The impact of public
opinion on policy has been a hot topic of debate since the conception of the
democratic government system. Another concept up for debate: whether polls are
effective in determining the public’s opinion on policy and whether these
should be used to determine policy. As for the latter use of polls, it is clear
from the knowledge available, common sense, and our speaker’s comments that
polls should not influence policy. I question the fairness and usefulness of
polls in light of our speaker’s concerns regarding the changing attitudes,
motivations, and tactics pollsters are using today, as well as various issues
surrounding the concept of polls in general. I personally have been skeptical
of polls from studying them throughout my undergraduate career and have tried
to better understand how they work and what influence they have on portraying
the public’s mindset to the politicians. Are polls being utilized properly and
effectively, or are polls simply a cover to convince the public that their
opinions matter?
Polls can be effective in
understanding the public’s “complex” opinion – this is something that I agree
with, our speaker agreed with, and our readings agreed with. However, I agree
with a few conditions attached. I agree that the polls can be helpful in
gauging the public’s perspective but only when they are created and understood
in context and in weariness of the public’s fragile mindset. I believe that it
is essential to gauge polls based on the demographic context of the group being
asked – for example, we discussed in class how the terms “illegal alien” vs.
“undocumented workers” would be interpreted depending on which group you were
asking. One can assume that if you’re asking a group of anti-immigrant sentiment,
they would react negatively to the former or both. In this case, word choice
becomes the biggest advantage or drawback to a poll depending on what result a
pollster is trying to achieve. The public will interpret questions in a variety
of ways, so polls must be made to eliminate as much confusion and bias as
possible. It is entirely too easy to change and manipulate opinions if
demographic context and word choice is not taken into consideration before
distribution, collection and analysis.
The continuity of polls
helps to boost credibility and a pattern of public opinion, however, the
public’s compound mindset can throw patterns off or skew polls in different
ways. For example, our speaker spoke about the impact of contradictory
opinions, such as the abortion debate. She also made an excellent point in that
people tend to pull away from controversial issues and disengage because they
don’t want to resolve their own problems. This is evident in many highly
controversial areas including abortion, gun control, and even the 2016
election. How can we comprehend the political behavior of the public if we do
not consider the various thought processes that occur in everyone’s minds?
Beyond this, polls need to care about the audience, an aspect that our speaker
and I both believe to be disappearing in today’s political climate. Pollsters
are moving away from understanding ordinary life which is often more telling of
the people’s ideas and thoughts than direct questions about policy.
It is in the milieu of
these changing attitudes, motivations, and tactics of pollsters that I question
the usefulness and fairness of polls. “Pollsters have lost their souls.” This
quote from our speaker spoke volumes to me because I feel that it is quite
reminiscent of the entire political world currently. Politics suck the soul out
of the representatives, the people who study it, and the people it effects. Our
speaker mentioned that she does not believe polls to be “left-leaning” as the
President claims, nor does she deem them to be biased in any way overall.
However, she did argue that the media is influencing polls in a sometimes
negative or biased way – polls are often connected to media partners and may
follow the media course. For example, one could argue that Fox News polls are
probably skewed in the favor of conservatives and MSNBC polls are skewed in the
favor of liberals. Besides the media’s polls having an agenda, media also
influences polls in the amount of attention they provide – a pollster wants
their poll to be shown and analyzed, they are “desperate for attention” and
today’s media coverage has resulted in “overkill.” This media coverage and bias
was quite evident in last year’s presidential election: polls were used to
determine the outcome of the election and the public’s feelings about the
candidates, and although they appeared to be wrong in many circumstances, they
garnered a lot of media attention and scrutiny which led to more polls
regarding similar topics.
I question the usefulness
and effectiveness of polls because it is a topic that is under-studied and hard
to grasp. Their usefulness could be proven or disproven, but I believe the
debate would still exist. The government, especially at the conception of our
country, has very rarely trusted the public’s opinions, hence the many
different types of government structures that emerged since “demokratia” was
introduced in Athens. It is easy to understand why leaders would be wary of the
public’s opinion today – as we’ve discussed in class, the public often lacks the
knowledge to truly engage with a poll. As our speaker mentioned, there were
multiple polls gauging opinions on Hope Hicks, but unless you’re a diehard
consumer of politics, the average person would probably not know who that was.
