Search results

AbstractWhat a public report should be and what it can do.

A president skillful enough, or fortunate enough, to preside over a healthy economy is rewarded with public support. Examined are two conceptions of the individual citizen that might underlie this aggregate relationship. A president's popularity might decline when economic times are bad because citizens in effect blame him for their personal hardships -- the pocketbook citizen hypothesis -- or because they see the president as failing to cope adequately with national economic problems, quite apart from the economic dislocations of private life -- the sociotropic citizen hypothesis. Across a variety of tests, results from national surveys covering the Nixon, Ford, & Carter presidencies consistently supported the sociotropic hypothesis. Several promising explanations for the findings are suggested, & their normative implications explored. 2 Tables, 3 Figures. AA.

This report provides a sample of public opinion questions concerning the current tax system, the Internal Revenue Service, and proposals for tax reform. It will be updated as new poll results become available. The report is for the use of Members as they consider legislation currently before the 105 Congress.

"Public Opinion and Foreign Policy" published on by Oxford University Press.

Objective. Social science considers values a key motivator of human behavior, yet studies of values in public opinion have tended to focus on more limited political values. I investigate how a general theory of human values (Schwartz, 1992) shapes public opinion. In one dimension, individuals are motivated by a desire for independent thought and action versus conformity to traditional social norms; in the second, individuals are motivated by a desire to care for others versus control or achieve superior social status over them.Methods. Statistical analysis of the European Social Survey, nationally representative surveys in 15 western European nations.Results. Human values are systematically related to a citizen's left‐right self‐identification, displaying appropriate sensitivity to party system context in Scandinavia, and explaining attitudes toward ethnic minority immigration, even when controlling for reasonable alternate explanations.Conclusion. Personal values along these two dimensions of social conflict merit further attention as sources of public opinion.

The authors begin the construction of a generalizable theory of casualties and opinion, reexamining the logic employed by Mueller and showing that although human costs are an important predictor of wartime opinion, Mueller's operationalization of those costs solely as the log of cumulative national casualties is problematic and incomplete. The authors argue that temporally proximate costs, captured as marginal casualty figures, are an important additional aspect of human costs and a critical factor in determining wartime opinion. Using Mueller's data on opinion in the Vietnam and Korean wars, the authors find that marginal casualties are important in explaining opinion when casualty accumulation is accelerating, and earlier findings about the importance and generalizability of the log of cumulative casualties as the sole casualty-based predictor of opinion are overstated. Finally, the authors offer some thoughts about other factors that should be considered when building a model of war deaths and domestic opinion.