Overview

Those who seek to accurately gauge public opinion must first ask themselves: why are certain opinions highly volatile while others are relatively fixed? Why are some surveys affected by question wording or communicative medium while others seem immune? In this text, R. Michael Alvarez and John Brehm develop a theory of response variability that, by reconciling the strengths and weaknesses of the standard approaches, should help pollsters and scholars alike better resolve such perennial problems. Working within the context of US public opinion, they contend that the answers Americans give rest on a variegated structure of political predispositions - diverse but widely shared values, beliefs, expectations and evaluations. Alvarez and Brehm argue that respondents deploy what they know about politics (often little) to think in terms of what they value and believe. Working with sophisticated statistical models, they offer an analysis of not just what a respondent is likely to choose, but also how variable those choices would be under differing circumstances. American public opinion can be characterized in one of three forms of variability, conclude the authors: ambivalence, equivocation

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A provocative and important statement about the nature and functioning of mass opinion... Alvarez and Brehm bring a sophisticated methodological arsenal to bear on enduring questions of public opinion. They have produced an invaluable study of the structural underpinnings of political attitudes, one that is deserving of serious consideration from a broad range of social scientists. -- Howard Lavine Perspectives on Politics

Author Information

R. Michael Alvarez is Professor of Political Science at the California Institute of Technology and the author of ""Information and Elections"". John Brehm is Professor and Chair of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He is the author of ""The Phantom Respondents"" and the coauthor of ""Working, Shirking, and Sabotage"".

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