Or even in our class example, I had no idea what the Kingdom of Bhutan was. I
also wonder the effectiveness in light of historical context – our speaker told
us that FDR was the first president to use a public opinion poll to measure the
public’s thoughts on the war, and even though the public was very much against
US involvement, we went to war. We know that polls should not influence policy,
but I believe they should at least be taken into consideration when making
decisions that impact the entire country.
Considering all of these
aspects of polls and their lack of impact on influence, Burstein’s argument
that the public does influence policy needs some embellishment as to how.
Gillens and Page argue that the upper class and interest groups have more
influence on policy than the average citizen, and this would make sense
considering all we’ve learned about “mobilized bias” and the need for resources
to have an effect in the grand scheme of things.
These issues with polls
make it hard for me to believe that polls are effective in understanding the
public’s political opinion. We've seen them fail - the 2016 election and even the 1948 election come to mind. However, polls can be useful in other ways – in
Season 1, Episode 7 of the West Wing, the administration believes that polling
and sampling would produce more accurate census results. They are likewise
effective in understanding ordinary life such as figuring out the public’s
favorite color, favorite sports team (not
the Dallas Cowboys, by the way), or which guy the Bachelorette should choose. Polls can even be fun - we've all posted a poll on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram about whether we should get a haircut, order takeout, or whatever else we can't make up our minds about. How much do polls really engage the public though?
So, are polls actually
impactful and useful for pollsters, politicians, and the media or are the
simply a show for the public to think their opinion matters?
Hey Lexi! First of all, I am sad that I wasn’t there to speak to this woman, as I think that I would like to hear more of her justification as to why “polls shouldn’t influence public policy.” I think objectively, polling is a fantastic way to get an idea of what your constituents want to see done in the government and then to further act that out. However, this is pretty contingent upon the role of your congressperson/politician acting as either a delegate (where they may take your opinion into consideration and act however they see as fit based off of their own experience and background knowledge) or a trustee (where you can pretty much trust that they are going to do almost exactly what the public wants them to). As your blog post goes on, I can see why there is a skepticism regarding the legitimate use of polls as election fodder. Your point that polls can be helpful in gauging the public’s perspective when they are created and understood in a way that is received well by the public is something I think is present throughout the few blog posts I’ve read, as well as the readings. Personally I believe that you cannot legitimately inquire a person’s opinion on a heavy subject and get an honest answer if they cannot understand every part of what is being asked of them. Unfortunately, I think in polling people are sometimes too afraid to acknowledge that they don’t know what Bill 2342-3b is, especially if this is a small community bill. While I understand the initial hesitancy of not wanting to sound uneducated about politics/things happening in our world, I think that ambiguous or too technical wording is something that gives polls an implicit bias. It’s easier to understand (and subsequently answer) “Do you think that Congress should have the power to rule what cases can go to federal courts?” than it is to understand “What do you think about Patchak v. Zinke?*” and I think that polls need to have this in mind as they write questions in the future. If the goal is to skew a bias one way or another, however, then the ambiguous wording should probably stay. The final point I’d like to touch on that you made was the public’s tendency to pull away from issues and disengage if they’re trying to avoid their own personal problems/issues. That’s an incredibly potent point, and the fact of the matter in my eyes is that strong issues like abortion/immigration/etc. are things that in today’s day and age are polarized and establishing yourself as a part of one or the other is kind of also placing you in a political affiliation. This is not always true, but could be a huge deterrent to honest polling if one claims “independent”.
ReplyDelete*Patchak v. Zinke was a case argued today, so there is no opinion on it currently.
Lexi,
ReplyDeleteFirst, I would like to note that I truly enjoyed reading your blog post! I think that you raise some interesting points and provide us with a solid connection between what was stated in the readings and what was stated by our guest speaker, while cohesively interjecting your perspective. I especially like your overarching thesis question, which is, “Are polls being utilized properly and effectively, or are polls simply a cover to convince the public that their opinions matter?” Similarly, I have many skepticisms about polling and its ability to manufacture effective policy.
While I was unable to attend the lecture by our guest speaker, I read through the lecture notes of a few students and gathered some information about our guest’s perspective on public opinion and polls. During the lecture, our guest speaker mentioned that polls are useful to understand public opinion, but not necessarily valuable in producing effective public policy. Additionally, the guest speaker told students that polls and their outcomes, regardless of their inequalities, affect all political actors.
