“…In other words, it assumes that the country would equally prefer liberal decisions for all cases within a term—from economics, to civil liberties, to defense. However, recent work finds that there is actual meaningful variation in American public opinion between issues (Bryan & Kromphardt, 2016; Coggins, Stimson, Atkinson, & Baumgartner, n.d.; Rice, 2014). In a given term, the country might be relatively conservative on, for example, civil rights but quite liberal on economics.…”