How Much Can Leaders Shape or Lead Mass Opinion?

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: So I promised to talk about four things. I've talked about three of them. So our last section will be on how much can leaders shape or lead mass opinion? Because this is a real issue. How much are people being manipulated? Now we've got social media, obviously, big topic is sort of the extent to which there's various efforts to manipulate opinion through this.

I mean, it's not really new now, social media, but kinda new from the historical perspective of politics. Okay, so again, a little like polling, it's important to just remember it's new. But the idea that leaders are gonna try to lead public opinion, not at all new. I sort of wavered between the FDR photo with the radio address.

There was a nice one of Teddy Roosevelt in a park trying to kind of rally from the originator of the Bolly pulpit on a pulpit. So this is what leaders have done through the ages. There's Ronald Reagan, right? So we've got kind of the who comes in in the kind of primetime area of primetime tv.

And now we've got social media and the White House is in there. Because, again, maybe not from a normative perspective, it should be. But if we work in politics, the people who are gonna win are the people who are gonna be using all mechanisms that are available. And then in addition to president's right, we've got the media's out there, as I'm sure you've seen on TikTok.

There are professional groups that are going in and hiring influencers to try to shape the opinion of TikTok users. Even from the age before people can vote to sort of shape their political perceptions, and in ways that are not always fully transparent. We've got congressional opinion leaders. Right, Tim, there we've got, I'm trying to be bipartisan in my slides.

We've got Tim Scott and Mitch McConnell, and we've got AOC and Bernie Sanders. We've got interest groups out there. I mean, everybody's sort of out there trying to shape public opinion, right? The big picture political scientists have sort of, everything I've said so far, I actually think most people who work in politics would say, yes, yes, yes.

I wish people understood that, yes, yes, yes. Now we're gonna diverge a bit. People who work in politics like to think they can shape, that this is doable, right? And this is a lot of people's jobs, they're supposed to be out there doing it. Our view is, it's very hard to do that, in part, because there is a competition for changing people's views.

So it makes sense that you wanna think you're gonna be better than the other side or better than other people at it. But in the end, there's a lot of canceling out. So it's a little like, you don't wanna sit out doing it, so your side needs to be in there too, right, you don't just seed it.

But at the end of the day, you wanna have a realistic expectation if you're actually in the congressional office or in the president's office of how likely it is that at the end of the day, I mean, in some ways, you're working that hard to maintain opinion on your side.

That's harder to do. I realize why you wanna think, we're gonna kinda get a few points here. But what you're probably gonna be able to do if you're really, really effective is, in most cases, maintain it and not lose it. But you can think about four different types of views.

There's kinda one exception. So there's some kind of, for those who wanna go into this business, some kinda positive news. If it's a new issue or one on which voters have very, very little information, and you can somehow make it salient, or it's already salient, policy views can shift moderately, not as much as people usually think.

And I'm just telling you, every president makes this mistake. Because in some ways they've won because they were so, they've won the presidency and they've beaten every odd, nobody thought. I remember, this is a recording I would love to find. I said I thought Obama could win the primary in 2008, people laughed me, I was on NPR.

I was basically laughed out of the room in December. And then the same people I was on with who said, it's so obvious it's gonna be Hillary. Of course, once it was, then they were sort of saying, everybody always knew it was always gonna be Obama. So, I mean, so someone like Obama comes in, of course he thinks he can change public opinion, because, I mean, he's totally surpassed every expectation.

But the evidence is, no, you can't do it. Clinton didn't do it, Reagan didn't do it. Very popular presidents don't achieve it. They can sometimes shift the salience of issues. And again, if it's a really complex new issue, you can sometime shift them moderately. On issues where voters preferences are already fairly set, scientists sometimes call a doorstep issue that you sort of just think about on your doorstep, almost impossible.

People know what they think. Everybody was surprised at the Kansas referendum result. It's like people know what they think about. The issue of abortion, they've been thinking about it for a very long time. You're not providing any new information on this that they haven't already thought about. And so shifting their views is very unlikely.

And that's in both directions, I should note. So it's not shifting them in a liberal direction. It's not shifting them in a conservative direction. But you can change the salience. And presidents like Reagan were excellent at this. He did have, I mean, a lot of charisma. He did have the advantage of sort of a media environment that was very tight.

There were kinda three major networks, right? He wasn't facing what you'd face today. Obama was good at changing the salience of issues. So that's very different than actually changing people's policy views. And I would say, I wouldn't say Biden is great at it, but he gets in there.

He knows he's pushing infrastructure and making that a salient issue. So you can, when an issue's in line with public opinion, you can make it more salient, particularly as the president. On complex issues, you sometimes see success. The Truman Doctrine speech is all often pointed to George W Bush in Iraq before people started developing their views of the war as it emerged in the beginning.

He really did lead public opinion on the issue. Trump moves co-partisan opinion on COVID. It's clear that elite leadership moved the opinion.

