Beyond the Running Tally: Partisan Bias in Political Perceptions

I examine the impact of long-term partisan loyalties on perceptions of specific political figures and events. In contrast to the notion of partisanship as a simple running tally of political assessments, I show that party identification is a pervasive dynamic force shaping citizens' perceptions of, and reactions to, the political world. My analysis employs panel data to isolate the impact of partisan bias in the context of a Bayesian model of opinion change; I also present more straightforward evidence of contrasts in Democrats' and Republicans' perceptions of objective politically relevant events. I conclude that partisan bias in political perceptions plays a crucial role in perpetuating and reinforcing sharp differences in opinion between Democrats and Republicans. This conclusion handsomely validates the emphasis placed by the authors of The American Voter on the role of enduring partisan commitments in shaping attitudes toward political objects.     

Policymaking and technology transfer: The need for national thinking laboratories

The objectives of this paper are to understand what is meant by better policymaking and more efficient technology transfer, to explore what is needed for their achievement, and to suggest an operational mechanism for improving the two processes.The author introduces a few new terms: (1) Inter-context information is defined, and its importance in decisionmaking, policymaking, technology transfer and education is pointed out; (2) a distinction is drawn between incidental technology transfer—initiated by the donor—and organized technology transfer—initiated by the recipient.The author suggests that National Thinking Laboratories should be established to promote organized technology transfer and to act as catalysts to organized policymaking. Their charter should be to match needs in one context to capabilities in another context. This charter is outlined in operational terms by five general objectives listed by the author. The National Thinking Laboratories are most urgently needed, particularly in the developing countries.     

The effects of primary season debates on public opinion

This paper concerns the effects of primary season presidential debates on public opinion. Using a quasi-experimental design, we investigate one of the Democratic debates conducted during the 1988 campaign. We attempt to link the actual statements of the candidates with the reactions of our subjects. We find that viewers' opinions of the candidates changed dramatically after watching the debate, and that these changes are related to subjects' assessments of the candidates' images and debating styles (rather than their presentations of substantive issue positions). We speculate on some of the reasons for our findings, and discuss the differences between primary season and general election debates.     

Institutional change and the delivery of urban public services

Problems associated with providing efficient and equitable distribution of public services are attributable in part to the inabilities of government or other public institutions to be responsive to requirements of their clientele. To permit a better understanding of the nature of such institutional failures, and to suggest avenues of effective reform, this paper views institutional systems of service provision in a control systems framework. In this perspective, the elements of feedback are seen as essential to successful system performance over time and changing conditions. The paper identifies the kinds of error signals a system needs to generate, and the types of corrective mechanisms that it may employ, and then discusses three basic modes of institutional reform—performance evaluation, decentralization, and market competition—for improving the dynamic capability of systems of providing urban public services. Two service areas—sanitation and criminal corrections—are used for illustrating possible applications of the reform strategies.The author wishes to thank his colleagues at the Urban Institute, especially Richard P. Burton, for suggestions and comments on the substance and style of the paper. This paper is based on ideas first presented by the author at the First Annual Convention of the World Future Society, May, 1971. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of The Urban Institute or its sponsors.     

Information,intelligence, enlightened public policy: Functions and organization of societal feedback

Normative properties which make social statistics useful as social indicators are illuminated by considering the functions systematic social knowledge has at various levels of social organization and the involvements of actors at these various levels in roles which result in such knowledge. Modes and degrees of generalization which make knowledge useful for action at the lowest levels of social organization (information) or for administration at intermediate bureaucratic levels (intelligence) are not necessarily applicable to the formation of broad social policy (policy knowledge) or for affecting the general conceptions of the social world held by broad public (enlightenment). The latter two functions are not always well served by data which have been collected and ordered by systems primarily responsive to the former two functions.Portions of this paper were presented at the 65th Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, New York City, 6 September 1969 and at a Colloquium on Urban Intelligence Systems at the Center for Urban Studies, Wayne State University, 17 April, 1969.     

