In a Different Voice

Fast and frugal heuristics - simple rules for making decisions with realistic mental resources - are presented here. These heuristics can enable both living organisms and artificial systems to make smart choices, classifications, and predictions by employing bounded rationality. But when and how can such fast and frugal heuristics work? What heuristics are in the mind's adaptive toolbox, and what building blocks compose them? Can judgments based simply on a single reason be as accurate as those based on many reasons? Could less knowledge even lead to systematically better predictions than more knowledge? This book explores these questions by developing computational models of heuristics and testing them through experiments and analysis. It shows how fast and frugal heuristics can yield adaptive decisions in situations as varied as choosing a mate, dividing resources among offspring, predicting high school drop-out rates, and playing the stock market.

Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart

Social dominance orientation (SDO), one's degree of preference for inequality among social groups, is introduced. On the basis of social dominance theory, it is shown that (a) men are more social dominance-oriented than women, (b) high-SDO people seek hierarchy-enhancing professional roles and low-SDO people seek hierarchy-attenuating roles, (c) SDO was related to beliefs in a lag number of social and political ideologies that support group-based hierarchy (e.g., meritocracy and racism) and to support for policies that have implications for intergroup relations (e.g., war, civil rights, and social programs), including new policies. SDO was distinguished from interpersonal dominance, conservatism, and authoritarianism

https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3207711/Sidanius_SocialDominanceOrientation.pdf

Social dominance orientation: A personality variable predicting social and political attitudes.

This essay seeks to lay the foundation for an understanding of welfare state retrenchment. Previous discussions have generally relied, at least implicitly, on a reflexive application of theories designed to explain welfare state expansion. Such an approach is seriously flawed. Not only is the goal of retrenchment (avoiding blame for cutting existing programs) far different from the goal of expansion (claiming credit for new social benefits), but the welfare state itself vastly alters the terrain on which the politics of social policy is fought out. Only an appreciation of how mature social programs create a new politics can allow us to make sense of the welfare state's remarkable resilience over the past two decades of austerity. Theoretical argument is combined with quantitative and qualitative data from four cases (Britain, the United States, Germany, and Sweden) to demonstrate the shortcomings of conventional wisdom and to highlight the factors that limit or facilitate retrenchment success.

http://pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il/~mshalev/sem/Pierson_NewPolitics(1996).pdf

The New Politics of the Welfare State

Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 1994, Vol 39(2), 225. Reviews the book, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion by John Zaller (1992). The author's commendable effort to specify a model of mass opinion formation offers readers an introduction to the prevailing vi

The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion.

This monumental study is a comprehensive critical survey of the policy preferences of the American public, and will be the definitive work on American public opinion for some time to come. Drawing on an enormous body of public opinion data, Benjamin I. Page and Robert Y. Shapiro provide the richest available portrait of the political views of Americans, from the 1930's to 1990. They not only cover all types of domestic and foreign policy issues, but also consider how opinions vary by age, gender, race, region, and the like. The authors unequivocally demonstrate that, notwithstanding fluctuations in the opinions of individuals, collective public opinion is remarkably coherent: it reflects a stable system of values shared by the majority of Americans and it responds sensitively to new events, arguments, and information reported in the mass media. While documenting some alarming case of manipulation, Page and Shapiro solidly establish the soundness and value of collective political opinion. The Rational Public provides a wealth of information about what we as a nation have wanted from government, how we have changed our minds over the years, and why. For anyone interested in the short- and long-term trends in Americans' policy preferences, or eager to learn what Americans have thought about issues ranging from racial equality to the MX missile, welfare to abortion, this book offers by far the most sophisticated and detailed treatment available.

