Jeff Manza New York University
How does the American public respond to economic and political change in the 21st century? Did the ongoing economic crisis affect voters' policy preferences? And have the crisis and legislative responses by the Obama administration generated more (or less?) support for government interventions when it comes to social welfare, taxes, and national security? This collaborative research seeks to develop answers to these questions. The project does so through a new national survey to be conducted in 2010: The Survey of American Policy Attitudes toward the Crisis (SAPAC). This survey uses experimental methods to gauge the dynamics of policy attitude formation. The data collection coincides with a far-reaching economic downturn (and set of legislative conflicts) that are mechanisms potentially exerting pressure toward opinion change. The survey experiments will offer results with which to adjudicate two competing views of how public opinion is formed during times of crisis. The economic approach views public opinion as a self-regulating system in which environmental and policy changes continually exert pressure toward shifts in public attitudes. A second approach sees mass opinion as more fundamentally shaped by pre-existing social forces and ideological biases. This approach anticipates greater resistance to change pressures, and also quite different responses to such pressures among such key groups as liberals and conservatives, and middle and working-class Americans.
Broader Impacts
In addition to advancing scholarship on the dynamics of opinion formation, the 2010 SAPAC survey will also make possible a broad, over-time portrait of how American policy attitudes are currently evolving. This is because the 2010 data collection will directly extend earlier surveys we fielded in 2007 and 2009. In looking at questions concerning social welfare, taxes, and national security, this research brings into focus issues of lasting importance to Americans in the 21st century.
The goal of this research has been to investigate whether the financial crisis of 2008 (and of the recession that followed) caused the American public to demand more government spending and social services from government. This expectation is firmly-rooted in influential models and theories within the disciplines of Political Science and Sociology. The idea is that public opinion closely tracks changes in the performance of the U.S. economy. If the economy collapses, people want government to come to the rescue by setting forth new policies, spending, or regulation. But when the economy grows, people shift preferences and wish government to step aside, spending less and holding back on big, new programs. Has, then, the financial crisis and recession propelled the views of the American public in new directions? Has the public moved toward greater support for social welfare, social spending, and new programs? Did the election of a new, Democratic President in 2008, alongside the 2010 passage of new legislation extending health coverage to uninsured Americans, coincide with extensive new trends and the public’s views of government policy? Results of our analyses point to a surprising answer of "no." From the evidence we have developed so far, there are no trends toward greater government spending and service provision during the time period covered by the 2008 (and after) financial and economic crisis. Instead, there is some initial evidence of a slightly conservative turn in public preferences toward less government spending and policy, but this does not appear to be a large trend. Results of survey-based experiments we have conducted find additional evidence that information about the economic crisis does not generally propel individuals toward greater preferences for a new government spending or programs. In other words, when we isolate through experiments a key factor associated with economic change, we find little evidence that factor as the power to reorient individuals’ policy attitudes (at least in the contemporary historical era). These results are interesting and important because they suggest past scholarship may need substantial modification. The widely-held idea among social scientists that economic change creates a new demand for government spending, policy, and activism needs to be rethought in the current period. This means the factors that contribute to contemporary patterns of attitudes toward government and economy need to be analyzed in new and greater detail.
