Partisan Opinions

LETHAL INCOMPETENCE: VOTERS, OFFICIALS, AND SYSTEMS | Jonathan Bendor and John G. Bullock
ABSTRACT: The study of voter competence has made significant contributions to our understanding of politics, but at this point there are diminishing returns to the endeavor. There is little reason, in theory or in practice, to expect voter competence to improve dramatically enough to make much of a difference, but there is reason to think that officials’ competence can vary enough to make large differences. To understand variations in government performance, therefore, we would do better to focus on the abilities and performance of officials, not ordinary citizens.

TELEVISION “NEWS GRAZERS”: WHO THEY ARE AND WHAT THEY (DON’T) KNOW | Stephen Earl Bennett, Staci L. Rhine, and Richard S. Flickinger
ABSTRACT: Between 1998 and 2006, a new style of television news consumption was born: “news grazing.” With remote control devices in hand, “grazers” flip through TV news channels in order to find interesting news stories. Approximately three-fifths of the public graze, and this group tends to be younger than non-grazers. Grazers are less likely than the rest of the public to follow “hard” news about politics and economics, and, not surprisingly, they are even less knowledgeable about public affairs than most people are.

A ROAD NOT TAKEN: MASS BELIEF SYSTEMS RECONSIDERED | George F. Bishop
ABSTRACT: Critics of Converse’s agenda-setting 1964 essay underexplored the seemingly technical issue of measurement error. Down this road not taken lie serious questions about the evidence for both of Converse’s main theses. First, a thorough reexamination of the exact questions posed to a mass sample of the electorate and to an elite sample of congressional candidates suggests that the mass/elite difference in ideological constraint reported by Converse could be, in significant part, a measurement-error artifact caused by differences in question form. Furthermore, the vagueness and ambiguity of the questions not only calls into question the plausibility of Converse’s main thesis—lack of ideological constraint among the public—but of his subsidiary thesis: that, measured over time, members of the public had such unstable political opinions that they might best be considered “nonattitudes.”

A DIFFERENT KIND OF DEMOCRATIC COMPETENCE: CITIZENSHIP AND DEMOCRATIC COMMUNITY | Patrick J. Deneen
ABSTRACT: Social-scientific data, such as those found in Philip E. Converse’s 1964 essay, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” have led some to question whether basic assumptions about democratic legitimacy are unfounded. However, by another set of criteria, we have the “democracy” that was intended by the Framers—namely, a liberal representative system that avoids strong civic engagement by the citizenry. At its deepest level, the American system has been designed to ensure elite influence over the main ambitions of American policy: the expansion of public and private power. When social scientists accumulate findings of civic disengagement and ignorance, it is wrongly supposed to be an indictment of the citizenry; rather, those findings should be understood as the expected result of a certain set of commitments throughout American political history, of which civic apathy and ignorance are the desired outcomes.

DIFFERENT SITUATIONS, DIFFERENT RESPONSES: THREAT, PARTISANSHIP, RISK, AND DELIBERATION | George E. Marcus
ABSTRACT: The theory of affective intelligence dichotomizes challenging situations into threatening and risky ones. When people perceive a familiar threat, they tend to be dogmatic and partisan, since they are mobilizing decisive action based on habitual behaviors and nearly instinctual perceptions that have proved their worth in similar situations. When facing a novel risk, however, people tend to become more open-minded and deliberative, since old solutions do not apply. An experiment with students’ reactions to challenges to their opinions about a divisive political issue suggests that, indeed, democratic citizens display the different competencies that are demanded by these two different types of situation. The actual conduct of political campaigns, too, can be expected to reflect the differences between trying to guard against defections from one’s side by encouraging the appearance of routine partisan combat, and trying to promote defections from the other side by prompting anxiety, hence open-minded deliberation.

PARADOXES OF DEMOCRATIC ACCOUNTABILITY: POLARIZED PARTIES, HARD DECISIONS, AND NO DESPOT TO VETO | Michael H. Murakami
ABSTRACT: Parties are back, and many are cheering. Party polarization has voters seeing stark differences between Democrats and Republicans and demonstrating more ideological constraint than previous generations. But these signs of a more “responsible” electorate are an illusion, because the public is no more knowledgeable than ever about the type of “information” it needs if it is to exercise effective control over the public-policy outcomes it cares the most about. Indeed, polarization has produced a political environment where both voters and policy makers may be less likely to learn about the potential consequences of their governing choices. The result is that holding elected politicians to account for policies treated as divisive ends in themselves has become easier—but that holding them accountable for policies intended as means to the achievement of consensual ends (such as sociotropic ones) has become harder.

