Changes in Americans' Policy Preferences, 1935-1979

Abstract

Using responses to 3,315 survey questions asked of national samples, we examine how policy preferences of Americans have changed over the last 45 years. The data indicate that there has been considerable stability in public opinion: responses to half the 613 repeated policy items show no significant change at all; approximately half the detectable changes were less than 10 percentage points; and rarely did preferences fluctuate significantly back and forth within a short time period. Foreign policy changes were no larger or more frequent than domestic, but they did tend to occur more abruptly. When opinion shifts occurred, they were not random or capricious; they were usually related to important changes in citizens' social and economic environments. Rapid shifts generally coincided with major events in international affairs or the economy. Benjamin I. Page is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and a Senior Study Director at the National Opinion Research Center. Robert Y. Shapiro is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of Chicago and an Associate Study Director at NORC. The authors are grateful for research support from the National Science Foundation, Grant #SES-7912969 AOI, and wish especially to thank Tom Smith, Patrick Bova, Michael Galati, and John Gillroy for their advice and help. Eric Schmaler, Kathleen Bawn, and Leah Knowlton provided capable assistance. The data were originally collected by the National Opinion Research Center and the American Institute of Public Opinion, or were made available through the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research; the responsibility for analysis and interpretation is our own. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1980 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Association for Public Opinion Research, December 5, 1980, Chicago, Illinois. Public Opinion Quarterly Vol. 46 24-42 ? 1982 by The Trustees of Columbia University Published by ElIeviei North-Holland, Inc. 0033-362X/82/0046-24/$2.50 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.112 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 04:26:41 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms AMERICANS' POLICY PREFERENCES, 1935-1979 25 In the literature of public opinion, some scholars have maintained that opinions are highly labile, especially concerning foreign policy matters (Almond, 1950; but cf. Caspary, 1970). Such a view seems consistent with the notion that the average person is uninterested in politics, unaware of what is going on, and subject to influence by a host of arbitrary forces. Others have suggested that although the opinions of individuals may be volatile (Converse, 1964), the aggregate distributions of preferences are generally quite stable and change slowly (Key, 1961; Erikson and Luttbeg, 1973; Monroe, 1975; Erikson et al., 1980). Generalization has been hampered, however, by reliance on fragmentary or unsatisfactory data. Journalistic accounts have often stressed the instability of public opinion while reporting sudden jumps in the president's popularity rating or wild fluctuations in preelection polls.2 But these data do not gauge changes in polity preferences; the stimuli are not fixed policy alternatives but rather ever-changing politicians about whose latest words and actions new information is constantly available. When policy preferences are actually discussed, alleged fluctuations often represent only sampling error, or are artifacts of variations in question wording, sample design, or the research procedures followed by different polling organizations (see Lipset, 1976). The comparison of responses to even slightly different questions is hazardous; yet scholars have not generally had access to any comprehensive collection of responses to identical policy preference questions, asked repeatedly over time by the same survey organizations (see Cantril, 1951; Hastings and Southwick, 1975; Smith, 1980; Miller et al., 1980, for helpful but limited collections).