BEYOND CUES AND POLITICAL ELITES: THE FORGOTTEN ZALLER

Abstract

Zaller's Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion initially sets out an epistemic view of politics in which the ultimate determinants of political action are ideas about the society in which we act. These ideas are usually mediated to us by others, so Zaller begins the book by describing its topic as the influence of the media on public opinion, and he includes journalists among the “political elites” who exert this influence (along with politicians, public officials, and experts). But the book eventually reduces journalists to being messengers of politicians' cues to the public. This understanding of the media is built into the book's model of opinion formation, in which cued predispositions are pivotal to the acceptance or rejection of culturally mediated “messages”—but are themselves insulated from cultural influence. A cueing model of message reception, however, ignores messages that are differentially persuasive not because of the predispositions they cue but the content they convey. Gauging the heterogeneous persuasiveness of messages requires qualitative content analysis and cultural contextualization, and if this research is to contribute to a general understanding of public opinion, it will have to extend beyond news-media messages to ideational influences carried in high culture, formal education, and the entertainment media. All of these sources of ideas, in turn, may contribute to the shaping of predispositions, as suggested in part by public opinion regarding the Vietnam War. Research of this kind would signal a new type of political science that focused on the actual thoughts of real people trying to understand a complex environment: exactly the type of political science suggested at the beginning of Zaller's book.

Acknowledgments

thanks Scott Althaus, Stephen Earl Bennett, John Bullock, James Druckman, Paul Gunn, and Paul Quirk for comments on an earlier draft.

Notes

1. This is the view that was urged on political scientists by V. O. Key, Jr. (1964, 394): “The picture of the press collectively as the wielder of great power on its own initiative does not fit the facts”—about which, apparently, politicians and government officials, who constantly seek to influence journalists, are gravely mistaken. The basis for Key's assertion, however, was that political scientists had done so little research on the question that there was no evidence of media effects (ibid., 345), which certainly does not justify his confident assurances that these effects do not exist (ibid., 344). Similar nonfindings (ibid., 396) support Key's claim that “the tone and quality of the content of the media tend to be mightily influenced, if not fixed, by those who manufacture news” (ibid., 395), by which Key meant advertisers (ibid., 396). However hard-headed this might sound, it is contradicted by the information-selection and interpretive role of journalists, at least according to the Lippmannite opening pages of Zaller's book. In turn, Key opens his book with a two-paragraph dismissal of Lippmann that fails even to mention the questions of information selection and interpretation (ibid., 5). In effect, the puzzle I aim to solve is how it came to be that by the end of his own book, Zaller (1992, 319) was quoting Key's dismissal of media power (1964, 394) approvingly, despite having provided no evidence that the Lippmannite view of journalistic autonomy presented at the beginning of Nature and Origins was defective.

2. Lippmann 1922 [1997], 54; James 1890 [1918], 488.

3. Activists are a special case. They can communicate one on one, and a single conversation may be much more effective than a single newspaper article. But Zaller (1992, 273n5) points out that personal conversation about politics consists largely of relaying or reacting to information someone has received from journalists. On the other hand, activists can supply a new interpretation of mass-mediated news, as we shall see in the case of Vietnam.

4. However, Zaller (1992, 23) adds, to this otherwise clearly “epistemic” statement, an assertion about cues: “… and on which partisan elites are associated with which positions.”

5. As well as “race”—which, however, surely cannot be supposed to be a source of predispositions unless it collapses into “inherited personality factors” (Zaller 1992, 23). In thinking about predispositions and race, Zaller drops his customary caution and conflates statistical predictors of political attitudes, such as demographic factors, with causal sources of these attitudes. This is, to be sure, a common practice, but it flies in the face of Zaller's interpretivist understanding of politics, and therefore tends to neutralize any role for mediated facts and understandings in shaping the opinions of demographic “groups.” On the origins of this practice in the functionalist sociological assumptions of the Columbia school, see Friedman 2013.

6. Subject to caveats that may be warranted by Larry M. Bartels's contribution (2013) below.

7. If they forget this information after the election, they are reminded of it by the wording of the post-election NES survey that Zaller (1992, 229) uses.

8. Zaller (1992, 233) concludes that “there is only slight evidence of the nonmonotonicity that arises from the heightened partisan resistance of the highly aware.”

9. Indeed, in the penultimate chapter of the book (ch. 11), which summarizes the argument and evidence presented earlier, Zaller (1992, 274) says that according to the Resistance Axiom, “people can resist persuasion only to the extent that they have acquired an appropriate cueing message” (even while he admits that he has provided no direct evidence that cueing information, rather than “something else,” explains resistance [ibid., 275]). This suggests that somehow persuasive messages are powerless in the face of a cued predisposition. Perhaps Zaller means that inertial considerations must first have passed the test of having been consistent with partisan predispositions; after thus having been accepted, they can, in the future, exert a cumulative partisan force of their own, even absent new partisan cues or messages. And perhaps countervalent messages sneak in before a cue or contextual information alerts the citizen that these messages should be rejected on partisan grounds. In the case of congressional voting, for example, even well-informed defectors may have received the decisive pro-incumbent messages before they were alerted of the incumbent's party affiliation (in the voting booth), so that the messages remain in their heads as considerations even though they would not have been accepted if the voter had realized that the incumbent was from the other party. However, there is no evidence for any of this. The fact that well-informed partisans defect less often than worse-informed partisans do is fully consistent with the possibility that people treat their predispositions as just one of many considerations, and that more persuasive considerations may move them to disregard their predispositions in a given case. As far as I can tell, none of the research claiming to show mindless partisanship in Nature and Origins and in public-opinion research generally is immune from cognitivist reinterpretation of this sort, even when the research purports to show experimentally that people blindly adhere to prior opinions (predispositions, in effect) in the face of counterevidence (e.g., Taber and Lodge 2006); see Friedman 2012 and Ross 2012.

