Within the last decade, the amount and quality of research on the relationship between public opinion and policy making has taken a dramatic step forward. This research contributes to the development of democratic theory and to the (re)organization of political science as a profession. Further development of opinion-policy research, however, will require addressing several critical limitations.

What Has Been Done

Statistical analyses and interpretative case studies have reported (both in the United States and Western Europe) a systematic relationship between public opinion and decision making on a range of issues—from national security to social security (for a review see Shapiro and Jacobs 1989 and Shapiro and Young 1989). These results have emerged from several distinct research designs.

The first relies on in-depth investigations of public opinion's impact on formulating specific policies. These case studies rely on closely examining public opinion as gauged through polling results and policy decisions. Many of these studies offer cross-national studies; they discuss issues central to international relations, American politics, and comparative politics (Jacobs 1992a, 1992b, and 1993; Risse-Kappen 1991; Deese 1994 for essays by Shapiro and Page, Graham, and Bennett; Jasper 1990; Eichenberg 1989; Russett 1990; Graham 1989; Kusnitz 1984; Burstein 1985; Sobel 1993; Mattes 1993). For instance, Jacobs (1993) uses interviews and archival evidence to investigate the formulation of American and British health care policy.

Throughout the Cold War, United States national security policy, and the public attitudes that supported it, seemed anchored in the great ideology and power rivalry with the Soviet Union. A basic component of that policy, the ups and downs of American military spending, was largely predictable by changes in the level of Soviet military spending and by public preferences, as expressed in opinion surveys, for increases or decreases in American military spending. Public beliefs about the appropriate level of military spending, moreover, appeared firmly rooted in a larger set of foreign policy beliefs. Attitudes toward the Soviet Union, toward the circumstances justifying the use of military force internationally, and toward cooperating with other countries were all part of a stable and well-defined system of beliefs. In turn, foreign policy attitudes frequently were predictable from a reasonably coherent set of attitudes toward domestic policy.

The end of the Cold War brought remarkable changes in both policy and attitudes. The major anchoring point for the rivalry—the Soviet Union itself—has ceased to exist, and Russia no longer poses the same level or kind of military threat. Rationales for U.S. military spending, for the use of military force abroad, and for international cooperation have likewise changed. But in some respects they have not changed so greatly. These historic events present us with an extraordinary opportunity to study the structure of Americans' foreign policy beliefs and the dynamics of attitude change. They also provide a chance to speculate about how changed and stable attitudes may affect national security policy.

How does public opinion in American democracy relate to policy making, particularly in Washington, D.C.? This question has a special pertinence right now, and not just for political scientists. As I write, it is a little over a month after President Bill Clinton delivered a major televised address on the health care crisis, and only a few days after he and Hillary Rodham Clinton went up to Capitol Hill to introduce a 1,342 page “Health Security bill” into Congress. Clearly, Clinton is staking his presidency—not to mention the immediate prospects of the Democratic Party—on an attempt to respond to a certain reading of public opinion. By wading into a policy arena already staked out by many resourceful vested interests, Clinton is undertaking to mobilize and influence broad public support for what is arguably the most ambitious federal social policy initiative since the Social Security Act of 1935.

Consideration of various aspects of the relationship of public opinion to the current round of health insurance policy making in Washington, D.C., can, in my view, underline the value of a historically grounded and institutionally mediated analysis of the roots and effects of public opinion. The approach I shall illustrate builds upon Lawrence Jacobs's (1993) recent book, The Health of Nations: Public Opinion and the Making of American and British Health Policy. One major undertaking of that work is to make sense of the role of U.S. public opinion in the enactment of Medicare in 1965.

Abundant evidence has been produced to demonstrate substantial empirical relationships between public opinion (in the sense of survey-measured collective policy preferences) and public policy in the United States and elsewhere. Policy outputs—what governments do—tend to correspond fairly closely with what surveys say their citizens want them to do. In my view, however, a number of important research questions remain largely open. Answers to some of them are crucial to deciding what, if anything, opinion-policy congruence has to do with democratic theory.

Open Questions

1. How much impact does public opinion actually have on policy making? In particular, how much of the observed relationship is causal rather than spurious, and how much causal impact proceeds from opinion to policy rather than the reverse? If public opinion simply tends to swing into line behind whatever policies decision makers come up with, or if some third force drives both opinion and policy, the implications for democratic theory are rather different from what they would be if public opinion exerted a powerful influence on government action.

2. Under what circumstances is this impact larger or smaller? What kinds of political systems are most responsive to their citizens? How much difference do free elections make? High levels of economic development, education, and communications? Vigorous party competition? Parliamentary versus presidential systems? Federalism?

In a world where citizens desire to have their preferences reflected in public policy and, for instrumental reasons, policy makers share that desire, the linkage of opinion to policy still faces formidable problems. Chief among these is this: policy making is highly specific, detailed, and informed, while mass electorates choose not to attend closely enough to politics and policy to have preferences that are similarly specific, detailed, and informed. We now believe that many citizens have meaningful preferences over the general contours of government activity. At the level of whether “government should do more to …” deal with any number of problems, we now see individual citizen preferences in a somewhat more favorable light than we once did. More important, we now view change in aggregate preferences over time as expressive of real beliefs and values about public choices.

But this is not enough. Policy makers face no choices as simple as “do more” or “do less.” They deal at a wholly different level. They deal at a level of specificity where public attitudes are only infrequently measured, and for good reason; mass publics in the main do not have (real) attitudes over details they cannot reasonably be expected to attend to. And yet each of those choices, complicated and specific though they are, will reflect some measure of movement at the more general level where citizen preferences are engaged. The daily choices of the C-SPAN world are obscure and arcane to typical citizens. And yet the actors in that world feel bound by citizen preferences.

