The “Most Important Problem” Dataset (MIPD): a new dataset on American issue importance

Abstract

This article introduces the Most Important Problem Dataset (MIPD). The MIPD provides individual-level responses by Americans to “most important problem” questions from 1939 to 2015 coded into 58 different problem categories. The MIPD also contains individual-level information on demographics, economic evaluations, partisan preferences, approval and party competencies. This dataset can help answer questions about how the public prioritizes all problems, domestic and foreign, and we demonstrate how these data can shed light on how circumstances influence foreign policy attentiveness. Our exploratory analysis of foreign policy issue attention reveals some notable patterns about foreign policy public opinion. First, foreign policy issues rarely eclipse economic issues on the public’s problem agenda, so efforts to shift attention from poor economic performance to foreign policy via diversionary maneuvers are unlikely to be successful in the long term. Second, we find no evidence that partisan preferences—whether characterized as partisan identification or ideology—motivate partisans to prioritize different problems owing to perceptions of issue ownership. Instead, Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, respond in similar fashions to shifting domestic and international conditions.

An attentional theory of issue-carrying capacity

“…I delve further into gender differences in policy priorities by disaggregating feminine and masculine issues to examine the effect of gender on individual policy categories. 5 I estimate logistic regression models that predict the likelihood of a respondent mentioning given policy issues as the most important problems, wherein the dependent variables are 29 policy categories coded by Heffington et al (2017) using the Singer coding scheme. The figure 3.1 depicts the odds ratios on the variable female that are derived from 29 empirical models.…”

“…The second part of the empirical investigation of sex differences in agenda diversity utilizes the 'Most Important Problem' Dataset (MIPD) (Heffington, Park and Williams 2017). The MIPD contains the individual-level responses to open-ended 'most important problem' questions from 1935-2015 in the US.…”

“…Leveraging a recently introduced dataset that codes over 930,000 Americans' responses to the "most important problem" from 1939-2015 using the same coding schemes (Heffington et al 2017), I undertake the most comprehensive test of gender differences in policy priorities. This new dataset allows me to compare Americans'…”

“…These surveys are unique in that the respondents were asked seven open-ended most important prob-lem questions, which allows for much more variation as compared to standard MIP surveys. Secondly, I make use of a recently introduced and the most comprehensive dataset of most important problem surveys (Heffington, Park and Williams 2017).…”

“…utilized the Most Important Problem Dataset (MIPD), a dataset that contains Americans' responses to the 'most important problem' question from 686 public opinion surveys that were conducted by various organizations between1939-2015(Heffington et al 2017. The MIPD codes the most important problem responses using three coding schemes, the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP), Singer and the Manifesto Research on Political Representation (MARPOR).…”