Why Respond to Polls? Public Opinion Polling and Democracy

As every polling professional knows, public opinion research is under siege. For years now, the numbers of people willing to respond to polls have dropped lower and lower as Americans have been overwhelmed by telephone solicitations and telemarketers. The national "Do Not Call List" really does seem to work in filtering out these unwanted calls, but many people remain unsure of the legitimacy of the pollsters and market researchers who get through to conduct serious research.

Public opinion research is also under siege because critics argue that the proliferation of polling undermines effective political leadership and government. The common wisdom is that politicians and policymakers slavishly follow polls and don't take action without knowing from their pollsters that this is what the public wants. These same critics and others have been quick to emphasize the apparent errors in any polling—an inclination that has only been exacerbated in the wake of the 2004 election by a fierce debate about misleading early exit poll results that were inappropriately leaked. (In the end the exit polls were largely on the mark, and the much-maligned preelection polling also proved to have been stunningly accurate).

In short, the critics maintain that polling is bad, and the solution, according to political pundits like Arianna Huffington, is for the public to refuse to talk to pollsters: Leaders should lead and not be swayed by poll results, which critics see happening perpetually. But is there evidence to support this? If policymakers were following the dictates of polls, research on the relationship between public opinion and specific policies would show either a very strong historical correspondence, issue by issue, between short-term public opinion changes and subsequent government policies, or a relationship that is becoming increasingly strong.

What existing research shows is that the opinion-policy relationship is very far from perfect. While we can debate many aspects of the data, there is no support for the extreme claims in one direction or the other: Policymakers do not purely respond to public opinion, nor do they purely attempt to lead it. The fact that political parties and politicians conduct polls doesn't mean they are conducting them so that they will do things that are acceptable to the public.

Why is that? The reason, as George W. Bush has shown, is that politicians and policymakers have policy and ideological goals that they attempt to pursue between elections. Polls have historically been used in ways that are hardly characterized by responsiveness to public opinion—substantially for leading or manipulating public opinion to attain policy goals, or for other political purposes.