A difference of opinion: PoliSci professor find If you’ve ever thought that elected officials in Washington don’t care about your opinions, you might be right.
data back from 2002 and 2004, have pretty good implications for our current affairs.
That’s according to new research by UWM political science professor Hong Min Park, whose forthcoming paper, “Determinants of the Opinion Gap between the Elites and the Public Hong Min Park in the United States,” will be published in Social Science Journal.
My analysis shows that public opinion differed most from elites’ concerning immigration, foreign aid, and trade. At this point in time, we know that those are the important issues that shape the public discussion, especially under the Trump presidency. But this data is from 2002 and 2004. As we can recall in 2002 and 2004, those issues were some of the concerns of the public and some of the concerns of the elite, but they were not a main concern at that time.
Park’s research uncovered some wide “opinion gaps” between the views of the American public and the views of elites, or the politicians in charge of legislating for that public. He sat down to discuss his research – and how it might explain today’s current political climate. In this paper, you examine how views of the public and politicians differ. What inspired your research? I have been wondering why the public has a different opinion on a lot of issues than the elites, especially the elected politicians. They need to be reelected, but they do not listen to the public. I always wondered why and when the elected politicians follow, or try to follow, public opinion, and when they do not need to or want to follow public opinion. To find the answers, I found one public opinion survey that asked the exact same questions to the public and to the elites at the same time in 2002 and 2004. There is one caveat, which is that this is an old public opinion survey. We cannot easily generalize the comparison into a more recent case. That could be a theoretical concern. But the findings that I had, by comparing these public opinion and elite survey
10 • IN FOCUS • February 2020
How do public opinion surveys from the early 2000s shed light on politics in 2020?
But now, in 2020, these are the main concerns that we have. I cannot prove it, but my suspicion is that some of the political strategists recognized this difference of opinion between the regular public and the elites … and they might (have thought) that there was room where they could maneuver and manipulate. They try to emphasize these issues so that they can get the attention of some of the public. What issues did the public and elites disagree on the most? What I found is that the elites and the public do not share their preferences and policy opinions more on domestic and economic issues, but they share more on foreign policy issues. When I say economic policies, it’s trade – NAFTA, that kind of thing. When I say foreign policy issues, it’s more about diplomatic policies – for example, Middle East policies or policies against Iran, or North Korean nuclear policy. When I say domestic, it’s more job-related issues and immigration. I found that on domestic policies, the regular public and the elites have very, very different opinions. On average, on domestic policies,