American welfare strategies: Three programs under the social security act

In the United States, a single piece of legislation, the Social Security Act, is the major vehicle through which the cash assistance to citizens is provided. This act contains many subprograms, programs so different in concept, administration and programmatic implication that many people do not know that the same piece of legislation makes them all possible. In this paper three programs—social security, unemployment compensation, and public assistance—are examined in a sociohistorical, sociocultural context. The roots of these programs are analyzed, their current operations outlined, and the policy problems currently confronting them are detailed. The ways in which the programs relate to the political mythology of the society is seen as important. Because of the continual conflicts arising out of the administration of public assistance, three special cases involving that program are mentioned.Special thanks is due to Mrs. Shirley Roles, who made many useful conceptual and editorial suggestions.     

Stability and change in political attitudes: Observed,recalled, and “explained”

Using data from a panel survey of members of two generations, this study explores observed change in policy opinions across a 9-year span and respondents' recollections and explanations of their self-perceived attitude shifts. In general, remembrances corresponded poorly to opinions as originally expressed, with respondents perceiving that they were more attitudinally stable than was actually observed. When attempting to reconstruct their past political attitudes, individuals appeared to rely on simple rules of thumb such as one might employ to account for another's behavior. Finally, respondents readily supplied explanations for their self-perceived attitude history, even when those perceptions directly contradicted observed opinion change. It is argued that these results are not artifacts of survey measurement problems. Instead, they indicate that policy attitudes generally do not have strong cognitive representations, are eminently changeable, and once they are changed, an individual's cognitive autobiography is revised so as to render the changes invisible.     

The possibility of a desirable minimal state

There is a near consensus that organized special interests use influence to expand government into activities that are detrimental to the public at large. Consequently, as Lee (1989) suggests, it would be desirable if the general public had more control over political decisions — if government were more responsive to the public interest. However, the public interest like rent-seeking, is a subjective concept (Pasour, 1987).The possible existence of a desirable minimal state is not disproved by an approach that assumes utilities are interpersonally comparable. Individual utilities are subjective and ordinal and hence, cannot be added or weighted to determine the level of government that is socially optimal. If one accepts the subjectivist approach, it follows that no one can decide upon any policy whatever in the absence of an ultimate ethical or value judgment (Rothbard, 1982: 212). In this respect, determining the desirable minimal state is no different from determining whether an individual government program is desirable (or whether it represents rent-seeking waste).     

Making decentralization work: The view from City Hall

The success of decentralization experiments depends ironically on central government—and, in particular, on the character of City Hall initiatives, designs, and administrative organization. Urban administrators were forced to experiment in the dark with decentralization, and their initiatives often traced an erratic, evolutionary course marked by false steps and by serendipity. In particular, programs that looked promising from a City Hall perspective often failed because they were insensitive to street-level behavior. City Hall initiatives have also been hampered by problems of cooperation between citizens and public employees and by coordination within government. Seen in this light, successful decentralization requires a learning process in which citizens and public employees develop strategies for working together on focused neighborhood problems.This article is based on Chapter 8 of my book, Neighborhood Democracy: The Politics and Impacts of Decentralization (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1973).     

Evolution,consciousness, and political thinking

Evolutionary theory is utilized to sketch the outline of a performance-based perspective of political thinking. It is argued that human consciousness evolved as an emergent and interactive mechanism for enabling the individual to cope strategically with environmental exigencies. Within the context of this evolutionary perspective, consciousness at the individual level is shown to develop in patterned yet flexible and individually variable ways as a result of the interaction of biological and environmental variables including, among the latter, those elements of the social environment like ideas, values, and intentions, as well as institutional patterns of conflict, affiliation, and authority, which are themselves products of coping strategies. Political thinking, it is suggested, is a strategic coping enterprise involving equilibration between the individual's own strivings and social demands for conformity in collective affairs.     

Getting into the action

Using policy sciences in the federal government to create better public programs requires the right climate for analysis plus a good set of tactics for analysts to follow. The ideal climate includes close association between analysts and highest authorities, strong support from the top, the existence of expanding budgets and promising discontinuities—unusual events when the opportunity becomes ripe for dynamic change. Effective tactics for the policy science practitioner include staying in the real conversations where decisions are made, spreading the credit for findings, acquiring allies to support positions, winning early battles to prove their worth, and inviting intensive internal reviews. Suggestions on staffing and on choosing likely subjects so analysis can reap benefits, along with a list of dangers to avoid, conclude the paper. The points are illustrated with actual examples in the federal agencies.From an address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Boston, Massachusetts, December 28, 1969.     

