Side by Side, Worlds Apart

• Date: 01 March 2014
• DOI: 10.1177/1532673X13498619
• Published date: 01 March 2014
• Subject Matter: Articles

American Politics Research

2014, Vol. 42(2) 338 –363

© The Author(s) 2013

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X13498619

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Article

Side by Side, Worlds

Apart: Desired Policy

Change as a Function

of Preferences AND

Perceptions

Dona-Gene Mitchell1, Matthew V. Hibbing2,

Kevin B. Smith1, and John R. Hibbing1

Abstract

The degree to which people desire policy change is a function of two

factors: preferences for future policies and perceptions of current

policies. Political scientists, pollsters, and pundits know a good deal about

people’s policy preferences but surprisingly little about the distance of

those preferences from policy perceptions. In this article, we assess the

distance between policy perceptions and policy preferences to calculate

the amount of policy change desired. The data come from an original survey

tapping respondents’ preferred and perceived policies and from those few

National Election Surveys where parallel items on policy preferences and

perceptions were posed. By incorporating policy perceptions alongside of

preferences, our findings provide a better indication of the gulf between

the policy change desired by liberals and the policy change desired by

conservatives. The findings help explain polarization in the United States

where differences in policy preferences alone often do not indicate

extreme diversity.

1University of Nebraska–Lincoln, USA

2University of California, Merced, USA

Corresponding Author:

Dona-Gene Mitchell, Department of Political Science, University of Nebraska–Lincoln,

524 Oldfather Hall, Lincoln, NE 68588, USA.

Email: dmitchell2@unl.edu

498619APR42210.1177/1532673X13498619American Politics ResearchMitchell et al.

research-article2013

Mitchell et al. 339

Keywords

policy perceptions, policy preferences, desired policy change, ideology,

political behavior

Democratic accountability rests on the assumption that citizen input will

guide the direction of current and future policies and a key feature of citizen

input is the extent to which people desire change in current policies. To accu-

rately assess the public’s desire for policy change, it is not enough to know

what individuals want; it is also necessary to know what they believe current

policies to be. To illustrate, imagine two people who believe governmental

policies should strictly punish rule-breakers but differ in the extent to which

they believe current policies do in fact “strictly punish.” One individual is

convinced current policies are firm and punitive; the other is equally con-

vinced lax sentences and cushy penitentiaries do nothing but mollycoddle

criminals. Though the policy preferences are identical, the substantial differ-

ence in perception of existing conditions produces distinct perceptions of the

degree of policy change needed. Individuals whose perceptions and prefer-

ences align are likely to be satisfied with the status quo given that the policy

world they see resembles the one they desire. Individuals whose preferences

significantly diverge from their perceptions see a very different policy world

from the one they desire and, accordingly, are more likely to want the status

quo to change, perhaps radically.

In this paper, we marshal survey evidence that poses parallel questions on

people’s policy preferences (e.g., to what extent do they want policies that

strictly punish criminals?) and perceptions (e.g., to what extent do they

believe current policies strictly punish criminals?) to more fully understand

the degree to which individuals desire policy change. Most surveys ask only

about policy preferences and a few ask about perceptions, but it is rare for

surveys to ask about both with parallel items. As a result of the paucity of

parallel items, we draw here on data from an original survey of ours and

supplement this analysis with the American National Election Surveys

(ANES), which in selected years included the necessary parallel items. The

results are consistent across surveys in showing that variations in policy per-

ceptions contribute in important ways to the overall degree to which people

desire policy change. Though our initial concern is with variation in prefer-

ences and perceptions across ideological groups, we also present the results

of multivariate analyses (with demographics and partisan affiliation included

among the explanatory variables) designed to account for variation in