SPEAKER: In his classic 1921 book, Public Opinion,
the journalist Walter Lippman noted that our opinions are not
a response to the world as it is, but to the world as we think it is.
In the age when people thought the world was flat,
mariners behaved as if it was flat.
They stayed close to shore, believing that if they sailed too far from land,
they would plunge off the edge.
That thinking is not all that different from what happens today
when people's perceptions of reality are at odds with it.
Polls taken before the 2000 Iraq invasion
found, for example, that a majority of Americans
wrongly believed that Iraq was aligned with al Qaeda, the terrorist group that
attacked the United States in 2001.
Those who thought Iraq and al Qaeda were working together
were far more likely to favor invading Iraq than those who knew better.
Poll after poll has found that most citizens are not
well informed on the issues of the day.
Eight decades of opinion surveys leave no doubt
that the overall level of political information is low.
There are always some citizens, of course, who are highly informed.
But they are the exception and not the rule.
What should we make of this fact?
To some observers like Lippman, it means that public opinion is not
a trustworthy guide to policy action.
Not that officials should ignore public opinion, but that they
shouldn't take it too seriously.
Other observers have interpreted the evidence differently.
Political scientist Sam Popkin, for example,
argues that citizens actually behave quite rationally,
recognizing that their opinion is but one of millions.
So why should they spend great amounts of time studying the issues of the day?
Popkin contends that citizens are pretty good at allocating their time,
concentrating on the issues that most directly affect them.
And by relying on shortcuts, such as their partisanship,
to guide their choices.
Popkin concludes that in most instances citizens
get it right, holding opinions that are sensible in the context
of their own interests.
But even if that's so, what should we make
of the exceptions, such as the Iraq War example, cited earlier.
The invasion of Iraq was no small matter.
And yet most Americans had opinions based on a false reality.
We can't settle here, the issue of whether citizens
are well enough informed to carry out their duty in a democracy.
That would require going through mounds of data
and positing debatable assumptions, such as whether information shortcuts can
substitute for direct knowledge.
But it's an important issue, one that more than any other
has challenged theories of public opinion.
We want public opinion to count, and yet we'd like it to be informed.
Theorists have had trouble figuring out how
to reconcile the hope with the reality of public opinion.