Private Polls and Presidential Policymaking: Reagan as a Facilitator of Change

Did the Reagan administration disregard majority will when craftingits policy initiatives? Did it cater to a narrow partisan constituencyinstead? The answers to these questions will help with an assessmentof Jacobs and Shapiro’s (2000b) hypothesis that presidentssince the late 1970s have used private White House survey researchas a tool to manipulate or assuage centrist public opinion whilemeeting the policy demands of their partisan core supporters,resulting in a decline in presidential responsiveness to majoritywill. Using the actual surveys administered by Richard Wirthlin(Reagan’s pollster) between 1981 and 1983, this articlewill demonstrate the level of consistency between majority opinionon 129 policy issues and Reagan’s behavior through 1984,and it will explore the conditions under which the presidentwas more or less likely to respond to public preferences. Thedata reveal that the Reagan administration was constrained bythe popular will in predicable ways: if the policy issues wereabout domestic concerns, highly popular, and visible in themedia, then the administration acted in line with public preferencesmore than 70 percent of the time. Further, Reagan and his adviserswere selective in responding to party activists: they championedissues drawn from their conservative ideological agenda thatfit with the current tide in public opinion, while sidesteppingother issues dear to party activists that encountered strongmajority resistance. While I do not contest Jacobs and Shapiro’s(2000b) important observation that presidents often use surveyresearch to "craft talk" in an attempt to channel the publicdebate, the evidence here highlights how the president nonethelessremains constrained by the popular will, at least on domesticissues.     

Does majoritarian approval matter in selecting a social choice rule? An exploratory panel study

This study is an attempt to empirically detect the public opinion concerning majoritarian approval axiom. A social choice rule respects majoritarian approval iff it chooses only those alternatives which are regarded by a majority of “voters” to be among the “better half” of the candidates available. We focus on three social choice rules, the Majoritarian Compromise, Borda’s Rule and Condorcet’s Method, among which the Majoritarian Compromise is the only social choice rule always respecting majoritarian approval. We confronted each of our 288 subjects with four hypothetical preference profiles of a hypothetical electorate over some abstract set of four alternatives. At each hypothetical preference profile, two representing the preferences of five and two other of seven voters, the subject was asked to indicate, from an impartial viewpoint, which of the four alternatives should be chosen whose preference profile was presented, which if that is unavailable, then which if both of the above are unavailable, and finally which alternative should be avoided especially. In each of these profiles there is a Majoritarian Compromise-winner, a Borda-winner and a Condorcet-winner, and the Majoritarian Compromise-winner is always distinct from both the Borda-winner and the Condorcet-winner, while the Borda- and Condorcet-winners sometimes coincide. If the Borda- and Condorcet-winners coincide then there are two dummy candidates, otherwise only one, and dummies coincide with neither of the Majoritarian Compromise-, Borda- or Condorcet-winner. We presented our subjects with various types of hypothetical preference profiles, some where Borda respecting majoritarian approval, some where it failed to do so, then again for Condorcet, some profiles it respected majoritarian approval and some where it did not. The main thing we wanted to see was whether subjects’ support for Borda and Condorcet was higher when this social choice rule respected majoritarian approval than it did not. Our unambiguous overall empirical finding is that our subjects’ support for Borda and Condorcet was significantly stronger as they respect majoritarian approval.     

Lumpers and Splitters: The Public Opinion Information that Politicians Collect and Use

Are the decisions of American policymakers informed by generaltrends in the public’s ideology or by the public’spolicy-specific preferences? In this article we discuss twoexplanations for the types of public opinion information thatpoliticians collect and use. Using a unique data set of privatepolls from the White House of Richard Nixon, we find that whenopinion data on specific policies were available, the presidentrelied on them and not on general ideology data. On less importantissues, however, we find that the president often chose notto collect policy-specific data and instead relied on generalideology data. The differential collection and use of informationby policymakers reflect varying strategic calculations. Theyalso have profound implications for representative democracyand the demands placed on citizens and governors.     

Public Opinion on Foreign Policy: The Multilateral Public that Perceives Itself as Unilateral

Americans have a strong preference for multilateral foreignpolicies over unilateral foreign policies. But do Americansknow their own preferences? Data from a national survey showwide misperceptions of public opinion on foreign policy. WhileAmericans strongly prefer multilateral policies, they overestimatepublic support for unilateral policies. For example, while only23 percent of respondents agreed that the more important lessonof September 11 is that the United States should work aloneto fight terrorism rather than work with other countries, respondentsestimated that almost 50 percent of Americans endorsed thisview. Moreover, misperceptions of public opinion were relatedto subsequent judgments of specific policies. For example, respondentswho incorrectly perceived the unilateral view as the majorityview were 1.84 times more likely to support a presidential decisionto invade Iraq without the approval of the United Nations (UN)Security Council than respondents who correctly perceived theunilateral view as the minority view. Misperceptions of publicopinion were also associated with the belief that the currentforeign policy reflects the opinions of the American people.This belief in the legitimacy of the foreign policy was as stronga predictor of support for specific unilateral policies as respondents’attitudes.     

