Search

Scholars suspect that public policies affect public opinion, but the empirical evidence is mixed, and contemporary theories advance offsetting predictions. This study examines two allegedly similar private investment account programs that differ in politically relevant ways. Statistical analyses show that owners of Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) and Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) experience policy feedback effects, but in opposite directions. More specifically, matched comparisons of respondents in a national survey indicate that IRA participants are more likely to favor Social Security privatization than individuals without IRAs. In contrast, HSA participants are less likely to prefer consumer-driven health coverage in which individuals are empowered to make choices. Overall, the findings suggest that policies alter public opinion preferences but that the effects depend on programmatic design and performance.

Analogies have captivated philosophers for millennia, yet their effects on modern public opinion preferences remain largely unexplored. Nevertheless, the lack of evidence as to whether analogies aid in political persuasion has not stopped politicians from using these rhetorical devices in public debates. To examine such strategic attempts to garner political support, we conducted survey experiments in the United States that featured the analogical arguments being used by Democrats and Republicans as well as some of the policy rationales that accompanied their appeals. The results revealed that analogies—especially those that also provided the underlying policy logic—increased support for individual health coverage mandates, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and even single payer national health proposals. However, we demonstrated that rebutting flawed analogies was also possible. Thus, within the health care arena, framing proposals with analogies can alter policy preferences significantly, providing a way to deliver policy rationales persuasively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democratic responsiveness concerns the degree to which government policies match public preferences. Responsiveness studies typically use national surveys to characterize public opinion, but whether poll questions overlap with the policy agenda is unknown. The first of two empirical analyses presented here, with hundreds of issues on the national agenda in the United States from 1947 to 2000, reveals that public opinion is mostly unrelated to policy outcomes. The picture appears to be even more ominous--that is, opinion and policy are negatively related--on highly salient issues that attract media attention. A second study revisiting published work confirms that responsiveness patterns look different depending upon whether studies of opinionpolicy connections (a) begin with survey data and then examine policy developments, or (b) begin with national legislative agenda issues and then examine survey data. Thus, conclusions about democratic responsiveness depend upon the issues that are examined, and often opinion surveys do not include questions about tangible public policy options. In that sense, future changes in democratic responsiveness might go undetected because scholars often lack data on what goes into the denominator of democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political knowledge is a central concept in the study of public opinion and political behavior. Yet what the field collectively believes about this construct is based on dozens of studies using different indicators of knowledge. We identify two theoretically relevant dimensions: a temporal dimension that corresponds to the time when a fact was established and a topical dimension that relates to whether the fact is policy-specific or general. The resulting typology yields four types of knowledge questions. In an analysis of more than 300 knowledge items from late in the first decade of the 2000s, we examine whether classic findings regarding the predictors of knowledge withstand differences across types of questions. In the case of education and the mass media, the mechanisms for becoming informed operate differently across question types. However, differences in the levels of knowledge between men and women are robust, reinforcing the importance of including gender-relevant items in knowledge batteries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]