There are both idealistic and practical reasons to try to discern and pay attention to public opinion. For example, the fact that democracy attributes ultimate sovereignty to "the people" implies that the people's views and attitudes about how things are and how they should be need to be known and translated into policy outcomes. Along these lines, the founding fathers of the United States -- including George Washington, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson -- often mentioned public opinion in their discussions of how to design the American political system. In practice, public officials are well-served to track public opinion, not only because the will of the people should determine which policies are enacted, but also to make sure they're appealing to their constituents and to figure out how they might package themselves and their policy initiatives to maximize popular support.
As this site describes, Abraham Lincoln especially appreciated this, even going so far as to say that "public sentiment is everything" in American politics and receiving inordinate numbers of visitors at the White House to provide him with what he called "public opinion baths," or opportunities to get a feel for what Civil War era Americans thought by interacting personally with members of the mass public.4 Attributes of Public Opinion
The required text suggests that, when it comes to any given political issue, personality or event, there are various aspects (or "attributes") of public opinion that might be of interest. Sometimes it's enough just to know roughly how many people feel one way or another (i.e. the "content" of public opinion); other times, though, we want to know how strongly they hold their opinions ("intensity"), whether public opinion is relatively unchanging or constantly in flux ("stability"), and/or whether there seems to be an upward or downward trend in the making ("direction").
Content
The content of public opinion -- that is, the simple distribution of people who feel one way or another about a given personality, event, or issue -- is its most basic attribute.
For example, this graph from a recent Gallup poll tells us that a little more than half (55%) of Americans disapprove of majority government ownership of General Motors while a little less than half (41%) approve of it and only a small handful (5%) have no opinion on the matter:
It doesn't give us any more information than that: We don't know how strongly Americans approve or disapprove of majority government ownership of GM ("intensity"), whether they felt the same way a month ago ("stability"), or whether the size of the majority that disapproves is likely to grow or shrink in the coming weeks ("direction").While the vast majority of public opinion polls measure content, not all of them do. For example, this graph from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press's News Interest Index tells us which news stories people followed very and most closely during the first week in June, but not the content of their opinions on those stories:
In other words, we know from the graph that more than 25% of the public thought that Obama's Egypt speech was important enough to follow media coverage of it very closely, but not whether they approve or disapprove of what he said.Intensity
Sometimes knowing just how many people feel positively or negatively about something isn't enough to inform political decision making; instead, it becomes important to know how strongly or intensely those positive and negative feelings are held. For example, consider this graph, which reported on American public opinion regarding same-sex marriage a few years ago:
From a purely content standpoint, it's not especially telling. About 55% of the population opposes public opinion, about 35% favors it, and the remaining 10% presumably has no opinion on the matter. What is interesting, though, is the intensity (or strength) of opinion held those who oppose same-sex marriage as compared to those who favor it. While clearly more than half of those who oppose same-sex marriage do so "strongly," less than half of those who favor it favor it "strongly." A politician (or his strategists) looking at this graph would likely infer from it that a misstep on the same-sex marriage issue is more likely to cost him support among those who oppose it, since their opposition is comparatively intense, and will err on the side of opposition in his policy votes and campaign messages.
Stability
The attribute of stability refers to whether and how public opinion changes over time. A good example comes from another recent Gallup poll that caused a bit of a stir by its finding that, for the first time ever since Gallup pollsters have been asking about it, more Americans consider themselves to be "pro-life" than "pro-choice" in their opinion on abortion:
As you can see, public opinion on this issue has changed considerably -- by nearly 20 percentage points -- since the mid-1990s, when only 33% of Americans considered themselves pro-life. If you cover up the first few years of the graph, though, public opinion on abortion seems to have been relatively stable: During the decade spanning from 1998 until 2008, the proportion of Americans self-identifying as pro-life fluctuated only mildly around the 45% mark.
Direction
Finally, the direction of public opinion is related to its stability, since both of these attributes are concerned with changes over time. However, whereas stability aims to determine how much the public's opinions fluctuate, direction speculates about the future trends. Looking back at the pro-choice/pro-life graph above, for example, while there's relative stability over the 1998-2008 decade (that is, the pro-life proportion doesn't stray far from 45%) and a lot of year-to-year fluctuation (some years it's 42%, others 44% or 46%), the general trend (or "direction") of public opinion since the mid-1990s is -- and looks likely to continue to be -- clearly towards more Americans considering themselves pro-life.
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