This is my short response paper on Page and Shapiro (1992) and some related readings. I wrote this memo as a graduate student, so don't rely on this note in lieu of reading the papers.
In democratic theory, the connection between the policy preferences of citizens and what their governments do is important. Some influential studies point out that people do not have consistent or real policy preferences; their policy preferences do not correspond to their values or their own interests.
On the other hand, in this book, Page and Shapiro (1992) argue that the public’s collective policy preferences are stable, consistent, and coherent. They provide three factors to explain why measured opinions of many individuals are shaky, while collective opinions are stable. First, there are random measurement errors in large numbers of respondents’ survey responses. Since they cancel out across the responses, aggregate opinions can provide more accurate and stable information about the public. Second, individuals often change their opinions, and the opinion changes occur in offsetting directions. Third, collective deliberation and trusted cue givers enable people to have reasonable policy preferences.
Though the three factors are reasonable explanations to the paradox that collective opinion is stable while the measured individual opinions are unstable, there might be another explanation to the paradox: people’s interests on different issues are different in terms of the intensity. Some people might not be interested in some issues at all, while other might have intense interests and pay much attention on the same issues. When examining each individual’s policy preferences over time, policy preferences on some issues that the individual is not interested in might seem to be inconsistent and unstable. However, since people have different issues that they put much emphasis on, when we aggregate the individuals’ policy preferences on different issues, they could be consistent and stable. In other words, aggregate policy preferences could be consistent and stable not because of random measurement error, but because of people’s different intensities of interests on different issues [1].
The authors also discuss the role of available information for the public to have reasonable opinion and thus control government. Page and Shapiro (1992) point out that lack of available information may permit government non-responsiveness to public opinion. When public information, salience, and attention are low, it is easy for politicians to take unpopular policies. For these reasons, the authors emphasize that the level of information may be an important determinant of how well the public can control government.v
More importantly, Page and Shapiro (1992) contend that elites sometimes mislead the public or manipulate its policy preferences, which is a crucial matter for democratic theory. However, the authors discuss little how specifically politicians are misleading or even manipulating the public’s policy preferences. When considering elites can influence the public opinion (Bullock 2011; Broockman and Butler 2015) and the public consider politicians trusted cue givers, I argue that there are two possible ways. First, when politicians take inconsistent positions on the same issue, it gives an ambiguous or even misleading information about their own policy positions to the public. More specifically, there are three logics behind this. By being exposed to conflicting positions taken by a politician, people may be less confident in their expectations about the politicians’ true policy positions on the issue. Second, people may believe that the politicians true policy position on the issue lies between the two inconsistent positions. Third, people might have general optimism. When confronted with an inconsistent politician, optimistic people assume that the politician is closer to themselves and underestimate the contrary position from their own. All the three cases make it difficult for people to have accurate information about politicians’ policy positions, and thus they also have difficulty having effective cues from politicians.
Secondly, politicians might remain silent on some issues so that the public have difficulty getting access to information. Politicians might change agenda to avoid unpopular policy discussions. Moreover, they might choose to tailor some information considering audience’s policy positions. Since manipulating public opinion is an important matter in democracy, it is worth examining in depth how politicians mislead the public or manipulate their opinion.
Though there is some room for further discussion, this book provides a very different interpretation of public opinion in the literature. Based on the findings, the authors also provide a different normative conclusion about the public and the success of majoritarian democracy. According to the authors and the findings of this book, Americans have reason to be more optimistic about the success of majoritarian democracy than some critics think. v
[1] In this paper, the authors distinguish a moderator and a mediator. A moderator variable affects the direction and/or the strength of the treatment effect, while a mediator is a mechanism explaining how the treatment affects the outcome.
Discussion Questions
1. How do politicians mislead the public or manipulate public opinion? Why do politicians manipulate public opinion?
2. Under what conditions do politicians follow public opinion and do not? (What are the conditions for politicians’ non-responsiveness to public opinion other than the lack of available information?)
References
Broockman, D.E. and Butler, D.M., 2017. The Causal Effects of Elite Position‐Taking on Voter Attitudes: Field Experiments with Elite Communication. American Journal of Political Science, 61(1), pp.208-221.
Bullock, J.G., 2011. Elite influence on public opinion in an informed electorate. American Political Science Review, 105(3), pp.496-515.
Shapiro, R.Y. and Page, B., 1992. The rational public: fifty years of trends in Americans' policy preferences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
