THE VIETNAM WAR AND THE PUBLIC

The Tonkin Gulf incident during the Vietnam War - when the Defense Department announced that North Vietnamese PT boats had engaged in an "unprovoked attack" on the U.S.S. Maddox and two days later on the C. Turner Joy - is used to illustrate how government officials can sometimes manipulate public opinion, how events and circumstances affect opinion, and how public opinion can have a strong impact on policymaking. A permissive consensus existed, in which people were willing to go along when their leaders told them that action was needed in order to resist communist aggression. Few questions were raised at the time of the incident, and Congress quickly passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, authorizing the president to take "all necessary measures" to repel any armed attack and to assist any ally in the region. Years later, the Pentagon Papers, a secret Defense Department study, was leaked to the press by defense analyst Daniel Elsberg, The report revealed that the Maddox had been helping South Vietnamese gunboats make raids on the North Vietnamese coast; the second attack apparently never happened, but instead was imagined by an inexperienced sonar operator. Similarly, public opinion about the Vietnam War was also linked to events and media coverage during the war. Support was initially high, but as the body counts rose, leading figures began questioning the success and conduct of the war, and public support decreased, leading to the gradual withdrawal of American forces from Vietnam. The Vietnam story illustrates how government officials can sometimes manipulate opinion, especially when it concerns matters in distant lands.

DEMOCRACY AND PUBLIC OPINION

Public opinion consists of the political attitudes and beliefs expressed by ordinary citizens. An important test of how well democracy is working is how closely government policy corresponds to public opinion; the democratic ideals of popular sovereignty and majority rule imply that government policy should respond to the wishes of its citizens.

Many leading thinkers have expressed strong doubts about the quality and stability of public opinion, and many of the Founders worried about "passions" of the public. Modern survey researchers have turned up evidence of public ignorance, lack of interest in politics, and reliance on group or party loyalties rather than judgments about issues. The authors of The Struggle for Democracy explain that most people do not have extensive knowledge about politics, and Americans as individuals do not have well-developed ideologies or highly stable policy preferences. On many issues of public policy, many American's appear to have no real views at all or nonattitudes. Possibly more disturbing is the fact that a study of a sample of officials concluded that two-thirds or more of government officials doubt that the public was adequately informed to provide sound guidance for government decisions.

This chapter looks at the ways by which we may measure public opinion. It examines techniques used to achieve accurate results through the use of scientific opinion polls. Most of the guesswork can now be eliminated by conducting an opinion poll or survey.

Early attempts to determine public opinion by guesswork or from the views of personal acquaintances is defective: the views of personal acquaintances, media voices, or rally audiences are often not representative of the whole public. Surveys taken during the presidential elections of 1936 and 1948 illustrate how our knowledge of polling techniques evolved out of past failures. Scientific polling techniques became the standard following Franklin Roosevelt's landslide election in 1936. An opinion poll or survey can be highly accurate if the sample of people interviewed is representative of the whole population. The representativeness is achieved best when the people being interviewed are chosen through random sampling, which ensures equal probability the selection of survey respondents will have the same characteristics as the whole population. Top academic and commercial polling firms try to overcome the problems of question wording, "closed-ended" and "forced-choice" questions that can undermine the validity of the survey research.

LEARNING POLITICAL BELIEFS AND ATTITUDES

Political socialization is the process by which individuals come to have certain core beliefs and political attitudes. The agents of socialization are the instruments by which beliefs and attitudes are communicated to individuals in society. People engage in political learning throughout the course of their lives. The family plays an important role in shaping children's core beliefs and general outlooks about the political world. Schools and popular culture are important agents that shape the developing political outlooks of children. College education also affected political socialization as adulthood is reached. People's political outlooks are shaped by major event or developments that affect the country during young adult years. Other socializing agents, such as jobs, news media, marriage, and retirement, influence people's attitudes and expressed political opinion throughout adulthood.

HOW PEOPLE DIFFER

The authors have described public opinion as a collective whole, but they also point to important distinctions among different sorts of people in different circumstances. Among the biggest differences are those between black and white Americans. African-Americans became Democrats in large proportions with the New Deal of the 1930s, and today are the most solidly Democratic of any group in the population. Other ethnic groups are not as distinctive in their opinions as African-Americans. People of Irish, Italian, Polish, and other Southern or Eastern European ancestry became strong Democrats as part of the New Deal coalition, but by the 1980s these distinctions had faded as they achieved economic success. Hispanics or Latinos are the fastest-growing ethnic group in America, but they are also one of the least politically active groups in the United States.

Other factors are also significant. Ethnic differences are often interwoven with differences in religious faith and values, and there are still substantial regional differences. Regional policy preferences influence party identification. Policy preferences have undercut Southern whites' traditionally strong identification with the Democratic party. Urban, rural, and suburban residents also tend to differ from one another. Compared to the rest of the world, the United States has had little political conflict among people of different income or occupational groupings. Although income and occupation have always distinguished Democratic supporters from Republican supporters, the differences appear to be narrowing. Educational level is the strongest single predictor of participation in politics. The highly educated know more about politics, what they want, and how to go about getting it. Moreover, some policy preferences are related to education - those with more education show more support for civil rights, civil liberties, and individual freedom. Gender still is a factor. Today, women vote in approximately the same proportions as men, but a substantial office-holding gap still remains between men and women. The young and old differ on certain matters that touch their particular interests, such as the draft or the drinking age. Young people are often more attuned to the particular times in which they are growing up, illustrated by civil rights during the 1960s and environmental issues during the 1980s and 1990s. Social change often occurs by generational replacement - old ideas die off with old people.

