Invoking
Public Opinion: Polls, Policy Debates,
and the Future of Social Security
Fay
Lomax Cook, Jason Barabas, and Benjamin I. Page
Abstract
Democracy, according to most accounts, is supposed
to involve policymakers paying attention to ordinary citizens. One
way that policy elites might be expected to demonstrate their attention
to the public is by explicitly acknowledging, mentioning, and discussing
public opinion. In this paper we address two research questions:
(1) How do policy elites invoke public opinion about Social Security?
(2) To what extent do the claims seem accurate based on evidence
available to us through public opinion surveys? We used presidential
statements on Social Security and witnesses' statements in congressional
hearings on Social Security to learn the number and kinds of claims
that policy elites make about Social Security. To find public opinion
data on Social Security, we conducted a Lexis-Nexis search of the
archives of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research. Our analyses
show that the majority of claims about public opinion are general
(i.e., no specific reference to a representative aggregate distribution
of public opinion) rather than specific and have to do with confidence
in the future of Social Security, the public's desire for reform
of Social Security, the popularity of Social Security, and support
for presidential initiatives and positions. When the president and
congressional witnesses make general claims about public opinion,
they are less likely to be backed by evidence than are their specific
claims. We conclude by discussing our concern about how well and
how accurately policy elites make use of public opinion data in
making claims about what the public thinks.
Fay Lomax Cook, School
of Education and Social Policy, Northwestern University
Jason Barabas, Graduate fellow, Department of
Political Science, Northwestern University
Benjamin I. Page, Department of Political Science,
Northwestern University
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