INTERESTS AND IDEOLOGY
A fundamental requirement for democratic self-governance is that the public must develop clearly deflned interests that it can articulate during and between elections. One of the principles of democracy is that an individual is the best judge of what is in his or her best interest. Democratic political processes presume that it is best to let each individual articulate his or her own wants and needs. Other people may sometimes be in a better position to judge one's interests; however, there is no way to know when that is the case, so it is safer to assume the competence of every individual to decide his or her own interests. This principle, which Robert Dahl calls "the strong principle of equality," does not presume that individuals know their own interests; rather, it just asserts that no individuals "are so deflnitely better qualifled than the others" that they should have the ultimate authority to make decisions on behalf of those others.[2]
Presuming self-awareness does not make it so, however. Does the typical American voter, in fact, know what policies are in his or her best interests? And if voters ultimately seek to discern the interests of the larger public, can they tell what is best for the city, state, or nation as a whole? It is impossible to answer those questions because there is no independent ground from which to judge the accuracy of citizens' perceptions of the public good. Some philosophers make compelling claims that freedom and equality are relatively "neutral" standards for making such a judgment,[3] but I wish to ask a more simple question. Regardless of the substance of their views, do individual citizens have wellinformed and coherent policy positions?
By "well-informed and coherent," I mean three things. First, a wellinformed view is one that is based upon a modest amount of relevant
Well-informed Americans ought to know a good deal about public issues and government. Michael Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter studied this subject in depth in What Americans Know about Politics and Why It Matters (1996). Using survey data from the National Election Studies, they reported discouraging results: "Only 13% of the more than 2,000 political questions examined could be answered correctly by 75% or more of those asked, and only 41% could be answered correctly by more than half the public." On questions regarding political institutions and processes, the median respondent gave correct answers 49 percent of the time. On foreign affairs, the median was 44 percent, and on domestic politics, the median was 39 percent. Across the population, knowledge was distributed in a bell-shaped curve, with relatively few respondents having very high or low knowledge scores, except that a relatively large percentage of Americans knew very little about domestic politics. The poor performance of respondents on these knowledge questions led the investigators to conclude that the American public's judgments are "hardly the stuff of informed consent, let alone of a working representative democracy." The authors also found that despite all the varied changes in public education, journalism, and politics over the past flfty years, "citizens appear no less informed about politics today than they were half a century ago." The bad news is that they also "appear no more informed."[5]
Evidence from both public surveys and psychological experiments shows that most Americans' political views are often not only poorly informed but also rather incoherent. One of the most comprehensive and well-supported theories of public opinion paints a humbling portrait of how we think about political issues. The political scientist John Zaller brought together previously unconnected flndings on attitude instability, public opinion shifts, media discourse, reelection campaigns,
A useful metaphor for understanding Zaller's claim is the "attitude pie." In this view, attitudes don't exist as coherent entities, as popularly imagined. Instead, a typical person holds conflicting views on an issue, plus a measure of neutrality. In two dimensions, one can think of an attitude as a pie sliced into thirds—one piece favoring a policy, one piece opposing it, and one piece representing a neutral attitude. When asked to give an opinion in a survey, a citizen might say she supports welfare reform, yet that support might only represent the largest "slice" of her different views on the issue: 40 percent of her thoughts on the subject might support reform, but another 35 percent might oppose it, with neutrality accounting for the remainder of her attitude.[7]
"Latitude theory" suggests another way of understanding indeflnite attitudes. This theory "depicts a preference not as an optimal point on a dimension of opinion, but as a line segment, within which all points may be roughly equivalent in attractiveness."[8] A person's attitude toward free trade is not really a single point on a spectrum (e.g., 5 on a ten-point scale), but rather a range of acceptable positions (e.g., 2 to 6 on the same scale). In this view, attitude instability is typically just movement within this range of acceptability, and citizens are not so much indecisive as they are flexible.
