Do Political Leaders Understand Public Opinion Better than Backbenchers?

An experimental 3×3 factorial design was used to test the ability of exemplars to prime public opinion on an issue that was controversial, the issue of a prayer in school amendment. The experiment focused on changes in perception of current public opinion and future public opinion as well as changes in personal opinion. Perception of public opinion among Alabamans was affected by a disproportionate distribution of exemplars as was perception of future public opinion nationally. Actual opinion also varied positively with exposure to different exemplar distributions.

How journalists perceive public opinion is important in democracies. These perceptions help journalists to construct meaningful stories and might influence news content. However, little is known about how accurate journalists’ perceptions of public opinion actually are. Using a survey with Belgian (Flemish) political journalists, we analyze their perceptions of public opinion on concrete policy proposals, next to their general political leaning. We combine the estimates from journalists with evidence about “real” public opinion, collected through a parallel citizen survey. Further, our quantitative survey results are complemented with qualitative explanations offered by journalists themselves. We find that the surveyed political journalists perceive their outlets’ audiences’ political leaning as more right-wing than their own. Regarding specific policy issues, the political journalists perceive the public almost consistently as being more right-wing than they actually are. Right-wing journalists are better at correctly assessing public opinion. Moreover, the more experienced journalists are, the smaller the right-wing bias in their estimations. Journalists seem to be well aware of their own center-left leaning and overcompensate for, rather than project, their own leaning in their assessment of public opinion. In all, our study shows that looking into journalists’ public opinion perceptions is a relevant and promising research track.

The chapter shows that the reluctance of politicians to follow public opinion is a normative ideal rather than an empirical reality. Once politicians are asked about their daily work, it immediately becomes clear that their public opinion perceptions have a pervasive influence on their political undertakings. Perceptions matter. Foremost, (perceived) public opinion has a strong agenda-setting effect. Representatives choose to invest in initiatives where they have the public on their side and to abort or postpone initiatives for which there presumably is no support. They rarely deliberately cross their own electorate and when they do, preventive measures are put in place to avoid (electoral) harm. Politicians confirm that besides generating congruent policies, communication is one of the reasons why having accurate public opinion perceptions is so important. If they (exceptionally) decide to go against public opinion, they want to anticipate citizens’ reactions and to adapt their explanations accordingly.

Journalists’ perceptions of public opinion influence their reporting. Yet, the factors driving these public opinion perceptions are not well understood. This study examines one such potential factor, namely the impact of journalists’ own policy opinions on their estimations of public opinion. Concretely, we identify which journalists are more susceptible to such so-called social projection . Moreover, we investigate which factors moderate the relationship between own opinion and perceived public opinion. Drawing on unique survey data from political journalists in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, we demonstrate that journalists’ own policy opinions are indeed correlated with their public opinion estimations. Moreover, we find that journalists whose political opinions tend to the right are more likely to perceive public opinion in line with their own opinion. Finally, our findings indicate that journalists project less when estimating public opinion on policies within their news beats, and they project less when they perceive public opinion on a policy issue as ambiguous. We discuss the implications of our findings for journalism as a profession.

This study investigated partisan perceptions of hostile bias in news coverage of the 1997 Teamsters Union strike against United Parcel Service (UPS), and the processes by which Teamster and UPS partisans formed impressions of public opinion regarding the strike. As predicted, both partisan groups perceived neutral news coverage as biased against their respective sides. However, perceptions of hostile media bias did not produce corresponding perceptions of hostile public opinion; instead, partisans appeared to rely on their personal opinions when estimating the opinions of others. Nonpartisan control-group subjects, however, did infer public opinion in part from their subjective assessments of news content. Findings suggest that level of involvement is crucial in predicting the effect that perceived media coverage of social issues will have on perceptions of public opinion regarding those issues.

Given the vast amounts of research on party competition, party strategy, political communication and electoral campaigning, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to the study of national party elites' perceptions of voters and public opinion. This article argues that the mindset of leading party officials, and more specifically their perceptions of voter and public opinion rationality, driving forces and knowledge, is a much-neglected explanation for why parties adopt the electoral strategies they do. Analysed here are unique internal party documents from two Swedish parties during the period 1964 to 1991: the Social Democratic Party and the Conservative Party. A simple analytic framework is proposed for the study of party elite perceptions of voters and public opinion. In contrast to the overwhelmingly pessimistic view of voter rationality that still prevails in contemporary research, the findings presented in this article suggest that national party elites in general have had a surprisingly positive view of voters and, in particular, public opinion. Perceptions of voters and public opinion were largely unaffected by the parties' electoral fortunes, and did not become gloomier over time.

Coevolution modeling of group behavior and opinion based on public opinion perception

Politicians care a lot about public opinion, they put great effort into getting to know what the people want. They almost constantly assess public opinion through a large variety of sources. And although most of them define themselves as trustees, in their actual day-to-day decision-making almost all politicians behave as delegates in the sense that they hardly ever deliberately cross public opinion but act in line with it (or act not at all). Notwithstanding their great focus on public opinion, politicians’ perceptions of what it is that the people want are remarkably inaccurate. They not only misjudge the share of people supporting specific policies, they also quite often position the majority on the wrong side of the debate. Their perceptions of public opinion are not only inaccurate, but most of the time biased as well. Politicians perceive the public to hold more right-wing positions than it actually does. Together, the inaccuracy and bias of politicians’ public opinion perceptions challenge the idea that elected representatives make representative democracy work by relying on their public opinion perceptions. In Flanders (in Belgium), the political system this book looks at, politicians do everything within their power to understand citizens’ preferences, but they do not always succeed in acting responsively because of their mistaken perceptions.

