Since Franklin Roosevelt's presidency, almost all U.S. presidents have employed private polls in some capacity. This book attempts to explain how presidential polling evolved from a rarely conducted secretive enterprise to a commonplace event that is now considered an integral part of the presidency. Robert Eisinger contends that presidents opt to gain autonomy by conducting private polls. They do not trust institutions such as Congress, the media and political parties, and their measurements of opinion.

Do politicians listen to the public? How often and when? Or are the views of the public manipulated or used strategically by political and economic elites? Navigating Public Opinion brings together leading scholars of American politics to assess and debate these questions. It describes how the relationship between opinion and policy has changed over time; how key political actors use public opinion to formulate domestic and foreign policy; and how new measurement techniques might improve our understanding of public opinion in contemporary polling and survey research.

The distinguished contributors shed new light on several long-standing controversies over policy responsiveness to public opinion. Featuring a new analysis by Robert Erikson, Michael MacKuen, and James Stimson that builds from their pathbreaking work on how public mood moves policy in a macro-model of policymaking, the volume also includes several critiques of this model by Lawrence Jacobs and Robert Shapiro, another critique by G. William Domhoff, and a rejoinder by Erikson and his coauthors. Other highlights include discussions of how political elites, including state-level policymakers, presidents, and makers of foreign policy, use (or shape) public opinion; and analyses of new methods for measuring public opinion such as survey-based experiments, probabilistic polling methods, non-survey-based measures of public opinion, and the potential and limitations of Internet polls and surveys. Introductory and concluding essays provide useful background context and offer an authoritative summary of what is known about how public opinion influences public policy.

A must-have for all students of American politics, public opinion, and polling, this state-of-the-art collection addresses issues that lie at the heart of democratic governance today.

Is polling a process that brings "science" into the study of society? Or are polls crude instruments that tell us little about the way people actually think? The role of public opinion polls in government and mass media has gained increasing importance with each new election or poll taken.

Here Lewis presents a new look at an old tradition, the first study of opinion polls using an interdisciplinary approach combining cultural studies, sociology, political science, and mass communication. Rather than dismissing polls, he considers them to be a significant form of representation in contemporary culture; he explores how the media report on polls and, in turn, how publicized results influence the way people respond to polls. Lewis argues that the media tend to exclude the more progressive side of popular opinion from public debate. While the media's influence is limited, it works strategically to maintain the power of pro-corporate political elites.

The book offers a comparative analysis of policy representation in five Western Democracies: France, Germany, The Netherlands, Sweden, and the USA.

For decades, policymakers and analysts have been frustrated by the stubborn and often dramatic disagreement between experts and the public on acceptable levels of environmental risk. Most experts, for instance, see no severe problem in dealing with nuclear waste, given the precautions and safety levels now in place. Yet public opinion vehemently rejects this view, repudiating both the experts' analysis and the evidence.
In "Dealing with Risk, " Howard Margolis moves beyond the usual "rival rationalities" explanation proffered by risk analysts for the rift between expert and lay opinion. He reveals the conflicts of intuition that undergird those concerns, and proposes a new approach to the psychology of persuasion and belief. Examining the role of intuition, mental habits, and cognitive frameworks in the construction of public opinion, this compelling account bridges the public policy impasse that has plagued controversial environmental issues.

Over the past thirty years a wealth of statistical information about British voters and British elections has been collected by the British Election Studies research teams. The British Electorate, 1963-1992 makes these data available in a standard, easy-to-read format accessible to the non-technical user. Tables display the same data for each election, allowing the reader to compare any two elections between 1964 and 1992, or to trace trends across the whole period. The information presented covers a wide range of topics in voting and public opinion, including the vote, turnout, party membership, partisanship, and attitudes on issues such as abortion, capital punishment and nationalisation. Data on sub-groups of the electorate (men and women, young and old, trade unionists, the unemployed, Conservative and Labour voters etc) are also presented. This book will be an important reference for political and sociological researchers, both within academia and outside.

This timely book describes and explains the American people's alleged hatred of their own branch of government, the U.S. Congress. Focus group sessions held across the country and a specially designed national survey indicate that much of the negativity is generated by popular perceptions of the processes of governing visible in Congress. But Hibbing and Theiss-Morse conclude that the public's unwitting desire to reform democracy out of a democratic legislature is a cure more dangerous than the disease.