Criticality in games with multiple levels of approval

In this article, criticality within a voting game is rigorously defined and examined. Criticality forms the basis of the traditional voting power measures frequently employed to analyse voting games; therefore understanding criticality is a pre-requisite to understanding any such analysis. The concept of criticality is extended to encompass games in which players are allowed to express multiple levels of approval. This seemingly innocuous extension raises some important questions, forcing us to re-evaluate exactly what it means to be critical. These issues have been largely side-stepped by the main body of research as they focus almost exclusively on ‘yes/no’ voting games, the so called single level approval voting games. The generalisation to multilevel approval voting games is much more than just a theoretical extension, as any single level approval game in which a player can abstain is in effect a multilevel approval voting game.     

Economic class and popular support for franklin roosevelt in war and peace.

History has judged FDR as one of America's greatest leaders in part because he maintained the public's confidence in seeing the nation through the travails of the Depression and World War II. During this era, the two most widely employed explanatory variables in contemporary presidential popularity scholarship-the economy and war-assumed their most extreme values of the twentieth century. Hence, not only is understanding Roosevelt's public support historically important, but it represents a valuable case for filling in our understanding of the opinion dynamics of presidential support more generally. Yet, surprisingly, Roosevelt's approval ratings have attracted little systematic scrutiny. Compiling time-series data from 1937 to 1943, partially disaggregated by economic class, we investigate FDR's popular support among different classes during both national crises. We find that Roosevelt's peacetime support divided along class lines, while during the war class divisions blurred. Roosevelt's support was indeed conditioned by external events, refracted through the interests of different societal groups. We conclude that public support for modern presidents should be similarly studied as the sum of opinions among heterogeneous constituencies.     

Robert M. Teeter, 1939-2004

Robert M. "Bob" Teeter—political pollster, key strategistin the campaigns of every Republican president from 1968 to1992, co-director with Peter Hart of the Wall Street Journal/NBCPoll, board member and consultant to major corporations—diedof cancer at his home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on June 13. Hewas 65. "Teeter’s work with Hart evoked respect on both sidesof the political aisle," said Tim Russert, NBC News’sWashington bureau chief and host of Meet the Press. "You could always take Bob Teeter’s     

Of Polls, Mountains: U.S. Journalists and Their Use of Election Surveys

Polls are a prominent feature of U.S. election news coverage.Although polls are used to explain voter opinion, they are employedmostly to fuel horse-race coverage and to craft images consistentwith the candidates’ positions in the race. Moreover,U.S. journalists sometimes misinterpret polls by slighting thepossibility that changes in candidate preference are the resultof survey error rather than real change. On balance, U.S. journalists’dependence on polls adversely affects the quality of Americanelection coverage.     

THE IMPACT OF TELEVISED SPEECHES AND FOREIGN TRAVEL ON PRESIDENTIAL APPROVAL

Considerable attention has been devoted in recent years to theuse of political drama by the president, with the most discretionaryforms of drama—speeches and foreign travel—receivingmuch scrutiny. In fact, there has arisen a conventional wisdomwhich asserts that televised speeches and foreign travel bythe president (1) have increased over time, (2) exert a uniformlypositive impact on public evaluations of the president's performance,and (3) can therefore be used as a strategy for influencingthe president's approval ratings, a vital resource for the modernpresident. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate this conventionalwisdom and thus assess the value of televised speeches and foreigntravel as influences on presidential approval. The paper firstdefines political drama and casts the conventional wisdom inthe form of three propositions. It next develops a researchstrategy for evaluating these propositions in an appropriatemanner. Finally, the paper tests the propositions. The resultscast considerable doubt on the conventional wisdom and leadto the conclusion that the use of political drama is not anall-purpose strategy guaranteed to halt declines or replenishsizable losses of presidential approval.     