The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in Americans' Policy Preferences

The responsiveness of government policies to citizens' preferences is a central concern of various normative and empirical theories of democracy. Examining public opinion and policy data for the United States from 1935 to 1979, we find considerable congruence between changes in preferences and in policies, especially for large, stable opinion changes on salient issues. We present evidence that pubic opinion is often a proximate cause of policy, affecting policy more than policy influences opinion. One should be cautious, however, about concluding that democratic responsiveness pervades American politics.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1956018.pdf

Effects of Public Opinion on Policy

In this study, Warren E. Miller and J. Merrill Shanks present a comprehensive, authoritative analysis of American voting patterns from 1952 through the early 1990s, with special emphasis on the 1992 election, based on data collected by the National Election Studies. For example, Miller and Shanks reveal that: the loudly trumpeted "dealignment" of the 1970s and 1980s, along with the decline in voter turnout, was in fact an acute "nonalignment" and noninvolvement of new cohorts entering the electorate; the social correlates of the Republican/Democratic divisions on party identification among Southern voters have changed dramatically over a 40-year period; enduring cultural and ideological predispositions play a major role in shaping voters' reactions to election campaigns and their choice for President; personalities of presidential candidates and their poisitions on campaign issues tend to matter far less than is often claimed; and Perot's appeal in 1992 can be attributed to the same factors that distinguished between supporters of Clinton and Bush. In an analysis of individual elections and long-term trends, and of changes within regions, ethnic groups and gender and age categories, "The New American Voter" presents a social and economic picture of partisanship and participation in the American electoral process.

The new American voter

Public opinion polls are everywhere. Journalists report their results without hesitation, and political activists of all kinds spend millions of dollars on them, fuelling the widespread assumption that elected officials "pander" to public opinion -that they tailor their policy decisions to the results of polls. In this provocative and engagingly written book, the authors argue that the reality is quite the opposite. In fact, when not facing election, contemporary presidents and members of Congress routinely ignore the public's policy preferences and follow their own political philosophies, as well as those of their party's activists, their contributors and their interest group allies. Politicians devote substantial time, effort and money to tracking public opinion, not for the purposes of policymaking, but to change public opinion - to determine how to craft their public statements and actions to win support for the policies they and their supporters want. Taking two recent, dramtic episodes - President Clinton's failed health care reform campaign and Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America" - as examples, the authors show how both used public opinion research and the media to change the public's mind. Such orchestrated displays help explain the media's preoccupation with political conflict strategy and, the authors argue, have propelled levels of public distrust and fear of government to record highs. Revisiting the fundamental premises of representative democracy, this accessible book asks us to reexamine whether our government really responds to the broad public or to the narrower interests and values of certain groups. And with the 2000 campaign season heating up, "Politicians Don't Pander" could not be more timely.

Politicians Don't Pander: Political Manipulation and the Loss of Democratic Responsiveness