Public opinion has played a crucial role in the transitions from war to peace in Israel since the 1967 Six Day war. Security Threatened is the first major analysis of the interactions among opinion, politics and policy in that period, based on opinion surveys of thousands of adult Jews conducted between 1962 and 1994. The public divided during those years into militant hardliners and more conciliatory security positions, and power either shifted between, or was shared by, the Likud and Labour parties. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, with the onset of the intifada, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the American victory in the Gulf War, all segments of the Israeli public became more conciliatory. Policy initiatives reflected shifts in political power which in turn magnified changes in public opinion. Leaders were constrained by public opinion and by perceptions of threat, but they could also alter policy if they had the will because opinion was rather equally divided; since most people had their minds made up, the opposition could not block their policy.

This timely book describes and explains the American people's alleged hatred of their own branch of government, the US Congress. Intensive focus group sessions held across the country and a specially designed national survey indicate that much of the negativity is generated by popular perceptions of the processes of governing visible in Congress. John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse argue that, although the public is deeply disturbed by debate, compromise, delicate pace, the presence of interest groups, and the professionalization of politics, many of these traits are actually endemic to modern democratic government. Congress is an enemy of the public partially because it is so public. Calls for reform, such as term limitations, reflect the public's desire to attack these disliked features. But the authors conclude, the public's unwitting desire to reform democracy out of a democratic legislature is a cure more dangerous than the disease.

A timely examination of progressive politics in the era of radical populism.

Since 2016, western democracies have experienced a series of political earthquakes, spectacularly upending conventional political wisdom. Everywhere, outsider politicians rail against ‘the elite’.

Yet, with a few notable exceptions, the populist mood has benefited reactionaries rather than reformers. The status quo might be in crisis, but the emerging voices are those of hate and violence. Where is the progressive alternative?

In Trigger Warnings, Jeff Sparrow sympathetically but critically examines key progressive ideas. How does a billionaire position himself as anti-elitist? Are the culture wars worth fighting? What's at stake in the battles over political correctness? Should progressives defend it ― and, if so, how?

Sparrow traces the evolution of the Left and Right to explain the origins of this strange evolution, untangling some of the thorniest controversies of our time and arguing that the future needn't only belong to nihilists and bigots.

The purpose of this book is to meaningfully discuss what Pakistanis thought as a collectivity about various local and international issues during 2007-08. It covers a diverse range of subjects from democracy, war on terror, to religious inclinations and consumption preferences. Furthermore, it dispels various fallacies about public behaviour for example misconceptions that since the Pakistani public is largely illiterate it is incapable of understanding the complexities of governance or judicious foreign policies, that it approves of wholesale violence in the name of religion, that it is unaware of global climatic changes and is hardly bothered about issues beyond basic necessities. Careful analysis of the data disproves or qualifies these misconceptions which flourish because measuring popular opinion is difficult while passing off unsubstantiated generalizations about an amorphous entity is easy. The only credible method for measuring public opinion is through scientific

A diverse body of research exists to explain why eligible voters don't go to the polls on election day. Theories span from the psychological (nonvoters have limited emotional engagement with politics and therefore lack motivation), to the social (politics is inherently social and nonvoters have limited networks), and the personal (nonvoters tend to be young, less educated, poor, and highly mobile). Other scholars suggest that people don't vote because campaigns are uninspiring. This book poses a new theory: uncertainty about the national context at the time of the election. During times of national crisis, when uncertainty is high, citizens are motivated to sort through information about each candidate to figure out which would best mitigate their uncertainty. When external uncertainty is low, however, citizens spend less time learning about candidates and are equally unmotivated to vote. The American Nonvoter examines how uncertainty regarding changing economic conditions, dramatic national events, and U.S. international interventions influences people's decisions whether to vote or not. Using rigorous statistical tools and rich historical stories, Lyn Ragsdale and Jerrold G. Rusk test this theory on aggregate nonvoting patterns in the United States across presidential and midterm elections from 1920 to 2012. The authors also challenge the stereotype of nonvoters as poor, uneducated and apathetic. Instead, the book shows that nonvoters are, by and large, as politically knowledgeable as voters, but see no difference between candidates or view them negatively.