>> Brandice Canes-Wrone: On the flip side, you can repel public opinion on those sorts of issues. So Trump seemed to move Democrat's opinion on COVID-19 as well and sort of the policies associated with it.

And this is a problem for all presidents because we have these increasingly polarized approval ratings. So the other party has become less willing to sort of shift their views just because a president advocated something. And then what I've already said, that even very, very popular presidents have a lower ability than is commonly assumed.

So the peak of popularity in recent decades is George HW Bush right after the Iraq war. So he goes in there and sort of feels like, yeah, I can push all these domestic policies I've been wanting, no deal. Just doesn't translate. And Obama and healthcare is another example where there's an excellent book by Larry Jacobs and Bob Shapiro where they go through.

Some of you may have read it in your classes how the Obama White House thought they could craft public opinion on this issue. And actually, no, that's a follow-up article. The book is about Clinton and healthcare and how he thought he could craft it. But there's been follow-up work on Obama.

Foreign policy is a little more of an effect, and that fits with this theoretical construct I put up. This is an issue on which the interest group environment can be a little thinner depending on the foreign policy issue. And often the issues are very new, like kind of Iraq war, the second Iraq war when it started.

But even here, much slower. Reagan kept trying on the contras in the 80s, super high popularity. Opinion just stays, very unsupportive, it just doesn't move. Biden and the Afghanistan withdrawal, people actually wanted the US out of Afghanistan. But they're gonna form their own opinions about events. They're gonna see things on the news and they're gonna decide what they think of it.

So opinion, and less than you'd think. But again, for those of you who go into this business, the advice is not, don't do anything and let the other side dominate the airwaves. The advice is just, be realistic. Don't think, wow, everybody hates this policy. Now that the woman or the man or the person I've elected, I've worked all these years for as president, we can just go in and we can definitely shift public opinion.

Stick to the policies on which you won for, the ones that propelled you into office, get those done first. And maybe opinion will shift for reasons that are on these other ones that aren't very popular, for reasons that are outside your control. Okay, I wanna leave time for questions, so I'm gonna kinda move through to the summary.

So big picture summary, policy responsiveness is alive and well. So when opinion shifts, it does shift the likelihood that individual congressional members, even presidents, state legislators, governors, policy itself moves in the direction that opinion is shifting. It doesn't guarantee it, but it has a big effect, a noticeable effect.

Congruence is not high by design, though, there's a status quo bias. And so for people who want a lot of change, this is a real issue, it's there. So I'm not trying to hide that. The quote decline is from this high point in the 1970s, and the levels are actually much closer to those in the 1970s than they are to a large portion of American history.

So it hasn't been this sort of terrible decline that is often lamented about. And the influence of the affluent relative to the middle class is not particularly large, and by some measures, completely statistically indistinguishable. So again, that doesn't mean you should say, the affluent should never have more influence than the middle class, reasonable position.

But it's not the case, which we often read about, that the middle class has no influence. They have influence, and on 90% of the issues, the two are in agreement. And when they disagree, they win about an equal percentage of the time. And opinion is not as malleable by elites as commonly assumed.

Now, that's also because both sides are out there working hard, but it also means that when we hear this, well, you can't even trust what opinion is. It's all just malleable. You should be skeptical. Okay, I don't mean to leave us on too high of a note, cuz I realized, as I was sort of wrapping up the talk, that yeah, that I could sort of seem like everything's great.

Why are people writing these essays that polarization's a problem? I mean, so things are going well. But I think there is this temptation when you think some things are going poorly, to think everything's going poorly. And so this talk has tried to dispel some of that. Trust in government is really low, and that's a huge problem.

It's not new to Biden. It's been going down over time. It's had some rises and falls. But the overall trend, if you forced a regression line, is a kinda steady decline, if you forged a straight line. So that's not good. That's really bad for our polity. You'd think that it means that representation has really dropped.

As I've tried to say, it doesn't, but that doesn't mean that the trust in government itself isn't a big problem. And I talked a little about elite polarization. There are other people at Stanford, including Shanto Ayengar, one of my colleagues in political science who works on effective polarization.

So which is how individuals feel about other individuals in the other party. So this isn't sort of elected officials, this is sort of us in this room, right? And that's been going way up. And in fact, I mean, this may come as a surprise to you, but over time, one of Shanto's studies showed that whereas it used to be that people were really concerned about marrying someone from a different religion, now the big concern is marrying someone from another party.

That you couldn't do it. But someone who's a completely different religion, that's fine. So there's been concern that sort of politics has almost become this emotional religion to many people, and that there's not a sort of, that's taken on this other life. And that's a problem for our polity more generally.

So I don't wanna kind of leave us on too rosy a note, but the rosy side, if you wanna call it that, is that while other things have sort of increased in terms of kind of what you might call a problematic nature. In US politics, representation, again, a little bit of a decline since the 1970s, but not much, and looks pretty good on a lot of fronts.

So that is probably not the area then, even from this perspective, which is, how do we increase trust in government? How do we change effective polarization? We wanna kind of think about, what's changed that might be causing this if it's not really the representation side?