The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in Americans' Policy Preferences. - book reviews

THE RATIONAL PUBLIC

Fifty Years of Trends in Americans' Policy Preferences

Benjamin I. Page and Robert Y. Shapiro University of Chicago Press, $35, 489 pp.

As long as there have been democracies, there have been questions about the capacity of the average citizen to shoulder the substantial burdens of self-government. Plato and Aristotle were among the first in a long line of skeptics to voice doubts about the wisdom of any system that entrusted such important powers to the masses.

If the debate about the intelligence of public opinion is an old one, however, it took on a new complexion in the late 1930s, when the development of sample surveys allowed social scientists to measure the thoughts and attributes of the typical citizen with considerably more precision. The initial returns from this endeavor were not especially kind to the mass public. The first major academic voting studies in particular, The People's Choice (1944) and The American Voter (1960), painted a decidedly pessimistic portrait of the electorate. Most voters, it appeared, were not all that interested in politics; they tended to be poorly informed, lacking even many of the most basic facts that seemed necessary to participate in politics or assess current policy controversies. Their opinions were not very stable or integrated into any kind of comprehensive ideology; their voting decisions were dominated by emotional attachments to political parties, rather than by the kind of careful, informed reasoning that was necessary for issue voting. And though many particulars in this indictment have been challenged and qualified, on the whole, its generally skeptical tone has become part of the received wisdom of political science.

It is this tradition that is boldly taken on by Benjamin I. Page and Robert Y. Shapiro. As its title suggests, Page and Shapiro' s book attempts to provide answers to two distinct sets of questions. On the one hand, they have presented a remarkably wide-ranging and insightful defense of the intelligence and capacity of the mass public. Whatever the limitations of individual voters, they insist, American public opinion as a whole is rational and coherent; collective policy preferences are generally stable and change in understandable and predictable ways; the mass public draws reasonable distinctions and evaluates policies on the basis of its own real interests and a genuine conception of the public good.

But Page and Shapiro's book is considerably more than this. As the second half of their title indicates, their book is also the first comprehensive study of changes in mass attitudes. Somewhat surprisingly, this topic has remained, until quite recently, a largely unexplored area of public opinion research. But there are now a fairly large number of instances where the same survey question has been asked on a regular basis over a period of thirty or even fifty years. The Rational Public is the first major attempt to bring all these data together, and see what they tell us about the changing shape of American public opinion.

At this point, I must plead to being something of an interested party, since I am the author of another book on the same subject published this year. And it is precisely my own work that gives me some perspective for appreciating the enormous amount of research and analysis that went into the The Rational Public, and the significant contribution it makes to our understanding of public opinion. Page and Shapiro draw on results from dozens of different polling organizations, much of which was previously unpublished or located in widely scattered archives and reference sources. The result, in chapters 3-6, is a tour through the major changes in American public opinion on virtually every issue in social, economic, and foreign policy.

On social issues, for example, Page and Shapiro document a remarkable revolution in American attitudes about racial and gender equality. Since the late 1930s and early 1940s, there has been a huge increase in the public' s opposition to racial discrimination and in its willingness to accord an equal role to women in such areas as politics and business. Americans have also become substantially more supportive of freedom of speech and other civil liberties. Yet, the news wasn't all good for liberals: since the mid-1960s, there has been a decisive conservative shift in attitudes about crime and punishment, especially the death penalty.

On economic issues, they find much less dramatic change. Popular support for most forms of governmental spending and regulation has been high and generally stable. There were some signs of a conservative trend in the late 1970s; but, they conclude, "in nearly every case this 'right turn' of opinion was small and temporary." Their discussion of foreign policy shows, not surprisingly, the sharp reaction against military intervention and the cold war in the late 1960s, followed by a resurgence of anticommunism in the late 1970s, and then the final disintegration of the cold war mentality in the late 1980s. Yet, throughout this period, Page and Shapiro find that isolationism had strikingly little appeal: whatever specific policies they might endorse or oppose, most Americans have come to accept the proposition that the United States must play an active role in world affairs.

I do have a number of questions about The Rational Public in particular, about whether its two "halves" really fit together. Though I agree with most of the particular conclusions about the changes and trends in public opinion, I don't think a lot of it proves, one way or another, whether public opinion is rational.

Consider just one example: One of the authors' arguments is that collective public opinion is rational not simply because individuals are able to respond to the changes they directly experience in the world around them, but because "a complex social system" allows for the possibility of "collective deliberation....Thus ordinary citizens need not master the intricacies of policy analysis, but can learn enough to form intelligent preferences simply by knowing whom to trust for a reliable conclusion."

And who are these trusted intermediaries who are charged with such an important responsibility? Overwhelmingly the most important, according to their analysis, are television news commentators and so-called experts. And since, as they acknowledge, experts are often selected and sanctioned by the media, this argument to a large extent boils down to the claim that public opinion is intelligent because it relies on cues from the media for sorting through complicated policy controversies.

Does this argument hold up? Well, it depends on what you think of the media. Page and Shapiro devote a lot of attention to how the media have covered various issues (though this part of their analysis comes entirely from secondary sources); and their general conclusion is that distortions, misinformation, and manipulation in America tend to have a decidedly fight-wing slant, highly supportive of capitalism, minimal government, and the status quo. As it turns out, I strongly disagree with this verdict. Particularly on social and cultural questions (such as abortion), I think the evidence is overwhelming that the media have a strong liberal (though not radical) bias.

My purpose in raising this issue is not to rehash an old controversy, but to make the point that Page and Shapiro's perspective on media bias plays a crucial role in their overall argument. Almost all of their examples of cases in which the public was misled or misinformed are instances where government withheld or distorted the information available to the mass public. About the only real fault they ascribe to the press is its tendency to believe government propaganda too readily. If they were more willing to see the media as an institution with its own set of biases and distortions, they might wonder more about the wisdom of a system that accords such extraordinary power to an unrepresentative and largely unaccountable institution.

In short, those scholars who are more skeptical about the intelligence of public opinion will have ample ground for a counterattack. Yet, anyone who feels so inclined will be undertaking a major task, for part of the achievement of this book is the remarkable diversity of evidence and argument that Page and Shapiro bring together in support of their central thesis. It is likely to have a central place in academic work on the subject for years to come.

WILLIAM G. MAYER is an assistant professor of political science at Northeastern University in Boston. His book The Changing American Mind was published by the University of Michigan Press.

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