Using 267 repeated policy questions (962 time points), we examine gender differences in policy choices and how they have changed from the 1960s to the 1980s. The average gender difference in preferences toward policies involving the use of force have consistently been moderately large. Sex differences in opinion toward other policies-regulation and public protection, "compassion" issues, traditional valueshave been approximately half as large but they also warrant more attention than in the past. Our analysis suggests that the salience of issues has increased greatly for women, and as a result differences in preferences have increased in ways consistent with the interests of women and the intentions of the women's movement. Robert Y. Shapiro is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Columbia University and a Research Associate at NORC, University of Chicago. Harpreet Mahajan is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Columbia University. The authors owe special thanks to Kurt Veith for his collaboration in some of the research reported here. They are also grateful to Ethel Klein, Eleanor Singer, Ester Fuchs, Eric Smith, Tom Smith, Chaim Eyal, Benjamin Page, Garth Taylor, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. The survey data and tabulations were obtained from the files of the Policy Change and Public Opinion Change project at NORC, which was originally supported by National Science Foundation Grant No. SES-7912969. Support for the research reported here was provided by the Columbia Council for Research in the Social Sciences; the responsibility for analysis and interpretation is the authors'. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 1984 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Association for Public Opinion Research, Chicago, Illinois. Public Opinion Quarterly Vol 50 42-61 ?9 1986 by the American Association for Public Opinion Research Published by The University of Chicago Press 0033-362X/86/0050-42/$2.50 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.35 on Fri, 02 Sep 2016 05:08:59 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms TRENDS IN GENDER DIFFERENCES IN POLICY PREFERENCES 43 Significant changes, however, occurred. Not only were women less supportive than men of President Reagan but they had become less likely to consider themselves Republicans (e.g., Clymer, 1983; Schneider, 1984; Frankovic, 1982), and they had become more active politically than in the past and voted in greater numbers (see Wolfinger and Rosenstone, 1980; Verba and Nie, 1972; Welch, 1977; Klein, 1984; Andersen, 1975; Rapoport, 1981). Despite premature reports in November 1984 of a decrease in the gender gap since 1980, the evidence indicates that the sex difference in President Reagan's support was about the same in both elections and that the gender gap may have affected the outcomes of races for other offices (see Opinion Roundup, 1985:28-29; Klein, 1985; Keeter, 1985). Less attention has been paid to gender differences in policy preferences than to voting. Public opinion surveys usually revealed no appreciable differences in choices for government policies, and these seemingly inconsequential findings were not extensively reported and summarized. They were mentioned, however, in voting and public opinion studies (Erikson et al., 1980:186; Monroe, 1975:96; Pomper, 1975; Campbell et al., 1960; Berelson et al., 1954), and breakdowns of responses by sex were often (and are still) routinely reported with survey results and in special compilations, such as those prepared for Public Opinion Quarterly (e.g., "The Polls" and the earlier "Quarterly Polls"; see also Cantril with Strunk, 1951). Not surprisingly, there has been increasing interest in these differences in policy preferences because of their potential electoral importance.1 Moreover, although some policy issues may be electorally more important than others, any changes that occur in the aggregate distributions of public preferences may ultimately influence the political 1 For example, Frankovic (1982) showed that women's lower level of support for Reagan could be explained by their greater opposition than men to belligerent positions on war and peace issues, arms control, and the uses of force in foreign policy. This assumes, of course, that these issues and any others were equally important influences on voting decisions for men and women. But this need not have been the case. Klein (1984) showed that some policy preferences for which there were no significant sex differences had different effects on candidate choices. Most notably, men and women had similar opinions toward the ERA and other policies pertaining to women's rights, but over time women appeared to be more likely to take these issues into account in voting. Thus the political importance of policy choices may go beyond the differences and similarities in the positions held by different people. On the other hand, such differences are most likely to occur on salient and important issues, and we would expect larger differences to produce larger effects. Moreover, it is also much more difficult for candidates and policy makers to determine the relative importance of different issues for different groups, everything else being equal (i.e., positions on other issues, partisanship; see Klein, 1984; Shabad and Andersen, 1979), than it is to judge simply the extent of differences in preferences. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.35 on Fri, 02 Sep 2016 05:08:59 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 44 ROBERT Y. SHAPIRO AND HARPREET MAHAJAN agenda and the direction of public policy (see Monroe, 1979; Page and Shapiro, 1983). These opinions, to be sure, are not autonomous but may be shaped by events and objective conditions, and by processes of education, leadership, or manipulation (cf. Page and Shapiro, 1982, 1984). Gender and other differences may be important because some groups may be more politically powerful than others or their preferences may be the driving force behind changes in mass opinion. Gender differences may take on additional significance because of women's rising levels of political participation (and women simply constituting a large pool of eligible voters) and because of the greater attention they may pay to particular issues and government policies. As a result, even small sex differences in policy choices may no longer be inconsequential, especially if they occur across a wide array of issues around which coalitions can form. What do we know about these gender differences? What differences have there been and what changes, if any, have occurred? We will briefly summarize the findings of past studies and then build upon them with an analysis of a larger set of additional data.

Robert Y. Shapiro

Papers

The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in Americans' Policy Preferences

Effects of Public Opinion on Policy

The new American voter

Politicians Don't Pander: Political Manipulation and the Loss of Democratic Responsiveness

Gender Differences in Policy Preferences: A Summary of Trends from the 1960s to the 1980s