Each of four theoretical traditions in the study of American politics-which can be characterized as theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic-Elite Domination, and two types of interest-group pluralism, Majoritarian Pluralism and Biased Pluralism-offers different predictions about which sets of actors have how much influence over public policy: average citizens; economic elites; and organized interest groups, mass-based or business-oriented. A great deal of empirical research speaks to the policy influence of one or another set of actors, but until recently it has not been possible to test these contrasting theoretical predictions against each other within a single statistical model. We report on an effort to do so, using a unique data set that includes measures of the key variables for 1,779 policy issues. Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.
I n contrast with the expectations of many analysts, I find that raw policy-specific facts, such as the direction of change in the crime rate or the amount of the federal budget devoted to foreign aid, have a significant influence on the public's political judgments. Using both traditional survey methods and survey-based randomized experiments, I show that ignorance of policy-specific information leads many Americans to hold political views different from those they would hold otherwise. I also show that the effect of policy-specific information is not adequately captured by the measures of general political knowledge used in previous research. Finally, I show that the effect of policy-specific ignorance is greatest for Americans with the highest levels of political knowledge. Rather than serve to dilute the influence of new information, general knowledge (and the cognitive capacities it reflects) appears to facilitate the incorporation of new policy-specific information into political judgments.T he American public's ignorance of political matters is well documented, but the consequences for democracy are far less clear. For some, a disengaged and ill-informed citizenry signifies a failure of democracy. But for others, the practical question is whether political judgments would be any different if citizens were better informed. If a "rationally ignorant" public can nevertheless manage to approximate the "enlightened preferences" that a fully educated and engaged citizenry would hold, then perhaps democratic government and political ignorance can coexist.A growing body of research assesses the extent to which Americans' political judgments would differ if the public were well informed about politics. The most straightforward way to address this issue is to inform a representative group of citizens about some set of political matters and see whether their judgments change as a result. This is the approach taken by James Fishkin and his colleagues in a series of "deliberative polls" that bring together a large number of randomly selected individuals and provide them with a wealth of information about specific political issues (Fishkin 1997;Luskin and Fishkin 1998). This strategy has many advantages but is limited by its great expense and by the unusual circumstances in which information is acquired. In addition, deliberative polls are explicitly designed to assess the effects of both information and deliberation on citizens' policy preferences. We cannot judge how much of the change revealed by a deliberative poll should be attributed to new information of the sort that might be acquired through the media and how much is due to the process of collective deliberation.A second approach uses statistical models rather than experimental interventions to compare the political preferences of more and less informed Americans.
Crime and welfare are now widely viewed as “coded” issues that activate white Americans' negative views of blacks without explicitly raising the “race card.” But does the desire of whites to combat crime or curtail welfare really stem from their dislike of blacks? Are these not pressing problems about which Americans rightly should be concerned—apart from any associations these issues may have with race? In this paper I assess the extent to which white Americans' opposition to welfare is rooted in their attitudes toward blacks. Using conventional survey modeling techniques and a randomized survey-based experiment from a national telephone survey, I find that racial attitudes are the single most important influence on whites' welfare views. I also show that whites hold similar views of comparably described black and white welfare mothers, but that negative views of black welfare mothers are more politically potent, generating greater opposition to welfare than comparable views of white welfare mothers.
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