What we say vs. what they hear
By Lisa Stein
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"If ever U.S. politicians pay attention to public opinion, surely we would expect them to do so on such an important, contentious issue as the future of Social Security." - Fay Lomax Cook Photo by Mary Hanlon. |
A central tenet of democracy goes something like this: Elected representatives should establish and carry out policies that reflect the prevailing public opinion. Citizens express their views; politicians listen to them and act accordingly.
Of course, the relationship between public opinion and policy making is never that direct. It is particularly complicated in the sphere of social policy, where many of the people who require government assistance traditionally don't have a strong voice in government. Discerning the public's opinion of social programs requires diligence and depends a great deal on the questions, who is asking them and how they are asked. Policy makers have their own political agendas that influence what they choose to pay attention to and how they relate their findings back to the public.
In examining the tangled connection between public opinion and social policy, several questions emerge. To what degree does public opinion really affect social policy? How do policy makers invoke public opinion to advance their goals? What roles do politics and the media play in reflecting opinion and shaping policy?
These are a few of the questions studied by Fay Lomax Cook, professor of human development and social policy and director of the Institute for Policy Research. Cook's four books examine the views people hold about policies such as welfare programs and Social Security, and why they hold them. Recently her research has shifted toward analyzing how those policy makers use public opinion, particularly within the much-debated area of the future of Social Security.
"I have found that policy makers sometimes invoke public opinion to push their own agendas," Cook reports. "We have to look very carefully at what public opinion actually is, so that it is not used inappropriately. In policy debates, policy makers often pick and choose the results of public opinion surveys to argue for their own points of view without presenting the whole picture."
In the 1992 book Support for the American Welfare State: The Views of Congress and the Public, Cook and co-author Edith Barrett examined what the public truly thought about various social welfare programs. They focused on the mid-1980s, when President Reagan and his administration proposed drastic cutbacks to welfare programs, using as part of their justification the low support revealed in public opinion polls. The media reported these claims about welfare's crisis of legitimacy without questioning their accuracy.
Cook and Barrett completed their own opinion surveys, however, and found that the majority did, in fact, support social welfare programs. Bucking the common polling practice of asking people about their views on "welfare"-a broad, misleading term with negative connotations-Cook and Barrett's survey inquired how people felt about a broad range of seven specific social welfare programs. They discovered a majority of the public supported all seven programs and were satisfied that a portion of their tax dollars funded them. They also found similar levels of support among members of Congress. It appeared that welfare's crisis of legitimacy had been highly exaggerated.
As history reveals, the various welfare programs survived Reagan's tenure in office. The book concluded, "The public and their representatives in Congress support the social welfare state. They do not want any more cuts in the fabric of protection provided to all citizens by social welfare programs. Thus, it appears that the American welfare state is here to stay."
The conclusion was logical and based on extensive research. The problem was, just four years after the book's publication, President Clinton and Congress dismantled Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), an important component of the welfare state since the passage of the Social Security Act in 1935. In its place the federal government instituted Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, also known as the Personal Responsibility Act, which offered less comprehensive support.
In doing so, politicians again had invoked public opinion, saying that Americans didn't support welfare. "But they did not look at public support for AFDC specifically," Cook says. "It was all about support for 'welfare,' which to most people means getting something for nothing. AFDC had been a kind of federal government guarantee to low-income women and their children."
This stunning development prompted a shift in Cook's research. "I began to ask, 'How could this have happened?' I decided that my next study was going to focus on the politics of public policy."
Subsequently she has examined how policy elites have referred to public opinion in their debates over Social Security. She chose Social Security because, like "welfare," it is a hotly contested issue.
In a study completed in summer 2002, Cook and two colleagues studied public debate over Social Security from 1993 through 2000, focusing on presidential statements and the testimony of witnesses at congressional hearings. Then they looked at relevant national public opinion polls conducted between 1990 and 2000 and compared the claims made about public opinion against the polls' results.
Many policy elites claimed that public confidence in Social Security had eroded and proposed overhauls of the system. The vast majority of these claims, including those made by President Clinton, were general and were not backed by any specific survey. Cook found that the more general the claim, the less likely it was to be rooted in actual results of public opinion surveys.
An example was President Clinton's assertion that "young people in their 20s think it's more likely they will see UFOs than that they will ever collect Social Security." Various congressional witnesses made this dramatic statement repeatedly, which had emerged from a 1994 poll for the Third Millennium organization. But Cook found that the poll's results were misleading and its methodology flawed.
Researchers had surveyed Americans ages 18 to 34 about whether they thought Social Security would exist by the time they retired. Sixty-three percent said no. Eight questions later, they were asked if they thought UFOs existed. Forty-six percent said yes. It was true, then, that a larger proportion of young adults believed in UFOs than in the longevity of Social Security. The comparison was inferred by the people conducting the poll, however, not made by the respondents themselves.
A few years later another survey conducted by a different organization asked the question, "Which do you have greater confidence in-receiving Social Security benefits after retirement or that alien life from outer space exists?" This time 63 percent expressed greater confidence in Social Security.
"The people who sponsored that first survey were really eager to show that young people don't have confidence in Social Security," Cook notes. "So they put these two points together. They said that young people are more likely to believe in UFOs than that they'll get Social Security. That was a really sexy, dramatic finding, but it was wrong."
A few years later an association of survey researchers sanctioned the original 1994 survey as a bad piece of research. According to Cook, the mass media never reported that outcome or the results of the later survey.
In general, Cook says, journalists fail to check the accuracy of claims made by policy makers. "If a policy maker makes a statement about public opinion, the journalist does not usually feel compelled to question it. I would like journalists to think that one of their roles should be to investigate whether the policy maker is making accurate statements based on what we know about public opinion."
In addition, Cook suggests the formation of an organization that would help make sense of public opinion data to further discourage public officials from making vague, incorrect claims about public opinion. "It would be very useful to have an objective, binding 'court' of sorts to discern what public opinion polls are and are not telling policymakers, and to make recommendations for questions that might be asked to better elicit what people think."
Cook also recommends that social service agencies communicate directly with citizens to help foster confidence in social policies and give them undiluted, unmediated facts. Her most recent study involved examining a new program begun by the Social Security Administration that mails citizens annual updates about the status of their personal Social Security accounts. The statements tell people how much they've contributed to Social Security so far in their lifetimes, and give them a projected amount they will receive at retirement based on their current contributions.
Cook's study shows that such clear and personally relevant information increases citizens' knowledge about Social Security and their confidence in its future. She suggests, "Giving people clear, accurate information about what the government is doing and how it's doing it in other areas might improve civic engagement and boost knowledge and confidence in other government institutions as well."
In short, Cook's work shows that public opinion matters. She believes that knowledge of public opinion is far better than ignorance, and that those who deliberately misinform the public and misuse and misreport public opinion are the enemies of democracy.
Lisa Stein is a freelance writer.