The Rational Public

...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...

...The initial returns from this endeavor were not especially kind to the mass public...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...In short, those scholars who are more skeptical about the intelligence of public opinion will have ample ground for a counterattack...

...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...

...Overwhelmingly the most important, according to their analysis, are television news commentators and so-called experts...

...Most voters, it appeared, were not all that interested in politics...

...And who are these trusted intermediaries who are charged with such an important responsibility...

...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...

...Americans have also become substantially more supportive of freedom of speech and other civil liberties...

...On economic issues, they find much less dramatic change...

...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 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...

...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...

...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...

...ity of the average citizen to shoulder the substantial burdens of self-government...

...As it turns out, I strongly disagree with this verdict...

...As its title suggests, Page and Shapiro's book attempts to provide answers to two distinct sets of questions...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...Commonweal...

...On the one hand, they have presented a remarkably wide-ranging and insightful defense of the intelligence and capacity of the mass public...

...and their general conclusion is that distortions, misinformation, and manipulation in America tend to have a decidedly right-wing slant, highly supportive of capitalism, minimal government, and the status quo...

...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 play s a crucial role in their overall argument...

...There were some signs of acon-servative trend in the late 1970s...

...At this point, I must plead to being something of an interested party, since I am the author of another book on the same sub23 October 1992: 21 ject published this year...

...I do have a number of questions about The Rational Public—in particular, about whether its two "halves" really fit together...

...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...

...It is this tradition that is boldly taken on by Benjamin I. Page and Robert Y. Shapiro...

...Does this argument hold up...

...It is likely to have a central place in academic work on the subject for years to come...

...but, they conclude, "in nearly every case this 'right turn' of opinion was small and temporary...

...Whatever the limitations of individual voters, they insist, American public opinion as a whole is rational and coherent...

...William G. Mayer s long as there have been democracies, there have been questions about the capac...

...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...

...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...

...Well, it depends on what you think of the media...

...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...

...Their opinions were not very stable or integrated into any kind of comprehensive ideology...

...Popular support for most forms of governmental spending and regulation has been high and generally stable...

...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...

...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...

...But Page and Shapiro's book is considerably more than this...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...About the only real fault they ascribe to the press is its tendency to believe government propaganda too readily...

...On social issues, for example, Page and Shapiro document a remarkable revolution in American attitudes about racial and gender equality...

...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...

...collective policy preferences are generally stable and change in understandable and predictable ways...