The Polls-Trends: Arab and Muslim Americans and Islam in the aftermath of 9/11

The terrorist attacks against the United States on September11, 2001, fueled widespread concern and speculation about mountingIslamophobic sentiment among Americans in response to the events.To monitor developments in opinions about Muslims and Arabs(both living in the United States and abroad) and attitudestoward the Islamic faith, survey organizations began to assessmore regularly Americans’ attitudes on these topics. Ianalyze developments in public sentiment about Arab and MuslimAmericans and Islam in the age of the war on terror using availablepublic opinion data. The data analyses in this study suggestthat Americans possess lingering resentment and reservationsabout Arab and Muslim Americans. The evidence also reveals lowlevels of awareness about basic elements of Islam but growinganxiety about Islam’s (especially Islamic fundamentalism’s)compatibility with Western values of tolerance, acceptance,and civility. Some of the sharpest movement in opinion dynamicswe observe is in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks,but opinion levels stabilize shortly thereafter. Monitoringthese developments as the war on terror continues is crucial.     

Invoking Public Opinion: Policy Elites and Social Security

Do policy elites invoke public opinion? When they do, are theirclaims based on evidence from public opinion surveys? To learnabout the claims that policy elites make, we examined statementsthe president and members of Congress, experts, and interestgroup leaders in congressional hearings made about Social Security.To learn about opinion data on Social Security, we conducteda Lexis-Nexis search of the archives of the Roper Center forPublic Opinion Research. Our analyses show that policy elitesdiscussing Social Security did invoke public opinion. Contraryto our expectations, however, few of the elite invocations ofpublic opinion cited specific surveys or concrete facts aboutthe distribution of opinion. Although claims directly contradictingsurvey evidence were relatively rare, only with the rather fewspecific claims by congressional elites did we find much clear-cutsupport in the available polling data. Relatively seldom couldwe find clear-cut support for the elites' general claims. Moreover,some of the most frequent claims about public opinion—couldhave been contested but seldom were. The highly visible andwell-polled case of Social Security suggests that specific,data-based elite invocations of public opinion may be even lesscommon on other, lower-visibility and less-polled issues. Italso suggests that survey research professionals might do wellto intensify their scrutiny of public discourse about publicopinion and to increase their efforts to bring scientific expertiseto bear upon such discourse.     

Privacy in the Information Age

In recent years, surveillance has become an increasingly salientpolitical issue in the United States. In this article we presentdata on public opinion about privacy invasions and surveillancetechniques since 1990. Generally speaking, the polls show thatconcern about threats to personal privacy has been growing inrecent years. Although the public was temporarily willing toexpand the government’s investigative powers in the aftermathof the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, support for mostforms of surveillance has declined.     

Voters and Values in the 2004 Election

A poorly devised exit poll question undermined meaningful analysisof voters’ concerns in the 2004 presidential election.Twenty-two percent of voters picked "moral values" from a listof "issues" describing what mattered most in their vote, morethan selected any other item. Various commentators have misinterpretedthis single data point to conclude that moral values are anascendant political issue and to credit conservative Christiangroups with turning George W. Bush’s popular vote defeatin 2000 into his three million–vote margin of victoryin 2004. We suggest, rather, that while morals and values arecritical in informing political judgments, they represent personalcharacteristics and ill-defined policy preferences far morethan any discrete political issue. First by conflating moralsand values and then by further conflating characteristics andissues, the exit poll’s "issues" list distorted our understandingof the 2004 election. In this article, we examine the flawsin the 2004 National Election Pool exit poll’s "most importantissue" question and explore the presumed rising electoral importanceof moral values and the conservative Christians who overwhelminglyselected this item. Using national exit poll data from 1980through 2004 and other national surveys, we find that the moralvalues item on the issues list cannot properly be viewed asa discrete issue or set of closely related issues; that itsimportance to voters has not grown over time; and that whencontrolled for other variables, it ranks low on the issues listin predicting 2004 vote choices. The aggregated exit poll dataalso show that the voting behavior of conservative Christiansis relatively stable over time, and these voters were not primarilyresponsible for Bush’s improvement in 2004 over 2000.     

Social Desirability Effects and Support for a Female American President

Public opinion polls show consistently that a substantial portionof the American public would vote for a qualified female presidentialcandidate. Because of the controversial nature of such questions,however, the responses may suffer from social desirability effects.In other words, respondents may be purposely giving false answersas not to violate societal norms. Using an unobtrusive measurecalled the "list experiment," we find that public opinion pollsare indeed exaggerating support for a female president. Roughly26 percent of the public is "angry or upset" about the prospectof a female president. Moreover, this level of dissatisfactionis constant across several demographic groups. Received for publication June 5, 2006. Revision received September 11, 2006. Accepted for publication October 25, 2006.     