Scholars who study the connections between public opinion and the policy process, and politicians who engage in making those connections, face the same two problems. First, determining what opinion the public actually holds is much more of an interpretive than a methodological exercise. Second, designing policies to respond to that (presumed) opinion is at best an inexact art and at worst a demonstration that making the wrong moves can produce more harm than good. This essay illustrates these points by examining race politics in America over the past three decades.

In order to move quickly to those illustrations, let me stipulate, with minimal evidence, several starting points. First, middle-class African Americans are better off now than middle-class members of their race have ever been; well-off African Americans are getting richer at a faster rate than well-off white Americans (though from a lower absolute starting point); and middle-class African Americans are gaining ground at the same time that poor African Americans are losing it.

Those points require much evidence to be completely persuasive, but they are all illustrated by a simple comparison of income quantiles by race over time (see Table 1).

The answer to the question we pose in the title is by no means obvious. That it might be affirmative is suggested by the facts that Ross Perot:

• ran ahead of the major-party presidential candidates in several presidential preference polls at the height of his popularity in June 1992; and

• on election day in November received a higher proportion of the popular vote (19.0%) than any third-party candidate since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 (27.4%), who came in second to Woodrow Wilson that year.

More significant than Perot's relatively large percentage, however, is that he appealed to many Republicans because of his conservative economic policies, especially with respect to reducing the budget deficit, and to many Democrats because of his liberal social views on issues like abortion.

It is precisely this kind of wide-ranging appeal that favors candidates under approval voting (AV), whereby voters can vote for as many candidates as they like or consider acceptable in a multicandi-date election. (In a three-candidate race like the 1992 presidential election, this means voting either for one's top or one's top two choices.) Yet despite extensive research on AV (Brams and Fishburn 1983), comparisons of it that have been made with other voting systems (Nurmi 1987; Merrill 1988), and empirical studies of its actual use (reviewed in Brams and Fishburn 1992), it is no easy task to establish how candidates would fare under AV in a specific election.

During 1989, as Eastern Europe's communist regimes abdicated power in the face of popular coups, Daniel Nelson was asked by a journalist if such changes meant a career change for scholars of communist systems. He answered affirmatively: if such scholars had examined these regimes only as communist systems; yet, for scholars who had studied politics in the arena of Eastern Europe, he said, a full and challenging career lay ahead.

This speculation has since given way to certainty. Comparative communism as a subfield of political analysis passed away during 1989, while the comparative politics of Eastern Europe was rejuvenated.

The Birth and Death of Comparative Communism

Within a few years after Mikhail Gorbachev inaugurated changes that he could not control, practitioners of comparative communism were confronted with new conditions for their research and analysis. Notwithstanding the continuation of communist rule in China, Cuba, North Korea, and Southeast Asia, the subfield lost its raison d'etre. Most of the premises that had generated a subfield of comparative endeavors, no matter how rudimentary they may have sometimes been, became moot.

Comparative communism had come and gone. But, what had comparative communism sought to accomplish? How well did scholars and policy-analysts succeed? Was there any lasting contribution to political studies?

In the late 1940s when communist parties gained power in Eastern Europe, China, and North Korea, the impression was that a single form of totalitarian government had been imposed from Moscow. The “Soviet bloc” aggregated all states' and leaders' behavior within the image of rigid uniformity. Consequently, broadly comparative analyses and rigorous tests of hypotheses were unnecessary. Most scholarly attention appeared to be driven by Western foreign policy interest.

These should be bracing times for students and scholars of European studies. The tumultuous events of the past five years—from the collapse of the Soviet empire and the unification of Germany, to the problematic consolidation of the European Community, and the resurgence of ethnic and religious nationalism—have recast the region's boundaries and have called into question many of the concepts and theories developed by area specialists in the postwar period.

It was with these issues in mind that the Social Science Research Council and the German Marshall Fund of the United States commissioned Sidney Tarrow to produce a report that would identify trends and raise issues of importance to the future of European Studies in the universities and among funders and other concerned organizations. Tarrow's report, Rebirth or Stagnation? European Studies after 1989, was published in June 1993 and has circulated widely among scholars, foundation officers, and university administrators working on the region.

The report finds that Europe's geo-political earthquakes pose fresh challenges for the way we think about and teach international and comparative politics. The transformation of Europe's social, economic, and political terrain has important implications not only for the region but for the international environment as a whole. Recent developments are also significant from the standpoint of university centers and funding organizations attempting to effectively intervene in an era of multiple demands and fiscal retrenchment. Virtually every institution of higher education in this country is trying to do more with fewer resources, and interdisciplinary programs—such as centers of European studies—may offer unusually inviting targets for budget-cutting administrators. As a result of these pressures, the support structure necessary for effective training and research is experiencing considerable strains.

In a recent attempt to get caught up on the important events occurring in the former Soviet Union, I rediscovered the importance not only of learning data but of exploring the ideology behind the data. In an effort to update my students on the vast changes in our country's former adversary, I read as many diverse sources as possible in order to make sense of the events. Out of this came the predictable, yet fascinating, conclusion that political “facts” may be perceived so differently by observers with diverse ideological perspectives that the facts themselves appear to change depending upon who is describing them. I soon realized I was doing both substantive research into the “facts” and an equally important investigation into the biases underlying the reporting of the “facts.”