Perhaps the most pervasive criticism of polling is that by altering the wording of a question, pollsters can manipulate the results. Small changes in question wording can sometimes produce significantly different results. For example, in February 2010, the New York Times /CBS News poll found that 70 percent favored permitting “gay men and lesbians” to serve in the military whereas only 44 percent favored military service by “homosexuals” who “openly announce their sexual orientation.” Thus, proponents of gays and lesbians in the armed forces could rightly say that a solid public majority favored their military service while opponents could rightly counter that only a minority favored lifting the ban on open military service by homosexuals. This example illustrates why, in evaluating public opinion data, it is crucial to carefully evaluate how questions are posed. Fortunately, most major polling organizations now post their questionnaires online, thereby making it much easier than ever before for everyone to scrutinize their work.
A nuts-and-bolts knowledge of how polls are conducted will help you avoid the common mistake of taking poll results for solid fact. But being an informed consumer of polls also requires that you think about whether the questions are fair and unbiased. The good—or the harm—that polls do depends on how well the data are collected and how thoughtfully the data are interpreted.
Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton had very different views about the wisdom of common people. Jefferson trusted people’s good sense and believed that education would enable them to take the tasks of citizenship ever more seriously. Toward that end, he founded the University of Virginia. In contrast, Hamilton lacked confidence in people’s capacity for self-government. His response to Jefferson was the infamous phrase, “Your people, sir, is a great beast.”
If there had been polling data in the early days of the American republic, Hamilton would probably have delighted in throwing some of the results in Jefferson’s face. If public opinion analysts agree about anything, it is that the level of public knowledge about politics is dismally low. This is particularly true for young people, but the level of knowledge for the public overall is not particularly encouraging either. For example, in October 2008, the National Annenberg Election Survey asked a set of factual questions about some prominent policy stands taken by Obama and McCain during the campaign. The results were as follows:
If so many voters did not know about the candidates’ stands on these hotly debated issues, then there is little doubt that most were also unaware of the detailed policy platforms the candidates were running on.
Section 6.3 includes a discussion of what polls reveal about Americans’ political information. Democratic theory presumes that in a democracy people are well informed enough to guide the policies that their government pursues. Yet much political science research in the U.S. has uncovered shockingly low levels of public information about politics. Do you think the American public is well informed enough to guide the policies of the U.S. government?
Pollsters sometimes ask people about policy issues with which they are largely unfamiliar.
What do you think—should one take the findings from such polls with a big grain of salt?
No amount of Jeffersonian faith in the wisdom of the common people can erase the fact that Americans are not well informed about politics. Polls have regularly found that less than half the public can name their representative in the House. Asking people to explain their opinion on whether trade policy toward China should be liberalized, or whether research on the proposed “Star Wars” missile defense system should be continued, or whether the strategic oil reserve should be tapped when gasoline prices skyrocket often elicits blank looks. When trouble flares in a far-off country, polls regularly find that people have no idea where that country is. In fact, surveys show that many Americans lack a basic awareness of the world around them; you can see one such example in Figure 6.3 .
As Lance Bennett points out, these findings provide “a source of almost bitter humor in light of what the polls tell us about public information on other subjects.”28 For example, slogans from TV commercials are better recognized than famous political figures. And in a Zogby national poll in 2006, 74 percent of respondents were able to name each of the “Three Stooges”—Larry, Curly, and Moe—whereas just 42 percent could name each of the three branches of the U.S. government—judicial, executive, and legislative.
How can Americans, who live in the most information-rich society in the world, be so ill informed about politics? Some blame the schools. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., criticizes schools for a failure to teach “cultural literacy.”29 People, he says, often lack the basic contextual knowledge—for example, where Afghanistan is, or what the provisions of the Affordable Care Act are—necessary to understand and use the information they receive from the news media or from listening to political candidates. Nevertheless, it has been found that increased levels of education over the past five decades have scarcely raised public knowledge about politics.30 Despite the apparent glut of information provided by the media, Americans do not remember much about what they are exposed to through the media. (Of course, there are many critics who say that the media fail to provide much meaningful information.)
