Navigating Public Opinion Polls, Policy, and the Future of American Democracy

by Manza, Jeff; Cook, Fay Lomax; Page, Benjamin I.

• ISBN13: 9780195149333
• ISBN10: 0195149335
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-09-05
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Do politicians listen to the public? How often and when? Or are the views of the public manipulated or used strategically by political and economic elites? Navigating Public Opinion brings together leading scholars of American politics to assess and debate these questions. It describes how therelationship between opinion and policy has changed over time; how key political actors use public opinion to formulate domestic and foreign policy; and how new measurement techniques might improve our understanding of public opinion in contemporary polling and survey research. The distinguished contributors shed new light on several long-standing controversies over policy responsiveness to public opinion. Featuring a new analysis by Robert Erikson, Michael MacKuen, and James Stimson that builds from their pathbreaking work on how public mood moves policy in amacro-model of policymaking, the volume also includes several critiques of this model by Lawrence Jacobs and Robert Shapiro, another critique by G. William Domhoff, and a rejoinder by Erikson and his coauthors. Other highlights include discussions of how political elites, including state-levelpolicymakers, presidents, and makers of foreign policy, use (or shape) public opinion; and analyses of new methods for measuring public opinion such as survey-based experiments, probabilistic polling methods, non-survey-based measures of public opinion, and the potential and limitations of Internetpolls and surveys. Introductory and concluding essays provide useful background context and offer an authoritative summary of what is known about how public opinion influences public policy. A must-have for all students of American politics, public opinion, and polling, this state-of-the-art collection addresses issues that lie at the heart of democratic governance today.

Table of Contents

Contributors	p. xi
Navigating Public Opinion: An Introduction	p. 3
Does Policy Responsiveness Exist?
The Impact of Public Opinion on Public Policy: The State of the Debate	p. 17
Public Opinion and Policy: Causal Flow in a Macro System Model	p. 33
Politics and Policymaking in the Real World: Crafted Talk and the Loss of Democratic Responsiveness	p. 54
Panderers or Shirkers? Politicians and Public Opinion	p. 76
Public Opinion and Congressional Action on Labor Market Opportunities, 1942-2000	p. 86
Polls, Priming, and the Politics of Welfare Reform	p. 106
The Power Elite, Public Policy, and Public Opinion	p. 124
How Political Elites Use Public Opinion
Policy Elites Invoke Public Opinion: Polls, Policy Debates, and the Future of Social Security	p. 141
How State-Level Policy Managers "Read" Public Opinion	p. 171
Public Opinion, Foreign Policy, and Democracy: How Presidents Use Public Opinion	p. 184
How Policymakers Misperceive U.S. Public Opinion on Foreign Policy	p. 201
Measuring Public Opinion
The Authority and Limitations of Polls	p. 221
An Anatomy of Survey-Based Experiments	p. 232
Probabilistic Polling	p. 251
The Future of Polling: Relational Inference and the Development of Internet Survey Instruments	p. 272
The Sovereign Status of Survey Data	p. 290
Conclusion
The Value of Polls in Promoting Good Government and Democracy	p. 315
The Semi-Sovereign Public	p. 325
References	p. 345
Index	p. 373
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