In his inaugural MacArthur lecture to a Northwestern audience on November 15, 2001, political scientist Dennis Chong assessed the quality of mass public opinion in the United States and the conditions in a democratic society that foster development of an articulate electorate.  According to Chong, it has become conventional wisdom among scholars that citizens, on the whole, are poorly informed about the institutions and issues of American government and that they rarely display stable, consistent, principled views about political issues.

Particularly vexing in public opinion research, he said, are “framing effects” that occur when small changes in the wording of questions produce large changes in the opinions that people express. In one vivid example, only about 20% of the American public say too little is being spent on “welfare”; but about 65% say too little is being spent on “assistance to the poor.”  Alternative phrasings of the same basic question can significantly alter its meaning to respondents, even if the change in connotation is not always obvious to the researcher.

Chong, an IPR faculty fellow, observed that weak public preferences can be a serious problem in a democratic political system premised on the rule of the people. Public opinion may be so superficial that radically different representations of public opinion may be generated by manipulating how questions are framed. Either the public has no attitudes on many political issues, he suggested, or else it holds so many fragmentary and conflicting attitudes that it cannot reconcile or resolve them. Can democracy have a popular foundation, he asked, if we cannot reliably identify the public’s preferences?

The good news is that there are ways to counteract superficial opinions and to strengthen public preferences, said Chong. Public deliberation and exposure to argumentation and information about political affairs has been shown to reduce ambivalence and improve the quality of opinion. “The opinions of informed individuals are more likely to be anchored by individual and group interests, moral values, principles, and other reasons.”  

On the other hand, people who remain outside the political process, who are uninformed, and who do not participate in discussion or deliberation of issues, are more likely to be influenced by the framing and wording of survey questions because their opinions have weaker foundations. 

Chong, who has studied public opinion on civil liberties issues, said great variation in public opinion by levels of knowledge and interest is evident in how people discuss controversial issues in open-ended interviews and in how they respond to these issues in structured opinion surveys. Some individuals are “maneuvered” easily by alternative framings of the issues, while others, by virtue of their greater involvement in public affairs, have acquired a more resilient perspective on the issues that is less susceptible to manipulation. 

Chong cautioned that “having opinions is only half the problem in a democracy; people also must balance their strong opinions with a capacity to be flexible and open-minded.” When the first forays into survey research in the 1940s and ’50s found citizens apathetic about politics, some scholars speculated that there might be some virtue in this condition, Chong said. Because democracy requires compromise and coalition-building, they argued that apathy could provide a better underpinning for a stable democratic system than a more intensely interested, politically active citizenry. High interest, it was feared, would lead to constant factional disputes and little collective reconciliation on important issues.

“How, then, can we have a more participatory democracy without developing an intense and intransigent collective public inimical to democratic debate and discussion?” Chong asked. The answer is that “somehow, the taste for opinions must be tempered by a taste for deliberation and open-mindedness.”

An active public debate must be balanced by popular acceptance of a norm of tolerance toward differences of opinion. Chong sees some hope for this outcome in survey research findings that people who participate to a greater degree in public affairs, irrespective of their ideological leanings, are also more likely to support the basic democratic right of free expression.