Angry debates about polarizing speakers have roiled college campuses. Conservatives accuse universities of muzzling unpopular opinions, betraying their values of open inquiry; students sympathetic to the left openly advocate against completely unregulated speech, asking for "safe spaces" and protection against visiting speakers and even curricula they feel disrespects them. Some even call these students "snowflakes"-too fragile to be exposed to opinions and ideas that challenge their worldviews. How might universities resolve these debates about free speech, which pit their students' welfare against the university's commitment to free inquiry and open debate? Ulrich Baer here provides a new way of looking at this dilemma. He explains how the current dichotomy is false and is not really about the feelings of offended students, or protecting an open marketplace of ideas. Rather, what is really at stake is our democracy's commitment to equality, and the university's critical role as an arbiter of truth. He shows how and why free speech has become the rallying cry that forges an otherwise uneasy alliance of liberals and ultra-conservatives, and why this First Amendment absolutism is untenable in law and society in general. He draws on law, philosophy, and his extensive experience as a university administrator to show that the lens of equality can resolve this impasse, and can allow the university to serve as a model for democracy that upholds both truth and equality as its founding principles.

Public opinion about homosexuality varies substantially around the world. While residents in some nations have embraced gay rights as human rights, people in many other countries find homosexuality unacceptable. What creates such big differences in attitudes? This book shows that cross-national differences in opinion can be explained by the strength of democratic institutions, the level of economic development, and the religious context of the places where people live. Amy Adamczyk uses survey data from almost ninety societies, case studies of various countries, content analysis of newspaper articles, and in-depth interviews to examine how demographic and individual characteristics influence acceptance of homosexuality.

In this work, Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann examines public opinion as a form of social control in which individuals, almost instinctively sensing the opinions of those around them, shape their behaviour to prevailing attitudes about what is acceptable. For the second edition, Noelle-Neumann has added three new chapters: the first discusses new discoveries in the history of public opinion; the second continues the author's efforts to construct a comprehensive theory of public opinion, addressing criticisms and defences of her "spiral of silence" theory that have appeared since 1980; the third offers a concise and updated summary of the book's arguments.

Elections are the means by which democratic nations determine their leaders, and communication in the context of elections has the potential to shape people's beliefs, attitudes, and actions. Thus, electoral persuasion is one of the most important political processes in any nation that regularly holds elections. Moreover, electoral persuasion encompasses not only what happens in an election but also what happens before and after, involving candidates, parties, interest groups, the media, and the voters themselves. This volume surveys the vast political science literature on this subject, emphasizing contemporary research and topics and encouraging cross-fertilization among research strands. A global roster of authors provides a broad examination of electoral persuasion, with international perspectives complementing deep coverage of U.S. politics. Major areas of coverage include: general models of political persuasion; persuasion by parties, candidates, and outside groups; media influence; interpersonal influence; electoral persuasion across contexts; and empirical methodologies for understanding electoral persuasion.

Examining a central assumption widely accepted as being crucial in making democracy work - that politicians form a more or less accurate image of public opinion and take that perception into account when representing citizens - Politicians' Reading of Public Opinion and its Biases presents a paradox of representation. On the one hand, politicians invest enormously in reading public opinion. They are committed to finding out what the people want and public opinion is a key consideration in many of their undertakings. Yet, on the other hand, politicians' perceptions of public opinion are surprisingly inaccurate. Politicians are hardly better at estimating public opinion than ordinary citizens are. Their perceptions are distorted by social projection, in the sense that politicians' own opinion affects their estimations, and on top of that, there seems to be a systematic right-wing bias in these perceptions. The findings imply that one of the main paths to responsive policy-making is flawed. Even though politicians do the best they can to learn about people's preferences, skewed perceptions put them on the wrong track. From a democratic perspective, the central findings of the book are quite sobering. The high hopes that many authors had with regard to politicians' ability to adequately 'consult' or 'sense' public opinion appear to be vain. The book puts forward a plausible driver of the slippage between the public and politics. Politicians are less responsive to people's preferences than they could be, not because they do not want to be responsive but because they base themselves on erroneous public opinion perceptions.

