The history of capital punishment in the United States demonstrates
several characteristics of public opinion: (1) The public's attitudes
toward a given government policy vary over time. (2) Public opinion
places boundaries on allowable types of public policy. (3) Citizens
are willing to register opinions on matters outside their expertise.
(4) Governments tend to react to public opinion. (5) The government
sometimes does not do what the people want. If the government does
not do what the people want, can it properly be called a democracy?
The majoritarian and pluralist models of democracy introduced in Chapter
2 are compared for their assumptions about public opinion. This chapter
examines the validity of those assumptions.
Before the development of opinion polling, there was no reliable way
to know what the people wanted. Sampling theory combined with computer
technology enabled researchers to study public opinion much more accurately.
Two important characteristics of the distribution of public opinion
are its shape (bell-shaped, skewed, or bimodal) and its stability
over time.
The process of political socialization‹how people acquire their
values through the interplay of cultural factors, knowledge, and ideology‹underlies
the formation of public opinion. The family, peers, schools, and the
community are early agents of political socialization. Later influences
include neighbors, fellow workers, club members, the mass media, and
the voting experience. Political values, the foundation of public
opinion, are shaped differently for each individual through the political
socialization process. Still, people with similar social backgrounds
tend to share similar political opinions. Income, region, ethnicity,
religion, religiosity, race, and education are all factors that affect
values. Of these, the latter three produce greater opinion divergence
today on issues that compromise freedom for either order or equality.
Most people will classify themselves along a liberal-conservative
continuum, but few will reflect true ideological thinking in public
opinion surveys. A two-dimensional framework for assessing the values
of order and equality. yields four ideological categories of comparable
size. Liberals favor equality but not order. Conservatives
want government to enforce order but not equality. Communitarians
want more government action to promote both order and equality. Libertarians
oppose government actions for either purpose. Liberals and conservatives
had less difficulty placing themselves on a traditional liberal-conservative
scale than communitarians or libertarians.
People who lack a consistent set of political attitudes and beliefs
rely on four factors to form political opinion: self-interest, information,
political leadership, and belief schemas or pre-existing knowledge
and opinions that are applied to specific issues. Despite the complexities
of individual opinion formation, strong correlations have been found
between people's social background, general values, and specific opinions,
In some instances public opinion appears to be stable and well defined
and thus in conformance with the majoritarian model of government
decision making. More often, public opinion is sharply divided, inconsistent,
and based on relatively superficial knowledge. Politically powerful
groups frequently are at odds over what policies government should
adopt. Division and disagreement among influential, competing interests
allow leeway for political decision makers to rely less on disparate
public opinion and more on bargaining and compromise, a pattern more
characteristic of the pluralist model. Public opinion is viewed as
a force that rarely casts the decisive vote but one that helps set
broad parameters for government policy.
Return to Top ©1998 by Houghton
Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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