Based upon the notes from the guest lecturer and the assigned readings, I agree with what was said by our outside speaker and I agree with your idea that the complexity and evolvement of the public’s opinion is difficult to translate into policy. However, in order to come to the conclusion that polls should be used more to explain the complex opinions of constituents rather than the creation of laws, I think that we must consider the possibility that the democratic style of the United States’ government and the lack of citizen participation in political affairs lends itself to this view. Furthermore, I believe that the variety and influence of political actors makes this conclusion valid.
In the article, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, the authors noted each of the four theoretical traditions in the study of American politics, which include Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic-Elite Domination and two types of interest-group pluralism, Majoritarian Pluralism and Biased Pluralism.
Majoritarian Electoral Democracy attributes United States government policies chiefly to the collective will of average citizens, who are seen as empowered by democratic elections.
Economic-Elite Domination argues that United States policy making is dominated by individuals who have substantial economic resources, like high levels of income or wealth.
Majoritarian Pluralism maintains that the interests of all citizens are, more or less, equally represented; the roots of this theory go back to Federalist Paper 10, by James Madison.
Biased Pluralism states that corporations, business associations and professional groups predominate policymaking. The thrust of interest-group conflict and the public policies that result tend to tilt toward the wishes of corporations and business and professional associations.
Individually, each of these theories offer different predictions about which sets of actors have how much influence over public policy. These actors include average citizens, economic elites and organized interest groups, which are either mass-based or business-oriented.
(Continued...)
DeleteConclusively, the results from Page and Gilens’ article suggest that reality is best captured by a mixture of theories. They argue that United States holds a political climate in which both individual economic elites and organized interest groups play a substantial part in affecting public policy, but the general public has little or no independent influence; their evidence strongly indicates that Biased Pluralism is the most descriptive of political reality. Despite strong support for theories of Majoritarian Democracy, this reading states that the majorities of the American public have little influence over the policies that the United States government enacts. Page and Gilens wrap up their article by stating that, if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, we need to know more about the policy preferences of political party activists and government officials; these actors can change the way our democracy interprets and utilizes public opinion information.
While I believe that the results of Page and Gilens’ research provides a perspective that must be considered when evaluating the value of public opinion polling, “Remember that study saying America is an oligarchy? 3 rebuttals say it's wrong,” an article published by Vox, contradicts Page and Gilens’ remarks; the article states that research suggests that, while the wealthy class has more political influence than the middle class, ordinary Americans still win a substantial share of the time, even when opposed by the wealthy class.
In 2014, a slew of headlines confirmed that the wealthy, elite class was actually in control of the policymaking process and the middle and lower classes were just a formality. Vox stated that these headings were a response to the study produced by Page and Gilens, which concluded that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on United States government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.
However, other political scientists found that middle-income Americans and rich Americans actually agree on an overwhelming majority of topics, which contradicts Page and Gilens’ findings. Other researchers conclude that strong support from the middle class is as good of a predictor of a policy being adopted as strong support from the elite class; even when policy preferences differ across socioeconomic classes, policy ends up about where it would have been if those in the middle class received the exact same representation as the wealthy class. Ultimately, the opposing researchers maintained that, in a democracy, there should be strong congruence between policy outcomes and the opinions of the American middle class.
In addition to containing the contradictions to the original article, the Vox piece included Gilens’ response to the criticisms about his research. He argued that the opinions of the elite class dramatically diverge from the middle class, especially regarding the redistribution of wealth and economic policy. Additionally, Gilens disputes the idea that the middle and elite classes agree on most political agendas; he states that a political system that responds to the preferences of average citizens is profoundly different from one in which average citizens get their way only when they happen to agree with the preferences of the elite class.
(Continued...)
DeleteOverall, after digesting the readings, guest speaker notes and student blog posts, I believe I am even more skeptical of polls than I was before. While debates over their effectiveness will continue to exist, I think polls have become a tool for the media to show people that their perspectives matter, rather than a way to measure opinions, exclusively. In addition to your idea that polls, like the American public, are changing in attitude and motivation, I argue that the nature of our representative democracy reflects these findings. In today’s political climate, people just want to be heard; there are so many socioeconomic inequalities present in our nation that it has become difficult for citizens to “trust the system;” to an average American, polling is an easy and mindless way to “contribute” to society. However, polls are understudied and misunderstood by all political actors. Ultimately, I think if pollsters, politicians and media organizations approached polling as a narrative form of information, rather than a factual form of information, it would alter the way citizens view their opinions and participate in politics.