Human attention is in the highest demand it has ever been. The drastic increase in available information has compelled individuals to find a way to sift through the media that is literally at their fingertips. Content recommendation systems have emerged as the technological solution to this social and informational problem, but they've also created a bigger crisis in confirming our biases by showing us only, and exactly, what it predicts we want to see. Data versus Democracy investigates and explores how, in the era of social media, human cognition, algorithmic recommendation systems, and human psychology are all working together to reinforce (and exaggerate) human bias. The dangerous confluence of these factors is driving media narratives, influencing opinions, and possibly changing election results. In this book, algorithmic recommendations, clickbait, familiarity bias, propaganda, and other pivotal concepts are analyzed and then expanded upon via fascinating and timely case studies: the 2016 US presidential election, Ferguson, GamerGate, international political movements, and more events that come to affect every one of us. What are the implications of how we engage with information in the digital age? Data versus Democracy explores this topic and an abundance of related crucial questions. We live in a culture vastly different from any that has come before. In a society where engagement is currency, we are the product. Understanding the value of our attention, how organizations operate based on this concept, and how engagement can be used against our best interests is essential in responsibly equipping ourselves against the perils of disinformation. Who This Book Is For Individuals who are curious about how social media algorithms work and how they can be manipulated to influence culture. Social media managers, data scientists, data administrators, and educators will find this book particularly relevant to their work.

A long-held belief of political scientists is that moderate voices in the Senate act as power brokers between the ideological poles, yet year after year we see partisan gridlock in Congress. Some even argue that the shrinking number of moderates only increases their political influence. In Life in the Middle, Neilan S. Chaturvedi argues that the belief in the powerful, pivotal moderate neglects their electoral circumstances and overestimates their legislative power. In other words, not all Senators are elected under equal circumstances. Chaturvedi posits that, unlike their ideological counterparts who are elected from states that share an ideological identity, moderates are elected from one of two constituencies: states that have a partisan lean to one party but have enough "swing voters" to vote in a moderate from the opposite party, or states that are nearly evenly divided in terms of partisanship. Using unique interview data with legislative directors, retired United States Senators, and data compiled from the Congressional Record, Chaturvedi shows that, because of their precarious electoral circumstances, moderate senators must avoid active participation on bills and pushing controversial legislation. Lawmaking is much more variable and less moderating than previous theories assumed, as the process relies less on the work of moderates and more on party leaders. The book also demonstrates that mainstream concerns about polarization and its negative effects of increased gridlock and ideological legislation are true.

Much of public opinion research over the past several decades suggests that the American voters are woefully uninformed about politics and thus unable to fulfill their democratic obligations. Arguing that this perception is faulty, Vincent Hutchings shows that, under the right political conditions, voters are surprisingly well informed on the issues that they care about and use their knowledge to hold politicians accountable.

Though Hutchings is not the first political scientist to contend that the American public is more politically engaged than it is often given credit for, previous scholarship--which has typically examined individual and environmental factors in isolation--has produced only limited evidence of an attentive electorate. Analyzing broad survey data as well as the content of numerous Senate and gubernatorial campaigns involving such issues as race, labor, abortion, and defense, Hutchings demonstrates that voters are politically engaged when politicians and the media discuss the issues that the voters perceive as important. Hutchings finds that the media--while far from ideal--do provide the populace with information regarding the responsiveness of elected representatives and that groups of voters do monitor this information when "their" issues receive attention. Thus, while the electorate may be generally uninformed about and uninterested in public policy, a complex interaction of individual motivation, group identification, and political circumstance leads citizens concerned about particular issues to obtain knowledge about their political leaders and use that information at the ballot box.

In "Outside Lobbying," Ken Kollman explores why and when interest group leaders in Washington seek to mobilize the public in order to influence policy decisions in Congress. In the past, political scientists have argued that lobbying groups make outside appeals primarily because of their own internal dynamics--to recruit new members, for example. Kollman, however, grants a more important role to the need for interest group leaders to demonstrate popular support on particular issues. He interviewed more than ninety interest group leaders and policy makers active on issues ranging from NAFTA to housing for the poor. While he concludes that group leaders most often appeal to the public when they perceive that their stand has widespread popular support, he also shows that there are many important and revealing exceptions to this pattern.

