Chapter 5: Public Opinion

I. The Framers of the Constitution did not try to create a

government that would do from day to day “what the
people want.” They created a government for the
purpose of achieving certain substantive goals.
A. One means of achieving these goals was popular
rule, as provided for by the right of the people to vote for
members of the House of Representatives. But other
means were provided as well: representative
government, federalism, the separation of powers, a Bill
of Rights, and an independent judiciary. These were all
intended to be checks on public opinion.
B. The Framers knew that in a nation as large as the
US, there would rarely be a “public opinion”: rather
there would be many “publics holding many opinions.
The Framers hoped that the struggle among these many
publics would protect liberty while at the same time
permitting the adoption of reasonable policies that
commanded the support of many factions.
II. It is not easy to know what the public thinks.
III. The more people are active in and knowledgeable about
politics, the more weight their opinion carries in
governmental circles.
A. Political activists also think differently about
politics.
B. The government attends more to the elite views
than to popular views, at least on many matters.
What is Public Opinion?
I. Even if people have heard of a given person or issue,
how a pollster words a question can dramatically affect
the answer he or she gets.
A. Many polls ask voters to think only about the
benefits of a program and not about the costs.
II. Opinions on public officials may not be stable.
III. Our specific attitudes about particular matters may be
much less important for the health of society than our
underlying political culture.
The Origins of Political Attitudes
I. There are real and important limits to the impact of
advertising. Those limits exist because we have learned,
independent of government and the market, some things
that help us make our own choices.
The Role of the Family
 I. The majority of young people identify with their parent’s
political party. This process begins fairly early in life. As
people grow older, they become more independent of
their parents, but there nevertheless remains a great deal
of continuity between youthful partisanship and adult
partisanship.
II. The ability of the family to inculcate a strong sense of
party identification has declined in recent years.
Accompanying this decline in partisanship has been a
sharp rise in the proportion of citizens describing
themselves independents.
A. Part of this change results from the fact that
young voters have always had a weaker sense of
partisanship than older ones.
III. Though we still tend to acquire some measure of
partisanship from our parents, the meaning of that
identification is far from clear.
A. So far the evidence suggests that children are
more independent of their parents in policy preferences
than in party identification. The correlation of children’s
attitudes with parental attitudes on issues involving civil
liberties and racial questions is much lower than the
correlation in their party identification.
B. This may be because issues change from one
generation to the next, because children are more
idealistic than their parents, or because most parents do
not communicate to their children clear, consistent
positions on a range of political issues.
Religion
I. One way in which the family forms and transmits
political beliefs is by its religious tradition. In general
Catholic families are somewhat more liberal on
economic issues than white Protestant ones, while
Jewish families are much more liberal on both economic
and social issues than families of either Catholics or
Protestants.
A. There are two theories as to why this should be
so. The first has to do with the social status of religious
groups in America. The second theory emphasizes the
content of the religious tradition more than the social
status of its adherents.
II. Religious differences make for political
differences.
 A. There are no significant differences in how
people holding differing views of the Bible feel about
economic issues, as opposed to social or foreign policy
issues.
B. Fundamentalists and nonfundamentalists have
about the same opinion on government job guarantees
and spending on government services. This suggests that
both social status and religious tradition help explain the
effect of religion on politics.
The Gender Gap
I. The gender gap is the difference in political views
between men and women.
II. Men have been increasingly republican since the mid-
1960s, while the voting behavior of women has
remained unchanged.
A. The biggest reason for this gap seems to involve
attitudes about the size of government, gun control,
spending programs aimed at the poor, and gay rights.
Men have always been more conservative than women
in their views on these social issues, but the late 1960s
and early 1970s men had changed their party loyalty to
match their policy preferences.
Schooling and Information
I. Attending college has a big impact on political attitudes,
usually making them more liberal. College students are
more liberal than the population generally, and students
at the most prestigious schools are the most liberal.
A. The longer students stay in college, the more
liberal they are.
B. Having gone to college increases the rate at
which people participate in politics.
II. One possibility for why this is has to do with the people
that colleges attract. Another is that college and
postgraduate schooling expose people to more
information about politics from all sources.
A. Their political beliefs may be shaped by their
experiences as much as what they learn in the classroom.
B. The level of political information one has is the
best single predictor of being liberal on some issues.
III. Another possibility is that college somehow teaches
liberalism.
A. The political disposition of professors is in part
the result of the kinds of people who become teachers,
but it is also the result of the nature of intellectual work.
 Intellectuals require freedom to explore new or
unpopular ideas and thus tend to work with words and
numbers to develop general abstract ideas.
