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

Abstract

Did the Reagan administration disregard majority will when crafting its policy initiatives? Did it cater to a narrow partisan constituency instead? The answers to these questions will help with an assessment of Jacobs and Shapiro's (2000b) hypothesis that presidents since the late 1970s have used private White House survey research as a tool to manipulate or assuage centrist public opinion while meeting the policy demands of their partisan core supporters, resulting in a decline in presidential responsiveness to majority will. Using the actual surveys administered by Richard Wirthlin (Reagan's pollster) between 1981 and 1983, this article will demonstrate the level of consistency between majority opinion on 129 policy issues and Reagan's behavior through 1984, and it will explore the conditions under which the president was more or less likely to respond to public preferences. The data reveal that the Reagan administration was constrained by the popular will in predicable ways: if the policy issues were about domestic concerns, highly popular, and visible in the media, then the administration acted in line with public preferences more than 70 percent of the time. Further, Reagan and his advisers were selective in responding to party activists: they championed issues drawn from their conservative ideological agenda that fit with the current tide in public opinion, while sidestepping other issues dear to party activists that encountered strong majority resistance. While I do not contest Jacobs and Shapiro's (2000b) important observation that presidents often use survey research to craft talk in an attempt to channel the public debate, the evidence here highlights how the president nonetheless remains constrained by the popular will, at least on domestic issues.