Kollman develops his theory of outside lobbying through a combination of rational choice modeling and statistical tests that compare public opinion data with data from his interviews about interest groups' policy positions and activities. The tests reveal that group leaders use outside lobbying to take advantage of pre-existing public preferences, not to recruit members or to try to generate the mere appearance of grass-roots support. Kollman's innovative book will clarify the complex relationship among lobbying, public opinion, and public policy, and will set a new standard for interest group research.

Citizens appear to know very little about politics and government. Hundreds of surveys document millions of citizens answering thousands of political questions incorrectly. Given this state of affairs, it is not surprising that more knowledgeable people often deride the public for its ignorance and encourage them to stay out of politics. As the eminent political scientist Arthur Lupia shows in this capstone work, there are more constructive responses. As he explains, expert critics of public ignorance fundamentally misunderstand the problem, and as a consequence propose unhelpful solutions to a genuinely serious problem. For instance, idea that simply providing people with more facts will make them more competent voters is erroneous. That is because most experts fail to understand how most people learn, and do not know how to determine what types of information are relevant to voters. Lupia has worked for years with scientists and educators in all arenas to figure out how to increase issue competence among voters in areas like climate change. He draws from these efforts and the latest research on educational efficacy to develop a battery of techniques that effectively convey to people information that they actually care. If we accept the idea that citizens sometimes lack the knowledge that they need to make competent political choices, that greater knowledge can improve decision making, and that experts and advocates are often mistaken about how people think and learn, then a prescription for improving political knowledge and civic competence emerges: we need to educate the educators. Lupia's ultimate purpose, therefore, extends beyond politics alone: to help educators of all kinds convey information that is of more value to more people.

Over the past few decades, we have witnessed the growth of movements using digital means to connect with broader interest groups and express their points of view. These movements emerge out of distinct contexts and yield different outcomes, but tend to share one thing in common: online and offline solidarity shaped around the public display of emotion. Social media facilitate feelings of engagement, in ways that frequently make people feel re-energized about politics. In doing so, media do not make or break revolutions but they do lend emerging, storytelling publics their own means for feeling their way into events, frequently by making those involved a part of the developing story. Technologies network us but it is our stories that connect us to each other, making us feel close to some and distancing us from others. Affective Publics explores how storytelling practices facilitate engagement among movements tuning into a current issue or event by employing three case studies: Arab Spring movements, various iterations of Occupy, and everyday casual political expressions as traced through the archives of trending topics on Twitter. It traces how affective publics materialize and disband around connective conduits of sentiment every day and find their voice through the soft structures of feeling sustained by societies. Using original quantitative and qualitative data, Affective Publics demonstrates, in this groundbreaking analysis, that it is through these soft structures that affective publics connect, disrupt, and feel their way into everyday politics.

Since the mid-1990s, the Internet has revolutionized popular expression in China, enabling users to organize, protest, and influence public opinion in unprecedented ways. Guobin Yang's pioneering study maps an innovative range of contentious forms and practices linked to Chinese cyberspace, delineating a nuanced and dynamic image of the Chinese Internet as an arena for creativity, community, conflict, and control. Like many other contemporary protest forms in China and the world, Yang argues, Chinese online activism derives its methods and vitality from multiple and intersecting forces, and state efforts to constrain it have only led to more creative acts of subversion. Transnationalism and the tradition of protest in China's incipient civil society provide cultural and social resources to online activism. Even Internet businesses have encouraged contentious activities, generating an unusual synergy between commerce and activism. Yang's book weaves these strands together to create a vivid story of immense social change, indicating a new era of informational politics.

This book explains a long-standing puzzle in American politics: why so many Americans support downwardly redistributive social welfare programs, when such support seems to fly in the face of standard conceptions of the American public as anti-government, individualistic, and racially prejudiced. Bringing class attitudes into the analysis, Spencer Piston demonstrates through rigorous empirical analysis that sympathy for the poor and resentment of the rich explain American support for downwardly redistributive programs - not only those that benefit the middle class, but also those that explicitly target the poor. The book captures an important and neglected component of citizen attitudes toward a host of major public policies and candidate evaluations. It also explains why government does so little to combat economic inequality; in key instances, political elites downplay class considerations, deactivating sympathy for the poor and resentment of the rich.