ARE THE PEOPLE FIT TO RULE?

Many observers of American politics have had little confidence in the abilities of the average American to understand vital public issues or to rationally engage in public affairs. If, as they fear, ordinary citizens are uninformed, easily led astray and tend to irrationally change their political attitudes, we can not presume public opinion can or ought to play a central role in deciding what the government should do. An examination of the opinions of ordinary citizens and how they change in response to events and new information will demonstrate that the concerns associated with an uninformed and irrational public have been exaggerated.

WHAT PEOPLE KNOW ABOUT POITICS

Polling over several decades has shown that most ordinary Americans do not know or care a lot about politics. We have not been over concerned with this fact because most people know as much as they need to know in order to be good citizens. Clearly there are consequences for the lack of political knowledge. The implications are great. The authors advocate that individuals should take the personal responsibility to be good citizens; however, they do not expect the average American to have an elaborately worked out political ideology. Such a coherent system of interlocking attitudes and beliefs about politics, the economy and the role of government is not what the majority of individuals possess. Most people's opinions are only loosely connected to each other and vary from one issue to another. Not surprisingly, most individuals' expressed opinions on issues tend to be unstable. Uncertainty and lack of information likely plays a part. This does not means opinions of the public, taken as a whole, are unreal, unstable or irrelevant. The collective public opinion expressed as averages, percentages, or other summaries are actually very stable over time. Studies indicate that Americans' collective policy preferences react rather rationally to events, to changing circumstances, and to new information.

CONTENT OF COLLECTIVE PUBLIC OPINION

The public's general confidence, or trust in government institutions, tends to react to how particular institutions, or the government generally, are performing. Political efficacy refers to the public's feelings about whether the government pays any attention to ordinary people, and to whether involvement such as voting has any effect. Citizens' sense of efficacy has dropped noticeably; these feelings of anger, alienation, and mistrust are closely related to many people's judgments that Congress, the presidency, and the other institutions of government have not been performing well.

Another important aspect of public opinion involves evaluations of government's performance, including citizens' judgments of how the government is doing. A president's approval rating is a crucial indicator of presidential popularity. A president's popularity has important political consequences: it affects his influence on Congress and his ability to persuade the public, and it is a good predictor of whether or not he will win reelection and of whether his party will win or lose congressional seats. Trends in presidential popularity tend to fluctuate more than party loyalties or policy preferences. The authors note that the public's evaluation of the president depends on how well things are going. Evaluations of Congress have not been surveyed as regularly as those of the president, but it appears that Congress has often been highly unpopular.

Party identification - the sense of belonging to a political party - is still an important factor. Most people identify with a political party, despite the decline in the proportion of people who identify with either of the two major parties. Opinions and party loyalties differ according to race and ethnicity, religion, region, urban or rural residence, social class, educational level, gender, and age. Party balance has important effects on who rules in Washington, and especially on which party controls Congress. One recent political phenomenon is a decline in the proportion of people who identify with either of the two major parties. There has been a rise in the number of independents and leaners from approximately one-in-five Americans in the mid-1970s to one-in-three today.

Americans' basic beliefs and values are more fundamental than opinions about specific policies; there is often a high degree of consensus (agreement) about such matters. Americans show strong support for economic liberty, such as private ownership of property, and overwhelming rejection of communism or socialism. The public also supports equality of opportunity but not equality of results. While there is little public support for substantial redistribution of wealth or income, public opinion also does not support unrestrained private enterprise. The ideas of equal opportunity, government regulation of business, and safety nets can come into conflict with the ideas of economic liberty and capitalism. Questions of how to resolve these conflicts form one of the main sources of political disagreement in America, and make up a big part of the difference between liberalism and conservatism.

IS THE GOVERNMENT RESPONSIVE TO PUBLIC OPINION?

One goal of this section of the text is to ask how close is the relationship between what American citizens want (the collective public opinion in the whole nation) and what the U.S. government actually does. The authors relate that public opinion in the United States has meaningful effects upon what governments do at all levels, but the government's responsiveness to public opinion is not perfect. One scholar found that U.S. government policy corresponded with what opinion surveys said the public wanted about two-thirds of the time, and the same two-thirds correspondence has appeared when other scholars investigated how changes in public opinion relate to changes in federal, state, and local policy.

Despite the above, the chapter also discusses reasons for being skeptical that public opinion is the direct cause of government policies. The authors note that correlation does not equal causation, and that other factors may be at work. These include the "spurious" effect of third forces that act similarly on public opinion and government officials, such as when the media cover a certain subject, influencing both politicians and the public. Also, government itself can shape public opinion through information campaigns and public relations by government officials, and even manipulate it in some instances such as the Tonkin Gulf incident. While probably rare, these may be most common in foreign affairs, where the government sometimes can control what information is made available.

Copyright © 1995-2008, Pearson Education, Inc., publishing as Pearson Longman Legal and Privacy Terms