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POLICY SUBSTANCE IN THE PUBLIC MIND: The Issue Structure of Mass Politics
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realm, while providing some sense of priority—of centrality or periphery—among those
items. From the other side, working definitions must allow a changing array of specific
referents to embody the larger (and continuing) domain. To those ends, we propose the
following:
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Social welfare involves efforts to protect citizens against the randomness,
the harshness and the individual inequities, of the economic marketplace. In the United States, welfare policy is most commonly justified on the grounds that such protections will help restore citizens to a productive social (and economic) life. Such policies normally emphasize redistribution as their key characteristic; direct personal benefits are the heart of the definition. Such a definition includes most of the ‘classic’ concerns of the welfare state, including job security and health care. It excludes matters with more distant implications, like macroeconomic policy, unless the answers to these items underline their redistributive impact or their impact on classical elements of the welfare state. (For an overview, among many, Hamby 1973, Sundquist 1968, Berkowitz 1991)
•
International relations involves relationships between the United States
and the non-American world. Foreign policy thus reflects efforts to manage the interaction of the United States—its government, its citizens, their organizations—with the same elements in other nations. Such a definition is reasonably easy to apply, though public opinion items that mix both domestic and international implications do appear in the NES over time. Intermittently, these involve obvious economic (and redistributive) impacts on domestic life, blurring the boundaries with welfare policy. Occasionally, they offer items that are foreign affairs on their face, but have ‘hooks’ that cause them to be treated by the public as aspects of civil rights or cultural values. (For an overview, again among many, Gaddis 1972, Spanier 1991)
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Civil rights could be given an abstract definition making it, in effect, a
sub-domain of civil liberties, assuring that rights (and their responsibilities) are equitably applied to particular groups. But civil rights in the postwar period has been most centrally a matter of race policy for black Americans—that is the way in which most Americans, elite and mass, would recognize the term—so that in the search for an issue structure, it seemed essential to retain racial concerns as the essence of a policy definition. There are other elements of public opinion on race, but we have taken these items (like macroeconomic policy, above) as matters for subsequent analysis, once a basic structure has been established. (For the comprehensive story, see Sitkoff 1981 and Graham 1990.)
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Cultural values, finally, involve the behavioral norms within which social
life should proceed, and social policy involves governmental action to enforce those norms. The very heterogeneity of the items that became flashpoints for
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| | Authors: Claggett, William. and Shafer, Byron. |
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6
realm, while providing some sense of priority—of centrality or periphery—among those
items. From the other side, working definitions must allow a changing array of specific
referents to embody the larger (and continuing) domain. To those ends, we propose the
following:
•
Social welfare involves efforts to protect citizens against the randomness,
the harshness and the individual inequities, of the economic marketplace. In the
United States, welfare policy is most commonly justified on the grounds that such
protections will help restore citizens to a productive social (and economic) life.
Such policies normally emphasize redistribution as their key characteristic; direct
personal benefits are the heart of the definition. Such a definition includes most
of the ‘classic’ concerns of the welfare state, including job security and health
care. It excludes matters with more distant implications, like macroeconomic
policy, unless the answers to these items underline their redistributive impact or
their impact on classical elements of the welfare state. (For an overview, among
many, Hamby 1973, Sundquist 1968, Berkowitz 1991)
•
International relations involves relationships between the United States
and the non-American world. Foreign policy thus reflects efforts to manage the
interaction of the United States—its government, its citizens, their
organizations—with the same elements in other nations. Such a definition is
reasonably easy to apply, though public opinion items that mix both domestic and
international implications do appear in the NES over time. Intermittently, these
involve obvious economic (and redistributive) impacts on domestic life, blurring
the boundaries with welfare policy. Occasionally, they offer items that are
foreign affairs on their face, but have ‘hooks’ that cause them to be treated by the
public as aspects of civil rights or cultural values. (For an overview, again among
many, Gaddis 1972, Spanier 1991)
•
Civil rights could be given an abstract definition making it, in effect, a
sub-domain of civil liberties, assuring that rights (and their responsibilities) are
equitably applied to particular groups. But civil rights in the postwar period has
been most centrally a matter of race policy for black Americans—that is the way
in which most Americans, elite and mass, would recognize the term—so that in
the search for an issue structure, it seemed essential to retain racial concerns as
the essence of a policy definition. There are other elements of public opinion on
race, but we have taken these items (like macroeconomic policy, above) as
matters for subsequent analysis, once a basic structure has been established. (For
the comprehensive story, see Sitkoff 1981 and Graham 1990.)
•
Cultural values, finally, involve the behavioral norms within which social
life should proceed, and social policy involves governmental action to enforce
those norms. The very heterogeneity of the items that became flashpoints for
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