The Political Education of John Zaller

Bibliographic Data

ID6252091
AuthorsLarry M Bartels (0009-0006-1260-1593, corresponding author)
Year2012
Volume24
Issue4
Pages463-488
Publication date2012-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCritical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0891-3811 • E-ISSN: 1933-8007
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/08913811.2012.788277
OpenAlexW1981371872
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited43

The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (1992) provided both a powerful framework for analyzing public opinion and a highly influential account of the role of political elites in shaping public opinion. Zaller's subsequent work has focused less on the mechanics of opinion change than on the role of public opinion in the broader political process. This evolution has entailed sustained attention to V. O. Key, Jr.'s concept of “latent opinion”—the opinion politicians are likely to face in the next election, as distinct from what is currently measureable in surveys. It has also entailed a downgrading of the importance attached to Media Politics—“the attempt to govern on the basis of words and images that diffuse through the mass media”—relative to Party Politics—“the substance of party performance.” In recent work, Zaller and his colleagues have emphasized the key role of interest groups and activists in shaping parties' policy choices, largely free of effective constraint by the mass public. This work provides a rather more pessimistic take on “The Question of Elite Domination of Public Opinion” than does the epilogue to The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion. Acknowledgments thanks participants in the Vanderbilt Political Behavior Workshop for helpful discussion, Jennifer Hochschild and Cindy Kam for sharing early drafts of their contributions to this symposium, Christopher Achen, John Geer, Marc Hetherington, and Lynn Vavreck for advice and criticism, and John Zaller for more than thirty years of arguments, intellectual inspiration, and friendship. Notes 1. Unless otherwise indicated, my characterizations of Zaller's views are based on personal communications. Since many of these communications occurred late at night in conference hotel bars, my renderings should be understood as approximations of what Zaller said, or meant to say, or should have meant to say, rather than as precise transcriptions of what he did say. 2. Converse's essay was reprinted as the centerpiece of a Critical Review (vol. 18, nos. 1–3) symposium on “Democratic Competence,” which itself has been republished in book form (Friedman and Friedman Citation2012). 3. Zaller has alleged that he did not read a single novel during his many years in graduate school, but celebrated the completion of his dissertation by reading Moby Dick. 4. A small but illuminating personal example: Zaller (Citation1992, 347) attributed to me a non-existent book entitled The Dynamics of Presidential Primaries, which has subsequently been cited by several other scholars who apparently found his title more compelling than the one I gave to a similar, actual book. 5. More rudimentary analyses of the relationship between media content and public opinion have sometimes been framed with reference to Zaller's analysis, but not structured as direct tests of his model. For example, Russell J. Dalton, Paul A. Beck, and Robert Huckfeldt (Citation1998) examined the relationship between newspaper coverage of the 1992 presidential campaign and survey respondents’ vote intentions, but took no account of the volume of newspaper coverage, of possible interactions between partisan predispositions and coverage, or of the potential conditioning effect of political awareness. The closest they came to directly applying Zaller's model was in an analysis relating perceptions of the partisan leanings of local newspapers to actual (editorial and news) content and the respondents’ own partisanship among more and less “attentive” subgroups. Dalton, Beck, and Huckfeldt (ibid., 121) interpreted the results of this analysis as providing “limited” support for Zaller's reception axiom—though it is hard to see why, since perceptions were only weakly related to actual content among the most attentive respondents, but twice as strongly related among those who said they paid only “some” attention to the campaign. 6. For example, I am not aware of any published discussion of a notable logical failing of Zaller's model of opinion change—the fact that successive receipt of two separate messages produces a different effect than receipt of a single message with the same (combined) content. Since the division of elite discourse into distinct “messages” is essentially arbitrary, one would wish for a model in which the same content produced the same expected effect regardless of whether it was analyzed piecemeal or in combination. On the analogous property of sequential coherence in the Bayesian model of opinion change see, for example, Lawrence D. Phillips (Citation1973, 64–67). 