Studies in Public Opinion: Attitudes, Nonattitudes, Measurement Error, and Change

Extract

Studies in Public Opinion: Attitudes, Nonattitudes, Measurement Error, and Change. Edited by Willem E. Saris and Paul M. Sniderman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 384p. $65.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.

This edited volume contains a series of papers, which address a key issue in public opinion research. The issue could not be more general or more important. It is this question: Do members of the mass public actually have opinions about political issues? The question has been debated from the earliest work on public opinion, but was raised in a particularly stark form in a seminal paper by Philip Converse published in 1964. As is well known, he suggested that most people did not have meaningful opinions on most issues, due to the instability of their responses across different waves of a panel survey. The contributors to this volume are leading authorities in the field of political psychology and public opinion research, and the papers collectively make an important contribution to addressing this question. Paul Sniderman and John Bullock in the concluding chapter summarize the existing research agenda on this issue in the following terms: “The dominant themes of two generations of research have been that citizens tend to be muddle-headed (the lack of constraint theme), empty headed (the non-attitude theme) or both” (pp. 337–38).