' attitudes with respect to religion and culture and in the frames in which elite actors describe policy issues.
Our focus is a puzzle: that ideological identification as “liberal” is in serious decline in the United States, but at the same time support for liberal policies and for the political party of ...liberalism is not. We aim to understand this divorce in “liberal” in name and “liberal” in policy by investigating how particular symbols rise and fall as associations with the ideological labels “liberal” and “conservative.” We produce three kinds of evidence to shed light on this macro-level puzzle. First, we explore the words associated with “liberal” and “conservative” over time. Then we take up a group conception by examining the changing correlations between affect toward “liberals” and affect toward other groups. Finally, we consider the changing policy correlates of identification.
With competing assumptions and alternative empirical models, scholars have come to rather different conclusions about the impact of public preferences on the decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court. Some ...have found the justices to be attentive to mass opinion, while others have judged it to be irrelevant. Across this divide, however, one assumption is widely shared; that is, political scientists generally agree upon how best to measure the Court's outputs. In this analysis, we employ an alternative estimate of the justices’ liberalism, one which we think better reflects the underlying ideological tenor of their policies. With data from 1953 to 1996, we compare time-series models using different indicators of the Supreme Court's aggregate liberalism. Our results suggest that, in addition to being motivated by their own preferences, the justices are highly responsive to public mood, as well.
Public policy mood, a concept now more than twenty years old, is the measure of left/right preferences over policy choices in American politics. In this essay, I comment on the theoretical need for ...such a measure and discuss the strategy for estimation. I produce the measure itself for the years from 1952 to 2011. Then I take on the question of how many dimensions of such operational ideology exist. I find two, which is far from novel. But unlike much previous work, my own included, the present analysis utilizes prior theoretical information about the content of the dimensions in order to interpret them. I find the conventional two dimensions, economic and cultural, to be very highly correlated. Afinai section explores the thermostatic properties of mood.
Ideological self-identification in the United States is well measured for the period 1970 to the present. Many survey measures are available and they are posed with considerable frequency and ...regularity. It is thus a relatively straightforward methodological exercise to combine them into a single measure of the American public's latent disposition to identify as liberal or conservative. What is problematic about this state of affairs is that the availability of these good measures occurs after a number of important changes in the American political context, changes that, we argue, have affected how Americans conceive of ideological terms and how scholars think about self-identification in the modern electorate. This paper seeks to measure and explain ideological self-identification in the time before modern survey research. We undertake an historical analysis of scattered pieces of public opinion data before 1970, assembling the pieces to build a time series of self-identification from 1937 to 2006. We then begin attempts at explaining the now observable, and often dramatic, changes in this series.
Dynamic Representation Stimson, James A.; Mackuen, Michael B.; Erikson, Robert S.
The American political science review,
09/1995, Volume:
89, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
If public opinion changes and then public policy responds, this is dynamic representation. Public opinion is the global policy preference of the American electorate. Policy is a diverse set of acts ...of elected and unelected officials. Two mechanisms of policy responsiveness are (1) elections change the government's political composition, which is then reflected in new policy and (2) policymakers calculate future (mainly electoral) implications of current public views and act accordingly (rational anticipation). We develop multiple indicators of policy activity for the House, Senate, presidency, and Supreme Court, then model policy liberalism as a joint function of the two mechanisms. For each institution separately, and also in a global analysis of “government as a whole,” we find that policy responds dynamically to public opinion change. This responsiveness varies by institution, both in level and in mechanism, as would be expected from constitutional design.
The theory of issue evolution predicts that the dimensional space of party competition is simple. We contrast this prediction with the expectation that a complicated multi-party system, such as the ...one in France, produces a more complicated dimensional structure. To test this claim, we examine the longitudinal structure of the policy preferences that underlie public opinion in France. Using surveys of preferences as a basic data source, we are able to extract two latent dimensions that almost fully explain the reported preferences. Both dimensions are defined by the left–right structure of the French party system. Whereas one is the traditional socioeconomic domain, the other comprises a wide array of new cultural issues. The orthogonal solution, however, does not produce the expected socioeconomic and cultural dimensions. Thus we impose our prior belief in the socioeconomic and cultural content and rotate the two dimensions independently to maximize fit with the two prior dimensions. We show that the same two-dimensional structure is also present in cross-sectional data, and can be used to position parties in the two-dimensional space. Moreover, we find that the two dimensions are closely connected, despite their completely different content. The explanation, which arises from the theory of issue evolution, is that the meaning of left–right is dynamic as well as elastic and incorporates new issues as they arise.
In the study of longitudinal movements in public opinion it is usually the case that data are abundant, but irregular. Both cases (times) and variables are numerous, but it is never the case that all ...cases are available for any one variable. The dyad ratios algorithm was created to make dimensional analysis possible for this perverse data structure. The central logic of the dyad ratios algorithm is explained. Central focus is on the use of ratios as a starting point, the recursive estimation procedure, validity estimation by iterative procedure and the bootstrapping of standard errors. The ability of the algorithm to estimate a known longitudinal path is tested with artificial data. Then dyad ratios is compared to principal components analysis for a particular real data problem where both are possible. A final section makes a limited comparison between dyad ratios and item response theory.
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