An open-minded person always welcomes conflicting considerations, and an ideal judgment weighs different facts, ideas, and perspectives in making a decision. That decision might remain open to reconsideration in light of new information and insight, but it is unlikely to change in the meantime because it was reached through careful deliberation and reflection. Though latitude theory and the attitude pie metaphor suggest ways in which unstable attitudes can still be well formed, the evidence
For most citizens, Zaller's receive-accept-sample model suggests that the main determinant of policy views is the balance of opinions expressed in the mainstream media. Thus, the public's reported attitudes hinge upon the average attitudes communicated through radio, television, newspapers, magazines, the Internet, and other mass media. Careful analysis of such media messages is a task far beyond the scope of this book, but two observations about the quality and authenticity of the public attitudes created through this process should give one pause. First, as the media critics Jay Blumer and Michael Gurevitch note, "Less and less of the political communication diet serves the citizen role—due to the predominant presentation of politics as a game; the irrelevance of campaign agendas to the post-election tasks of government; and the diminished space and time devoted to policy substance."[9] Both qualitative studies and systematic content analyses have found that the political news reaching mass audiences in the United States focuses more on the game of politics than the substance of policy and elections.[10] Second, there is no doubt as to the fact that paid media (e.g., political advertising and public relations campaigns) overrepresent the views of wealthy individuals and corporations. Political observers and cultural critics have provided ample evidence of this bias, but it is nearly inevitable that an uneven distribution of wealth results in an uneven distribution of paid, mass-mediated political messages.[11] When this steady stream of unbalanced messages flows into the drying creek bed of political journalism, the result is a river of public opinion biased toward particular interests.
The history of American public opinion, however, demonstrates that public opinion does have some independence from media influence. The reason is that relatively sophisticated and ideological citizens tend to choose the messages they sample; even more important, these citizens do not uniformly accept the messages they receive. Regardless of the balance of messages in the media, these citizens can form what appear to be informed and coherent policy views by sleight of hand. If a person can at least form a general ideological bias, he or she can rely on political elites who share that ideology to reach judgments instead: "Ideology … is a mechanism by which ordinary citizens make contact with specialists who are knowledgeable on controversial issues and who share the citizens' predispositions." In other words, so long as at
Ideology is not the norm for citizens. As Lance Bennett argues, "Most individuals struggle with internal belief conflicts, making the measurement of stable beliefs and dispositions beside the point, not to mention an unlikely result."[13] Though the pure concept of ideology may be somewhat mythical, it is still useful to estimate how many voters think along such lines. Based on a careful examination of National Election Study data, it appears that roughly half of the American electorate are "nonideological," in that their political attitudes and behaviors show little ideological consistency. Roughly 20 percent of the electorate show unambiguous signs of ideological organization, usually along the lines of the liberal-conservative dichotomy, which remains popular in American politics. Another third of the electorate demonstrate at least some higher-order structuring of their political beliefs.[14] Other researchers have demonstrated that even nonideological thinkers still organize their political beliefs into lower-level schemas,[15] but only those with an ideological orientation that corresponds to ongoing political discourse will have the advantages Zaller describes. One can only "make contact with specialists" and adopt their ideologically consistent policy positions if one recognizes one's ideology in them.
Even for the flfth of the population who think ideologically, Zaller's characterization is far from flattering. Citizens who are politically knowledgeable and ideological obtain large amounts of political information and simply fllter out ideologically inconsistent views. The result is far from a well-reasoned set of attitudes. Instead, these citizens develop a crude copy of the views of elites who appear to share a similar ideological orientation. As a result of careful flltering, ideological citizens appear to have developed a coherent set of informed attitudes corresponding to a more basic set of core values. In truth, these citizens have assumed that like-minded elites hold attitudes that the citizens themselves would hold if they thought through the issues. That assumption permits ideological citizens to articulate views on a broad range of policy issues without devoting scarce time and energy on researching those same issues. Sometimes, however, citizens' genuine
More generally, elites model attitudes that dismiss alternative points of view, and they pass this extremism down to citizens who might otherwise prefer a more balanced policy position. This problem becomes acute when citizens seek to understand the larger public good. Ideological flltering of elite messages does not help a citizen develop a broad public perspective on current issues. Such a viewpoint would listen to and incorporate diverse viewpoints and seek out common ground upon which all parties can stand. Citizens cannot develop an inclusive public voice if they systematically dismiss ideologically divergent views.[17]
Despite these limitations, there is still value in picking up "cues" from ideological elites. There are simply too many issues for average citizens to study and develop nuanced views on every policy debate. Identifying oneself with a liberal or conservative ideology and adopting the views of corresponding elites has its hazards, but it does permit a busy citizen to take strong positions on complex issues. So long as citizens must make a wide range of political choices, such cue-taking is an attractive alternative to exhausting research or studied indifference.