10. Zaller's data (Fig. 9.2) show that the change occurred at some point between 1964 and the end of 1966, but the only antiwar cue from a political leader that he mentions is the Fulbright hearings held in 1966; this appears to be the basis of his assertion that liberals began to turn against the war in 1966 (rather than 1965).

11. During World War I, of course, liberalism in the modern sense was called Progressivism.

12. This was not Converse's view, although it is often taken to be. As he put it, bundles of issue positions are held together in ideologies by interpretations of “crowning postures—like premises about survival of the fittest in the spirit of social Darwinism”—that “serve as a sort of glue to bind together many more specific attitudes and beliefs.” These crowning postures, he maintained, “are of prime centrality in the belief system as a whole” (Converse 1964 [2006], 7).

13. The hawk/dove measure is based on responses to such questions as:

Which do you think is the better way for us to keep the peace—by having a very strong military so that other countries won't attack us, or by working out our disagreements at the bargaining table? (Zaller 1992, 196; cf. Hurwitz and Peffley 1987, 1115)

This is precisely the type of question of which the Michigan school—including Converse and culminating in Zaller—has taught us to be wary. As Zaller (1992, 76) puts it:

Most people really aren't sure what their opinions are on most political matters. … They're not sure because there are few occasions, outside of a standard interview situation, in which they are called upon to formulate and express political opinions. So, when confronted by rapid-fire questions in a public opinion survey, they make up attitude reports as best they can as they go along. But because they are hurrying, they are heavily influenced by whatever ideas happen to be at the top of their minds.

In the context of 1965 or 1966, even if a respondent who had genuinely internationalist commitments had recently heard something negative about the Vietnam war, this negative consideration could prompt a dovish top-of-the-head survey response, regardless of how the same respondent might have answered the question in a survey taken in, say, 1959 or 1960. Therefore, when Zaller finds that support for the war among well-informed “doves” took a nosedive in 1965–66, it may simply mean that some relatively well-informed survey respondents had just heard bad news about the war—and it may mean nothing more. That is, Zaller's measure of declining support for the war on the basis of “dovishness” may simply represent the relative rise in bad news about the war reflected in Zaller's Figure 9.1a; whoever had heard such news might then be prompted not only to respond that they were against the war, but that, in the abstract, negotiation is a better way to “keep the peace” than is maintaining a strong military. By the same token, those whom Zaller classifies as highly informed “conservatives,” i.e., “hawks,” may merely be relatively well-informed survey respondents who happened have heard good news about the war recently, and thus answered that they favored both the war and a strong military—but were not “hawks” in any deeper, predispositional sense.

Therefore, what is being measured may not reflect either ideological predispositions or hawk-dove “values.” Instead, Zaller's hawk/dove measure of liberal opposition to the war may merely tap whatever culturally mediated messages might simultaneously have prompted a particular respondent to oppose this particular war at the moment of the survey and, for that reason, to answer the hawk/dove questions dovishly—because those messages happened to have been at the top of his or her head.

The question remains, however, why highly informed liberals in the period turned against the war, because Zaller (1992, 209) says that the opinions of liberals identified by a feeling thermometer followed the same patterns that he puts under the hawk/dove rubric. I am questioning only that rubric in this note.

14. Zaller (1992, 271) quotes Charles Mohr, a Time and then New York Times reporter in Vietnam, writing defensively that “the reporters did not invent the somber information that sometimes appeared in their stories.” But the same passage from Mohr inadvertently suggests that the reporters did select that information: The reporters, he writes, were aware of disputes between, on the one hand, optimistic “senior officials” in the military who “were reporting to Washington on the programs they themselves were administering,” and, on the other hand, pessimistic “brilliant young field officers, as exemplified by the late John Paul Vann,” who “increasingly turned to the journalists” to express their disagreement with the senior officials. Even in protesting the journalists’ innocence of fabrication, Mohr demonstrates that journalists saw their optimistic sources as self-serving propaganda pushers and their pessimistic sources as brave truth tellers. Halberstam's account of the resulting coverage confirms that the pessimists, in seeking out the journalists, were pushing on an open door. In any case, there is no justification for treating Mohr's account as supporting the indexing hypothesis; that journalists were aware of the conflict between optimistic and pessimistic sources does not show that they treated both types of source as equally authoritative.

15. This is not necessarily to endorse Halberstam's self-congratulatory judgments about the accuracy of his and his colleagues’ reporting. For a skeptical account, see Moyar 2006, passim.

16. “A number of officials have recalled being ‘fed up with the “light at the end of the tunnel” stuff’ in official reports from Saigon, and becoming ‘more persuaded by what I saw on the tube and in the papers’” (Hallin 1987, 170).

17. Why a particular person finds a particular interpretation persuasive would have to be a function of what previous interpretations she had encountered and what previous information the new interpretation seems to explain so well.

18. Reporters do not fight to “break” a story because they are trying to echo the pack (or repeat official news releases); they do it because an unusual story commands unusual attention.

19. In the spring of 1965, there were hundreds of teach-ins across the United States (Sale 1973, 184). The Safer story was broadcast on August 5.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jeffrey Friedman

Jeffrey Friedman the coeditor of The Nature of Belief Systems Reconsidered (Routledge 2012) and Political Knowledge (Routledge 2013)