Cleavages in Public Opinion
I. The way in which political opinions are formed helps
explain the cleavages that exist among these opinions
and why these cleavages do not follow any single
political principle but instead overlap and cross-cut in
bewildering complexity.
A. There are many crosscutting cleavages based on
race, ethnicity, religion, region, and education, in
addition to those created by income and occupation.
Social Class
I. Though different definitions of class produce slightly
different groupings of people, most definitions overlap
to such an extent that it does not matter too much which
we use.
II. The voting patterns of different social classes have
become somewhat more similar.
A. One reason for this pattern has to do with
schooling. At one time the income of people did not
depend so heavily as it does now on having educational
credentials
III. Many of the issues that now lead us to choose which
party to support and that determine whether we think of
ourselves as liberals or conservatives are noneconomic
issues.
Race and Ethnicity
I. There is some evidence that the differences between
black and white Americans may be narrowing.
Region
I. It is widely believed that region affects political attitudes
and in particular that southerners and northerners
disagree significantly on many policy questions.
A. Today the political views of white southerners
are less distinct from those of whites living in other parts
of the country.
Political Ideology
I. Not everyone agrees on what liberal and conservative
mean. These terms are said to display some degree of a
political ideology—a coherent and consistent set of
beliefs about who ought to rule, what principles rulers
ought to obey, and what policies leaders ought to pursue.
 A. Political scientists measure the extent to which
people have a political ideology in two ways: first,
seeing how frequently people use broad political
categories to describe their own views or justify their
preferences for various candidates and polices, and
second, by seeing to what extent the policy preferences
of a citizen are consistent over time or are based at any
one time on consistent principles.
B. The second method involves a simple
mathematical procedure: measuring how accurately one
can predict a person’s view on a subject at one time
based on his view on a subject at an earlier time, or
measuring how accurately one can predict a person’s
view on one issue based on their view on a different
issue.
Consistent Attitudes
I. Critics of the view that Americans are nonideological
have argued that people can have general, and strongly
felt, political predispositions even though they are not
able to use terms such as liberal correctly.
A. The inconsistency in the answers people give at
different times may mean only that the nature of the
problem and the wording of the question have changed
in ways not obvious to people analyzing the surveys.
II. People can have an ideology without using the words
liberal or conservative and without having beliefs that
line up neatly along the conventional party lines.
What do Liberalism and Conservatism Mean?
I. Just because most people are not consistent liberals or
consistent conservatives does not prove that these terms
are meaningless.
A. The meaning of these words has changed since
they first came into use in the early 19th century. At that
time a liberal was a person who favored personal and
economic liberty. A conservative was a person who
opposed the excesses of the French Revolution and its
emphasis on personal freedom and favored a restoration
of the power of the state, the church, and the aristocracy.
II. Beginning around the time of the New Deal, the
meaning of these terms began to change. Roosevelt used
the term liberal to refer to his political program—one
that called for an active national government that would
intervene in the economy, create social welfare
 programs, and help certain groups acquire greater
bargaining power.
A. Over time the opponents of an activist national
government began using the term conservative to
describe themselves. In general a conservative favored a
free market rather than a regulated one, states’ rights
over national supremacy, and a greater reliance on
individual choice in economic affairs.
Various Categories
I. We can imagine certain broad categories of opinion in
which different people subscribe. These categories are
found by analyzing the answers people give to questions
about political issues.
II. The first category involves questions about government
policy with regard to the economy.
A. We will describe as liberal those persons who
favor government efforts to ensure that everyone has a
job, to spend more money on medical and educational
programs, and to increase rates of taxation for well-to-do
persons.
B. The second involves questions about civil rights
and race relations. We will describe as liberal people
who favor strong federal action to desegregate schools,
to increase hiring opportunities for minorities, to provide
compensatory programs for minorities, and to enforce
civil rights laws strictly.
C. The third involves questions about public and
political conduct. We will describe as liberal those who
are tolerant of protest demonstrations, who favor
legalizing marijuana and in other ways wish to
“decriminalize” so-called victimless crimes, who
emphasize protecting the rights of the accused over
punishing criminals, and who see the solution to crime
as eliminating its causes rather than getting tougher with
offenders.
Analyzing Consistency
I. People usually need more than two labels to describe
their ideology.
1. Pure liberals. These people are liberal on both
economic policy and personal conduct. They want the
government to reduce economic inequality, regulate
business, tax the rich heavily, cure the economic causes
of crime, allow abortions, protect the rights of the
accused, and guarantee the broadest possible freedoms
 of speech and the press. Pure liberals are more likely to
be young, college-educated, and either Jewish or
nonreligious.
