Public Perceptions of the American People

University Of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln NE

Investigators

Abstract

This project supports a national survey, focus groups, and an experiment to investigate public perceptions of the American People. Previous research on American public opinion has tended to focus on people's views of politicians, policies, institutions, and democratic values and processes. Surprisingly little work has been done on what people think about the American people as a group or on the extent to which people identify with this group, even though the people are a key political actor given the idea of popular sovereignty in the United States. The Principal Investigator contends that we need to discover how the people themselves view the American people to understand their beliefs about democracy. Two contrasting political theories highlight the importance of understanding how views of the people can affect views of democratic political systems, and the researcher draws on these theories to develop hypotheses to test. The literal view espoused by James Madison and others holds that the American people are fallible and hold wildly diverse interests. The solution to these problems is an institutional structure that protects government from the whims of the people and makes sense of the diverse demands made on government. A more communitarian view holds that people pursuing their wildly diverse interests hurt democratic government. Democratic government needs a unifying force that brings the people together, and that unifying force is a strong national collective identity. This identity helps people to fulfill their obligations to fellow Americans, trust fellow citizens, and want to pursue the common good over narrower interests. In both these theoretical approaches, beliefs about how the government ought to operate are influenced by perceptions of the people. Are the public's beliefs about government similarly affected by its perceptions of the American people? The researcher assesses this key question. The researcher discovers how Americans characterize the American people in terms of their capabilities, their political values, their demographics, and their homogeneity or heterogeneity as a people; to investigate the extent to which people identify with the American people as a group; and to determine the consequences of these characterizations and of a national collective identity for several political attitudes. This project provides the most detailed understanding yet of public attitudes toward the American people and provides an extremely valuable dataset for others interested in understanding people's attitudes toward democratic government, the American people, and group identity.