Do Politicians listen to the public? When? How often? Or are the views of the public manipulated or used strategically by elites? In this book, leading scholars of American politics assess and debate the impact of public opinion on policymaking. Central questions include the changing relationships between opinion and policy over time, how key actors use public opinion to formulate domestic and foreign policy, and how new measurement techniques might improve our understanding of the results of polls and survey research. These state-of-the-art essays address issues that lie at the heart of democratic governance today.
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 Americanpolitics, public opinion, and polling, this state-of-the-art collection addresses issues that lie at the heart of democratic governance today.
A valuable synthesis of the many strands of research focused on the social mechanisms that connect public opinion and public policy . The breadth and quality of chapters compiled in Navigating Public Opinion is likely to earn the volume a familiar place on the public opinion researcher's shelf.