2. Pure conservatives. These people are
conservative on both economic and conduct issues. They
want the government to cut back on the welfare state,
allow the market to allocate goods and services, keep
taxes low, lock up criminals, and curb forms of conduct
they regard as antisocial. Pure conservatives are more
likely to be older, to have higher incomes, to be white,
and to live in the Midwest.
3. Libertarians. These people are conservative on
economic matters and liberal on social ones. The
common theme is that they want a small, weak
government—one that has little control over either the
economy or the personal lives of citizens. Libertarians
are more likely to be young, college-educated, and
white, to have higher incomes and no religion, and to
live in the West.
4. Populists. These people are liberal on economic
matters and conservative on social ones. They want a
government that will reduce economic inequality and
control business, but they also want it to regulate
personal conduct, lock up criminals, and permit school
prayer. Populists are more likely to be older, poorly
educated, low-income, religious, and female and to live
in the South or Midwest.
Political Elites
I. There is a group that can be classified as liberals or
conservatives in a pure sense, and it is made up of
people who are in the political elite.
A. Elite refers to people who have a
disproportionate amount of some valuable resource.
II. Activists are people who hold office, run for office,
work in campaigns or on newspapers, lead interest
groups and social movements, and speak out on public
issues.
A. People display differing degrees of activism.
B. The more a person is an activist, the more likely
it is that he or she will display ideological consistency on
the conventional liberal-conservative spectrum. The
reasons for this greater consistency seem to be
information and peers. In general, the better informed
people are about politics and the more interest they take
 in politics, the more likely they are to have consistently
liberal or conservative views. This higher level of
information and interest may lead them to find
relationships among issues that others don’t see and
learn from the media.
C. The more active you are in politics, the more
you will associate with people who agree with you on
some issues; and the more time you spend with those
people, the more your other views will shift to match
theirs.
III. On a large number of issues, the policy preferences of
average Republican and Democratic voters do differ
significantly from one another.
Is There a “New Class”?
I. Some speculate that political elites now represent a “new
class” in American politics. The “new class” consists of
people who posses certain advantages conferred not by
power, resources, and growth of business but by the
power, resources, and growth of government.
II. Politicians, bureaucrats, members of the media, interest
group leaders—these people and others like them have a
stake in the growth of government. Because of that, they
often have liberal views even though they also have high
incomes.
A. The emergence of the new class helps explain
why affluent people are not as consistently conservative
as they were in the 40s and 50s.
III. McAdams suggests that the middle class in the United
States has been split in two—one part he calls the
“traditional middle class” and the other he calls the “new
class.”
A. The traditional middle class consists of people
who often have gone to college but not graduate school
and who live in the suburbs, go to the church, are well
disposed toward business, have conservative views on
social issues, and usually vote Republican.
B. The liberal middle class is more likely to consist
of people who have a postgraduate education, live in or
near big cities, are critical of business, have liberal views
on social issues, and usually vote Democratic.
C. The strain within the middle class has been
particularly felt by the Democratic Party. The strain has
made it harder to hold together the coalition that once
made the party so strong.
Political Elites, Public Opinion, and Public Policy
I. Though the elites and the public see politics in very
different ways, and though there are often intense
antagonisms between the two groups, the elites influence
public opinion in at least two important ways.
A. Elites, especially those having access to the
media, raise and frame political issues. Elite views shape
mass views by influencing both what issues capture the
public’s attention and how those issues are debated and
decided.
B. Elites state the norms by which issues should be
settled. (A norm is a standard of right or proper
conduct.) By doing this they help determine the range of
acceptable and unacceptable policy options.
II. There are limits to how much influence elites have on
the public. Elites do not define economic problems. Elite
opinion may shape the policies, but it does not define the
problem.
A. Elite opinion has little influence on whether we
think there is a crime or drug problem. On the other
hand, elite opinion does define the problem as well as
the policy options with respect to most aspects of foreign
affairs.
III. It is wrong to assume that there is one elite, united in its
interests and opinions.

This chapter discusses the various complexities of public

political opinion—how it is formed, how it is defined,
and how it changes over time. Public opinion is usually
determined by conducting surveys, but this method can
sometimes be inaccurate, as the way people respond can
be influenced by how the questions are phrased and the
order in which they appear. The political inclinations of
one’s family can have a profound impact on individual
philosophy, as does region, socioeconomic level, gender,
race, religion, and education level. The most common
terms that people use to describe political ideology are
liberal and conservative. However, what exactly these
terms mean has changed over time, and their definitions
can sometimes be convoluted. It is a common
misconception that just because a person may be liberal
on some issues means that they will be liberal on all of
them. There are also variations on traditional liberal and
conservative values—such as libertarianism and
populism.