The International Economy and Presidential Approval

There is widespread consensus that the state of the economymatters for presidents' standing in public opinion. To thispoint, however, the economy that has been taken to influencepresidential approval has been exclusively domestic. We showthat the domestic economy continued to matter in the 1990s,but so too did America's international economic performance,as measured by the national trade balance and inflation in theprice of imported goods. We further show that not all tradingpartners are equal in their implications for the president'spublic standing. Disadvantageous trade relations with Canadahave no effect on the president's approval ratings, while similarrelations with Japan depress them significantly. We explainthis difference by patterns of media coverage, showing thatthe volume of media coverage of trade relations with the twocountries has contrasting effects on presidential approval ratings.     

Political Polling and the New Media Culture: A Case of More Being Less

Changes in journalism—including newsroom cutbacks, anemphasis on repackaging secondhand material, and the demandsof 24-hour news—have expanded the reliance on polls asnews, including polls of a sort once considered not reliablefor publication, and led to a more superficial understandingof the 2004 presidential race. The proliferation of outletsoffering news, which has resulted in greater competition foraudience, has also intensified the motivation of using pollsin part for their marketing value rather than purely their probativejournalistic value. The more "synthetic" style of contemporaryjournalism has increased the tendency to allow polls to createa context for journalists to explain and organize other news—becomingthe lens through which reporters see and order a more interpretativenews environment. A greater dependence on horse race trackingpolls by the media has reinforced these tendencies and furtherthinned the public’s understanding toward who won andaway from why. Growing audience skepticism and political polarizationhave created an environment of distrust about the methodologyand integrity of polling. All of these factors, in turn, arefrustrating the efforts of academic and commercial pollstersto maintain standards and deepen understanding among journalistsabout public opinion research and how to use it as journalism.     

Military Triumph, Racial Transcendence, and Colin Powell

A "black kid of no early promise," Colin Powell became the youngestgeneral in the U.S. Army, and then in short order national securityadvisor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the nation’ssecretary of state. What does this extraordinary story revealabout contemporary American political life? Analyzing surveyssupplied by the National Election Study and the National BlackElection Study, we first establish that Powell’s rapidrise to prominence is matched by his remarkable popularity amongthe American public. Next, we develop and test two possibleexplanations for Powell’s popularity. One supposes thatthe secret to Powell’s high standing with the public liesin his association with success on the battlefield: Powell asthe victorious general. The other explanation invokes racialprogress, the disappearance of racism among whites, and thedecline of identity politics among blacks: Powell as raciallytranscendent. In the final section of the article, informedby our results, we offer some speculations about American politicstoday—about the political implications of military accomplishmentand about the multiplicity of conditions that are required forAmericans to "see through" race.     

WHY THEY LIKED IKE: Tradition, Crisis, and Heroic Leadership

Much is known about Dwight Eisenhower's accomplishments as wartime general and postwar president; however, little is known about the reasons for his extraordinary popularity. Drawing from opinion polls, popular media, and related sources this article shows how Eisenhower's achievements and public conduct resonated with the concerns and values of his generation. "Symbolic leadership" theory and the "action theory" of heroic leadership frame this twofold articulation of Eisenhower's midcentury image, but we place it in a broader perspective centered on tradition, crisis, and generational change. We thus explain not only why Eisenhower's reputation was so strong during the postwar years but also why it declined so sharply after his death, even while other American leaders' reputations remained intact.     

American trade unions and public approval: Can unions please all of the people all of the time?

Public opinion about labor unions has long been viewed as an important determinant of industrial relations outcomes. Yet, analyses of changes in union popularity over time have been largely qualitative and have focused on the impact of short-term idiosyncratic events. This paper provides a quantitative analysis of the determinants of American public approval of unions from 1936 to 1991. Hypotheses relating to the union wage advantage, strike activity, the national unemployment rate, and World War II, receive the strongest support. The implications of these results for organized labor and future research on attitudes toward unions are discussed.     

Using a 'domains' approach to build community empowerment

This paper provides two case study examples of how communityempowerment can be better conceptualized, planned and appliedwithin a programme context by using a ‘domains’approach. What is new about this approach is that it does notstart with a blank slate onto which participants inscribe theirown problems or needs but provides a predetermined focus througheach of nine ‘empowerment domains’: Improves participation;Develops local leadership; Increases problem assessment capacities;Enhances the ability to ‘ask why’; Builds empoweringorganizational structures; Improves resource mobilization; Strengthenslinks to other organizations and people; Creates an equitablerelationship with outside agents; and Increases control overprogramme management. The importance to community developmentpractice is that the approach provides a more systematic meansfor community empowerment in a programme context.