Opinion and Policy: A Global View

Abstract

In a world where citizens desire to have their preferences reflected in public policy and, for instrumental reasons, policy makers share that desire, the linkage of opinion to policy still faces formidable problems. Chief among these is this: policy making is highly specific, detailed, and informed, while mass electorates choose not to attend closely enough to politics and policy to have preferences that are similarly specific, detailed, and informed. We now believe that many citizens have meaningful preferences over the general contours of government activity. At the level of whether “government should do more to …” deal with any number of problems, we now see individual citizen preferences in a somewhat more favorable light than we once did. More important, we now view change in aggregate preferences over time as expressive of real beliefs and values about public choices.But this is not enough. Policy makers face no choices as simple as “do more” or “do less.” They deal at a wholly different level. They deal at a level of specificity where public attitudes are only infrequently measured, and for good reason; mass publics in the main do not have (real) attitudes over details they cannot reasonably be expected to attend to. And yet each of those choices, complicated and specific though they are, will reflect some measure of movement at the more general level where citizen preferences are engaged. The daily choices of the C-SPAN world are obscure and arcane to typical citizens. And yet the actors in that world feel bound by citizen preferences.