People often misperceive public opinion, challenging public engagement. Addressing mixed findings on corrective interventions, we conducted two studies on White Americans’ perception of public opinion regarding racial biases in policing practices. Majority view holders (i.e. those recognizing racial biases in policing) generally reported accurate estimates of public opinion and were unaffected by a message emphasizing public opinion statistics. However, minority view holders (i.e. those rejecting the presence of racial biases) mostly underestimated public recognition of racial biases in policing. Highlighting public opinion statistics increased this group’s awareness of racial biases, but only for those who strongly identified as Americans.

This chapter zooms in on a psychological explanation for the inaccuracy of politicians’ public opinion perceptions and right-wing bias, namely their tendency to “project”—that is: to let their perceptions of public opinion be influenced by their own opinions. The chapter finds that Belgian politicians’ own opinion indeed affects their public opinion estimation, and that this partially explains the perceptual inaccuracy of politicians whose preferences do not match those of the(ir) voters. Yet, projection cannot account for the general right-wing bias because even left-wing politicians estimate the public to be more right-wing than it actually is. Therefore, the chapter moves on to more general explanations: it argues that the success of right-wing parties and their leaders, the potential right-wing bias in the traditional press, combined with the right-wing representation of public opinion present on social media, may be driving politicians’ joint understanding of the public as being right-wing.

This study addresses the lack of sufficient climate action by examining politicians’ opinions and their perceptions of public opinion about climate change mitigation policies. After all, scholarly work on democratic representation has shown that two key drivers of political decision-making are the policy preferences of elected representatives and their perceptions of citizens’ preferences. Drawing on surveys with local elected representatives and citizens in Belgium, we find that they overall hold rather similar preferences on climate policies – though politicians are slightly less supportive of most policies than citizens. Interestingly, legislators underestimate support for climate policies among the broader public, which may lead to less climate action than would be expected from a representational view. Finally, we show that politicians’ own preferences influence their public opinion perceptions.

Subjective claims about what the public thinks are the most common public opinion cue in the news media and are used especially by populist politicians as a communication strategy to appeal to voters. These references are not based on polling data and may even be in contrast to them. Yet, there is little research on how effective this communication strategy actually is. In the present study, we looked at the effects of politicians’ subjective claims to public opinion on the evaluation of the politicians and on people’s perception of public opinion. In addition, we tested whether this communication strategy resonates especially well with people holding populist attitudes. In a 2 × 4 experiment, we were able to show that the use of subjective claims strongly shaped public opinion perceptions but did not necessarily improve the evaluation of the politician. The effects occurred regardless of people’s populist attitudes.

To what extent do perceptions of public opinion effect individual support and political participation in political action? To what extent might media use moderate the role of public opinion in predicting political participation in the digital age? This study investigates these questions by analysing unique data from an experiment and a representative survey designed and conducted at the height of the summer 2011 protests in Israel. This study offers a new analytical model for studying activism by independently and simultaneously examining the direct and indirect effects of perceptions of majority support, individual support and media use on political behaviour. The experimental results suggest that perceptions of public opinion and media use did affect participation in the 2011 social movement. Specifically, increased perception of majority support for the movement led to increased rates of participation. Moreover, media use was inconsequential among those respondents who perceived that a majority of the public supported the protest. Digital media had a moderate effect on the association between perceptions and support for the protest movement, but there was no such effect with respect to mainstream media use. The findings provide new empirical insight into the effects of perceptions of public opinion and media use on political behaviour. In doing so, they help to explain the development of mass protest movements in the digital age and especially the potential effect of perceptions and media use in promoting the evolution of social movements as well as involvement in collective action in the digital age.

The depiction of citizens expressing their opinions in the news is an increasingly popular feature of modern journalism, because they can serve as exemplars that illustrate abstract or complex issues. However, citizen exemplars differ regarding their level of personal involvement in the issue they talk about. Affected exemplars have some kind of personal experience with an issue (e.g. ill people) whereas unaffected citizens, as ordinary people from the street, do not. We examine for the first time how exemplars' personal involvement moderates their effects on recipients' perceptions of public opinion and personal attitudes. The results show that compared to unaffected exemplars, affected exemplars weaken effects on public opinion perceptions. In contrast, the moderating role of exemplar involvement for attitudinal effects was limited.

The chapter explains the book’s methodology to measure politicians’ public opinion perceptions in detail. The essence of the approach to perceptual accuracy is that politicians estimate the percentage of popular support for various specific policy proposals (e.g., “The most polluting cars should be banned from inner cities”) and that their estimations are compared with actual support for these policies as measured through a large-scale, representative public opinion survey. Importantly, not only were politicians asked to assess the support among Belgian citizens in general but also among the politician’s own party electorate. The chapter also explains why and how policy proposals were chosen, provides descriptive evidence for each of the eight chosen policies, and presents the societal and political discussions surrounding the concrete policies.