The dynamics of interpersonal attitudinal influence: Some additional evidence

The process by which one individual or group of individuals influences the attitudes of another is an important area of concern for students of political behavior. A few years ago a major political science journal published an article pointing to the salience of perceptual accuracy and issue salience in this regard. Interpersonal affective relationships were also considered but dismissed as lacking independent causal significance.Through parallel analysis of a separate data base, along with additional insights from a social conditioning approach, this report attempts to show that affectis an important variable mediating interpersonal attitudinal influence. It does so in multiplicative interaction with measures of parental cue-giving, such as issue salience. Hence, adding affect to the statistical modelafter removing the effects of cue-giving masks the joint effects.     

Policy sciences and the market

The most recent response of our universities to the challenge presented by the urban crisis—the domestic problems that show their dramatic symptoms in our cities—has taken the form of new graduate programs in the policy sciences. They are widely diverse in course content, teaching methods, measures to assure experiential inputs and devices for survival in the standard discipline-oriented university climate, but all have the common purpose of improving the quality and enlarging the quantity of both public policy practitioners and analysts.These pioneering activities are growing in an atmosphere of intense intellectual debate and self-examination. How best to design and conduct them with respect to these input parameters, appropriate overall roles for universities in policy science training, the nature of more rational decisionmaking as a process, and the roles of policy science-trained analysts and practitioners in it and in promoting it, are all under lively examination and discussion.What has thus far received relatively little attention is the nature of the decision universe in which the products of these programs, the graduates, will need to perform if they are to have impact. In this paper that universe and the relationship of the university to it are characterized in simple market terms. Doing so suggests that the most pressing problems for policy science lie on the demand, not the supply, side of the market. It will take the best efforts of policy scientists to address them successfully.     

Comparing technological risks in large scale national projects

In policy debates concerning large scale R&D efforts, the achievements of the Manhattan and Apollo projects are frequently cited as evidence of Yankee ingenuity and the ability to overcome technical obstacles. In this article, the factors which contributed to the success and failure of large scale crash development projects are analyzed systematically. Successes are distinguished from failures according to two criteria. First, while the successes are marked by parallel development of technological components which began only after the basic scientific and technical obstacles had been overcome and the basic feasibility had been demonstrated, in the failures, parallel development began much earlier. In addition, the successful crash projects, such as the atomic bomb effort and the moon program, were designed to meet static technical goals and did not depend on overcoming countermeasures. The unsuccessful projects, such as the Safeguard ballistic missile defense (BMD) system, failed in the face of changes in Soviet military technology.Using these criteria to analyze the Reagan administration's space-based ballistic missile defense program (SPBMD), the author concludes that despite the claims made by supporters, this R&D effort is not similar to the Manhattan or Apollo projects. Rather, like the Nuclear Airplane and Skybolt missile, parallel developments have begun prior to proof of feasibility, and like the Safeguard BMD, the SPBMD must adapt to countermeasures.     

The political consequences of thatcherism

While the economic changes effected by the British Conservative government in the 1980s are transparent, there is considerable debate as to whether there was a political dimension to the Thatcher Revolution. This paper argues that the Conservatives were successful in undertaking social structural reforms that effectively moved the political center of gravity in Britain to the right and toward the government's preferred market-oriented policy agenda. The government's strategy—manifest in the sale of council houses to tenants and of shares in privatized corporations to individuals, and its attack on organized labor—was narrowly targeted on the swing electorate among wealthier members of the lower socioeconomic strata. The Labour party has acknowledged the successes of the Conservatives' structural reforms, and has moved its policy platform, in Downsian fashion, to the right in order to regain electoral competitiveness.     