The “paradox of mass politics,” says Russell Neuman, is that the American political system works as well as it does given the discomforting lack of public knowledge about politics.31 Scholars have suggested numerous ways that this paradox can be resolved. Although many people may not know the ins and outs of most policy questions, some will base their political behavior on knowledge of just one issue that they really care about, such as abortion or environmental protection. Others will rely on simple information regarding which groups (Democrats, big business, environmentalists, Christian fundamentalists, etc.) are for and against a proposal, siding with the group or groups they trust the most.32 And finally, some people will simply vote for or against incumbent officeholders based on how satisfied they are with the job the government is doing.
The average American clearly has less political information than most analysts consider to be desirable. While this level of information is surely adequate to maintain our democracy, survey data plainly show that citizens with above-average levels of political knowledge are more likely to vote and to have stable and consistent opinions on policy issues. If political knowledge were to increase overall, it would in all likelihood be good for American democracy.
Let’s explore how much people know about politics. Let’s also consider what sorts of people are the best informed. In the American National Election Study of 2012, twelve factual questions were asked of a representative sample of the American public. Before we look at the results, go ahead and try to answer the questions yourself.
In the 2012 ANES study, the average respondent got 5.8 questions correct, or about 48 percent. Factors such as differences in education, family income, age group, gender, and racial group are related to political knowledge as you can see by clicking through the slideshow below.
Sadly, the American public has become increasingly dissatisfied with government in recent decades, as shown in Figure 6.4 . In the late 1950s and early 1960s, nearly three-quarters of Americans said that they trusted the government in Washington to do the right thing always or mostly. By the late 1960s, however, researchers started to see a precipitous drop in public trust in government. First Vietnam and then Watergate shook people’s confidence in the federal government. The economic troubles of the Carter years and the Iran hostage crisis helped continue the slide; by 1980, only one-quarter of the public thought the government could be trusted most of the time or always. Since then, trust in government has occasionally risen for a while, but the only time a majority said they could trust the government most of the time was in 2002, after the events of September 11.
This graph shows how people have responded over time to the following question: How much of the time do you think you can trust the government in Washington to do what is right—just about always, most of the time, or only some of the time?
When this question was written in 1958, survey researchers could not imagine that anyone would respond “never,” so the traditional wording of the trust in government question omits this option. In 2012, about 5 percent of respondents volunteered that they never trusted the government. Some pollsters have experimented with including the option of “never” and have found that as much as 10 percent of their sample will choose it.
SOURCES: Authors’ analysis of 1958–2012 American National Election Study data. As there were no election studies for 2006 and 2010 we have used the following sources for those years: December 2006 Pew Research Center poll; February 5–10, 2010 New York Times/CBS News Poll.
Some analysts have noted that a healthy dose of public cynicism helps to keep politicians on their toes. Others, however, note that a democracy is based on the consent of the governed and that a lack of public trust in the government is a reflection of their belief that the system is not serving them well. These more pessimistic analysts have frequently wondered whether such a cynical population would unite behind their government in a national emergency. Although the drop in political cynicism after September 11 was not too great, the fact that it occurred at all indicates that cynicism will not stop Americans from rallying behind their government in times of national crisis. Widespread political cynicism about government apparently applies only to “normal” times; it has not eroded Americans’ fundamental faith in our democracy.
Perhaps the greatest impact of declining trust in government since the 1960s has been to drain public support for policies that address the problems of poverty and racial inequality. Mark Hetherington argues, “People need to trust the government when they pay the costs but do not receive the benefits, which is exactly what antipoverty and race-targeted programs require of most Americans. When government programs require people to make sacrifices, they need to trust that the result will be a better future for everyone.”33 Hetherington’s careful data analysis shows that declining trust in government has caused many Americans to believe that “big government” solutions to social problems are wasteful and impractical, thereby draining public support from them. Indeed, during the debate over health care reform, President Obama’s advisers argued that the primary obstacle they faced was not persuading the public of the need for health care reform but, rather, convincing them to put sufficient trust in the government’s ability to carry out the reform.34 Obama acknowledged the problem in his 2010 State of the Union address, saying, “We have to recognize that we face more than a deficit of dollars right now. We face a deficit of trust—deep and corrosive doubts about how Washington works that have been growing for years.” In the 2012 election, Republicans tried to exploit such doubts about the trustworthiness of the federal government, arguing that their values favoring free enterprise solutions over governmental programs were more in tune with Americans’ basic values.