7. Agnieszka Dobrzynska and André Blais (Citation2008, 259) portrayed their own findings as providing “little support for the model.” They also interpreted analyses by Dalton, Beck, and Huckfeldt (Citation1998) and Paul Goren (Citation2004) as tending to disconfirm aspects of Zaller's theory. 8. A draft of the book dated 24 October 1999 is available at http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/zaller/media%20politics%20book%20.pdf. 9. Actually, Zaller's (Citation1999, 141) measure of “Net Media Negativity” had a small but statistically significant positive impact on the incumbent party's vote share. 10. In his memorable preface, Zaller (Citation1992, xii) claimed that this final chapter of the book was significantly shaped by “a weekend in the woods with it, a bottle of vodka, and a laptop”—a scholarly regimen he ascribed to the influence of Donald Kinder. 11. On the scientific consensus see, for example, the reports cited in a press release from the National Academies of Science (2010): “STRONG EVIDENCE ON CLIMATE CHANGE UNDERSCORES NEED FOR ACTIONS TO REDUCE EMISSIONS AND BEGIN ADAPTING TO IMPACTS” (http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID = 05192010). The 2012 Republican Party platform “flatly opposes ‘any and all cap and trade legislation’ to curtail greenhouse gases. It demands that Congress ‘take quick action to prohibit the EPA from moving forward with new greenhouse gas regulations.’ It criticizes the Obama administration's National Security Strategy for ‘elevat[ing] “climate change” to the level of a “severe threat” equivalent to foreign aggression.’” And it echoes an op-ed by Paul Ryan (Citation2009) accusing climate scientists of using “statistical tricks to distort their findings and intentionally mislead the public on the issue of climate change.” Meanwhile, a series of seven public-opinion surveys conducted between 2008 and 2012 found an average of 26 percent of the public denying that there is “solid evidence that the average temperature on earth has been getting warmer over the past four decades,” and another 13 percent unsure, with no clear trend over time (http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Research/Files/Papers/2012/6/11%20climate%20rabe%20borick/NSAPOCC_Belief_Spring%20Formatted.pdf). Public support for the notion that global warming is attributable in significant part to human activity is even lower. 12. Alan Blinder and Mark Zandi (Citation2010) estimated that the fiscal stimulus (of which the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 was by far the biggest component) increased real GDP in 2010 by 3.5 percent and lowered the unemployment rate by 1.4 percentage points, helping to avert what would otherwise have been “a much deeper slump.” As a USA Today story reporting their findings noted, “If President Obama expected anyone to say, ‘Thank you,’ however, he's been disappointed. In a recent USA Today/Gallup Poll, 59 percent of respondents disapproved of the president's handling of the economy. In the partisan war over the economy's performance, the word ‘stimulus’ has became [sic] synonymous with ‘boondoggle’” (http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/2010-08-30-stimulus30_CV_N.htm). A 2012 survey of 41 “distinguished experts with a keen interest in public policy from the major areas of economics” (http://www.igmchicago.org/igm-economic-experts-panel/poll-results?SurveyID = SV_cw5O9LNJL1oz4Xi) found 33 agreeing that the unemployment rate at the end of 2010 was lower than it would have been without the 2009 stimulus package (while only two disagreed) and 19 agreeing that the “the benefits of the stimulus will end up exceeding its costs” (while five disagreed; the rest indicated that they were “uncertain” or did not answer). A Pew poll conducted the same month found that 41 percent of the public disapproved of the stimulus, while only 37 percent approved (http://www.people-press.org/2012/02/23/auto-bailout-now-backed-stimulus-divisive/?src = prc-headline). 13. For example, Alec MacGillis (Citation2012) characterized Mitt Romney's “calling out Obama for weakening welfare work requirements” as “a blatant and knowing lie” characteristic of “The Post-Truth Campaign.” Sally Kohn (Citation2012) called Paul Ryan's vice presidential acceptance speech “an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech.” Ezra Klein (Citation2012) complained that “quite simply, the Romney campaign isn't adhering to the minimum standards required for a real policy conversation

Elite · Face (sociological concept · Mass media · Political science · Politics · Public opinion · Public relations · Social science · Sociology · Electoral Systems and Political Participation · Law · Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence · Social Media and Politics

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