A difference of opinion: PoliSci professor finds wide opinion gap between elites and public

If you’ve ever thought that elected officials in Washington don’t care about your opinions, you might be right.

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 in the United States,” will be published in Social Science Journal.

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.

Hong Min Park

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 data back from 2002 and 2004, have pretty good implications for our current affairs.

How do public opinion surveys from the early 2000s shed light on politics in 2020?

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.

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 an attraction or 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, as compared to diplomatic and defense policies, the preference difference is around 15 percentage points more. It’s pretty significant. In terms of economic policy, that difference was 6 percentage points higher as compared to diplomatic policies.

Are there certain types of issues where the public and elected politicians have bigger opinion gaps than others?

Among the domestic and economic policies, I pulled up the question items whose opinion gap was more than a 30 percentage point difference. I could identify 13 items out of 236. Four of them were about immigration issues. For example, “we need to favor restricting immigration to the U.S.”; “We need to control and reduce illegal immigration as an important policy goal,” and “Protecting jobs of American workers is an important goal.”

As you can imagine, the public has a more negative view on immigration issues compared to the elites.

Another four items were about helping people in other countries – for example, whether we need to send economic aid to other countries. The opinion gap was 52 percentage points. The majority of the elites strongly favor economic aid to other countries, and the majority of the public is strongly opposed.

The third important item was trade. Is it good to have NAFTA? Elites think yes, but the public does not think so. The opinion gap is 32 percentage points.

Is there a reason that the gap between elected politicians’ and the public’s opinion is so wide? Do politicians just not care what the public thinks?

My theory is that, in terms of foreign policy versus domestic or economic policies, the public does not care about foreign policy issues that much, because it’s not about our interests. We usually build our opinion based on what the media says or what our representative says.

For economic and domestic issues on the other hand, people know and are experiencing that issue, so they have a very strong opinion. Elites also have a strong opinion, so that’s why we have a very dramatic difference in opinion.

Do elites not care? Possibly. For the most part, the outcome of American elections, especially at the federal level, is pre-determined early in the campaign season based on factors such as presidential popularity, economy, and district demographics. We all know that the city of Milwaukee is Democratic, and we know that when we go farther north, it’s Republican. If I’m a candidate, I know that I’m going to win again if I’m still in the Democratic party representing Milwaukee. My position on specific issues is less important.

What does that mean for our elections?

The problem is that politicians need to go through a primary. Then they need to follow the opinion of primary voters. According to the political science research, primary voters are very different from the general public. They tend to be very attentive to politics and policies. Their preferences are somewhat extreme in the sense that they care about things more aggressively.

Elites tend to become more extreme because we tend to have more extreme primary voters. The Democratic candidate and the Republican candidate and the elites need to follow those opinions, and they are moving apart. Of course, on average, the public is in the middle! As (primary voters) move farther apart, the opinion gap will be wider and wider on issues like immigration or trade.

Was there anything that surprised you?

The uncertainty the elites have on a certain policy. When the survey asked elites about different issue items, some elites say, “I don’t know,” “I don’t care,” or “I refuse to answer.” Then I measure that as “uncertainty” an elite has on a given policy item.

It turns out when elites are not certain about their own positions on a particular issue, that’s when they tend to follow public opinion.

By Sarah Vickery, College of Letters & Science