Economists and public policy: Chicago political economy versus conventional views

Both conventional welfare economics and public choice analysis suggest that economists have an important educational role to play in the public policy process — in improving the decision-making process. In sharp contrast, information and incentive problems related to voting rules, the bureaucracy, and the legislature do not arise in CPE because these processes are all perfect agents of interest groups. Consequently, the political process is efficient and there is no scope for beneficial economic analysis as it relates to the sugar program or other public policies. That is, the polity is efficient or it would be reordered by competing interest groups to make it so. But, as Mitchell (1989: 290) stresses, the important unanswered question in CPE remains: if there is no scope for improvement how and why does change occur?The analysis here suggests that the sugar program (and similar policies) may persist not because they are beneficial to the public at large but rather because information and incentive problems in the collective choice process lead to perverse results. Consequently, economic analysts can make a positive contribution to the public policy process by providing information about the responsiveness of alternative institutional arrangements to the values and choices of individual citizens (Wiseman, 1989). The Friedmans' Tide in the Affairs of Men view holds that economic analyses are important in changing public opinion, which is an important precursor to changes in public policy.     

Party identification and party closeness in comparative perspective

The present analysis uses data from 1974 and 1981 U. S. cross sections, which incorporate a panel, to compare the standard NES measure of party identification (ID) with a measure of partisanship derived from a party closeness question widely employed in cross-national research. Important features of the two scales are examined by transforming the closeness measure into a scale of very close, fairly close, not very close, and no preference corresponding to the seven-point ID scale. The scales are highly correlated and are similar in their reliability. More than 75% of the independents in the ID scale choose a party in the closeness version, and over half of these select the fairly close category. Respondents do not volunteer that they are independents when that alternative is not stated in the question.     

Public Policy and Social Science Training in Israel: The Impact of Structural Change on the Constitution of Knowledge

Recent reforms instituted in the network of higher education in Israel have focused on two elements: adjusting the managerial structure of the universities to make it more amenable to market criteria of efficiency and reducing the proportional weight of state funding to the universities compared to that allotted to the technical and professional colleges. The main elements of this process—increasing power of managers in academic institutions, shifting universities toward entrepreneurialism, the idea of the service university, and the massification of the system of higher education—are characteristic of similar changes in higher education in the U.K., the U.S.A., Canada, and Australia.This article examines the impact of organizational and structural changes on the categories of knowledge produced, and by extension on the production of knowledge itself. By examining changes in the organization of higher education in Israel and in particular in the social sciences, the article suggests that institutional and academic diversification have influenced the categorization of legitimate knowledge pertaining to society, the economy, and the political arena—the traditional terrain of the social sciences—and hence what is considered knowledge worth knowing about these subjects. Finally, the article points to certain political interests that have motivated this change, and examines their larger impact upon Israeli society.     

Candidates and issues in the 1980 campaign: The ideological connection

The notion that ideological perceptions in the mass public are shaped to some extent by elites and political candidates is widespread in the public opinion literature. However, there has been a lack of empirical research directly demonstrating the links between elites and the masses whose thinking they supposedly cue and structure. This paper attempts to show, through magnitude scale data collected over time in the 1980 campaign, the significant impact of political candidates in altering ideological perceptions of political stimuli. The chief carrier of ideology in 1980 is shown to be Ronald Reagan, whose strong issue stands and ideological label influenced perceptions of specific issues' ideological content. The findings are discussed in terms of both measurement problems in the ideology literature and more general theories of elite and environmental influences on mass political thought.     

Ethics and the unintended consequences of social research: A perspective from the sociology of science

It is argued that successful social science requires the development of a social ethic or sense of research responsibility. An examination of impediments to ethical reflection in sociology suggests that an individualistic orientation is ineffective in coping with the unintended consequences of social research. Such consequences can be particularly harmful in the sociology of science where policy research and governmental support for its production often entails an indiscriminate advocacy of knowledge. Such advocacy raises anew questions of the power of scientific knowledge, the definition of client-professional relationships, and the collection of data which may not only violate the intent of individuals and groups supplying information, but may undermine the credibility of sociology itself.An early version of this paper was presented at the Sixth Annual Alpha Kappa Delta Sociological Research Symposium, Richmond, Virginia, February 19–21, 1976.