DO THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES? PARTISAN DISAGREEMENT AS A CHALLENGE TO DEMOCRATIC COMPETENCE | Robert Y. Shapiro and Yaeli Bloch-Elkon
ABSTRACT: The partisan and ideological polarization of American politics since the 1970s appears to have affected pubic opinion in striking ways. The American public has become increasingly partisan and ideological along liberal-conservative lines on a wide range of issues, including even foreign policy. This has raised questions about how “rational” the public is, in the broad sense of the public’s responsiveness to objective conditions. Widespread partisan disagreements over what those conditions are—i.e., disagreements about “the facts”—suggest that large proportions of the public may be perceiving the facts incorrectly. The facts in question are important enough that these partisan disagreements may translate into sub-optimal policy preferences and electoral decisions.

RATIONAL PUBLIC OPINION OR ITS MANUFACTURE? REPLY TO PAGE | George F. Bishop
ABSTRACT: Benjamin Page’s thoughtful critique of my book, The Illusion of Public Opinion, strives to reassure readers that all is well—despite the book’s extensive documentation of measurement-error artifacts in numerous public opinion surveys. Page’s own careful polling practices are not followed outside of elite academic survey centers. Moreover, even in such well-run surveys, the respondents are often ignorant of the issues being probed. The fact that nonrandom reasons of some sort must be determining on-the-spot survey responses may allow us to call the respondents “rational” in a loose sense. But the responses still don’t represent actual opinions about the specific policy issues being probed—let alone well-informed answers. Finally, while Page argues that measurement errors are most likely random, and should cancel out in the aggregate, the “miracle of aggregation” doesn’t occur when the form, wording, and context of questions varies from survey to survey. And even when wording and context are held constant, the respondents’ understanding of the same words can vary dramatically or subtly over time, due to new political events and their changing interpretation.

IN DEFENSE OF POLICY POLLING: REJOINDER TO BISHOP | Benjamin I. Page
ABSTRACT: Contrary to George Bishop’s claim, collective deliberation and cuetaking permit even poorly informed individuals to form opinions that can accurately reflect their values and interests in light of available information. Statistical aggregation of poll results can smooth out offsetting errors and uncertainties and reveal collective preferences that are real, stable, consistent, coherent, differentiated, and responsive to information: preferences that policy makers should pay attention to. Media polls tend to be more useful for this purpose than academic surveys that encourage “don’t know” responses and use information-based filters that bias estimates of collective preferences against lower-income citizens, minorities, and others who tend to be less well informed. Media polls frequently ask about specific policy issues relevant to policy makers. Even biased poll questions of certain kinds can provide useful information about collective policy preferences.

ABORTION ACTIVISM AND CIVIL DISCOURSE: REPLY TO SHIELDS | Robert B. Talisse and Steven Douglas Maloney
ABSTRACT: Jon Shields’s finding—that certain evangelical pro-life activist groups are more interested in deliberative discussions about abortion than are pro-choice activists—is wrong on methodological, normative, and philosophical grounds. He generalizes about pro-life civility from a small, trained sample group, and ignores possibly important variables that would explain pro-choicers’ incivility. Further, politeness is not necessarily a requirement of democratic deliberation—which entails not forcing one’s own beliefs on the public, as pro-lifers manifestly are trying to do, despite their calm demeanor. Conversely, some pro-choicers’ refusal to engage in debates is not a deliberative failure, as Shields suggests, as deliberation includes such things as campaigning and canvassing. Lastly, Shields, and the pro-lifers he has observed, use the weakest of the pro-choice arguments, instead of focusing on the best academic work in the field.

ABORTION AND DELIBERATION: REJOINDER TO TALISSE AND MALONEY | Jon A. Shields
ABSTRACT: Talisse and Maloney seem to think that professors, not ordinary citizens, are the key to a more deliberative democracy. Yet these professors fail to appreciate the reasonableness of the pro-life activists and thinkers they disagree with. For example, they falsely charge even the most deliberative groups with resurrecting an obsolete debate and framing conversations in a fallacious way. They further place an unreasonable justificatory burden on pro-life activists and hold them culpable for framing the debate around the ontology of the embryo (even though many prominent pro-choice thinkers prefer this frame). In drawing such a hard line between academics and activists, they also miss what has been an unavoidable partnership between academics and social movements in our imperfect deliberative republic.