Nation's Priorities

One of those standard survey questions is asking people what they think are the nation's greatest problems or top priorities.  Pollingreport.com does a nice job of compiling these.  Since the middle of 2009, we've seen some interesting shifts. 

My favorite is one done by the Wall Street Journal and NBC News (a few screens down from the top of the page).  It forces people into choosing one area that should be the top priority of the federal government.  Here are the high points:

• Health care has dropped from a high of 21 percent to 12 percent.
• The deficit and government spending has dropped from a high of 19 percent to 13 percent.
• Job creation remains high, with the latest number at 38 percent (up from 30 percent).
• National security inched up, but the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan remained stable.

Okay, so what do we take from the above?  Without getting too deeply into the agenda-setting by journalists and bloggers and talking heads, movement on these top priorities should ebb and flow based on real-world events.  It's not so much a fickle public as it is response to what's in the news, a recency effect.  Health care had its big moment last summer and into fall, but now it's being pushed aside both in the public mind -- and, let's face it, the Democrats as well -- because of other concerns.  The big one -- obviously -- being jobs.  Hence Obama's shift, the public response, or maybe it's the other way around (public concern -> Obama response).  Whatever the causal direction, the shift is unsurprising.

How accurate are people in identifying the most pressing issues?  That's unanswerable.  From a political standpoint, the public is completely accurate because you want to spin and position yourself to exploit or answer those concerns.  From a longterm perspective, the public is probably no better and no worse than your average journalist or politician.

Issue Publics

There is a long-standing approach that argues most people can be grouped into issue publics, topics they care greatly about.  I'm skimming a fairly new book entitled Moved to Action (with a long post-colon subtitle) that examines what motivates people to participate in politics, especially when inequality plays a role. 

There's a nice graphic on page 62 (Figure 3.2) that illustrates the idea of issue publics quite nicely. A huge majority of people care deeply about one, maybe two topics. "The key point is that many people in these data are specialists, not generalists," writes Hahrie Han, the author.  "They appear to direct their personal concern toward specific issues, rather than focusing on politics more generally."

The book is broader than this, of course, but I'm using this as a kickoff on the topic of issue publics from a news media and what people know perspective.  The cult of cable news kinda feeds the sense of issue publics in its continuous coverage of a handful of topics.  The cable talking heads create, nurture, and maintain these issues.  Then again, that's basically journalism's job -- to identify what is news and push it higher on the agenda.

In terms of political knowledge, you might suspect that the more issues one cares about, the better one might do on tests of knowledge.  Not necessarily.  There is breadth of knowledge, and there is depth of knowledge.  These two combined often create a cognitive complexity measure, a topic for another day.  Depth of knowledge in a few issues is considered good, but so is breadth of knowledge -- the ability to discuss a number of topics intelligently or at least to care about and understand the basics.  Some worry we are narrowing our knowledge base thanks to cult cable news and talk radio, that people know a few topics that matter most to them (or they've been told matter to them, over and over).  I'm not so worried because people have always has tunnel vision in terms of issue relevance.  For politicians and political strategists, it's a matter of pushing the right buttons.  For journalists, it's covering how those buttons get pushed and whether they matter.