Stable Condition : Elites' Limited Influence on Health Care Attitudes / Daniel J. Hopkins.

New York : Russell Sage Foundation, [2023]

Baltimore, Md. : Project MUSE, 2023

©[2023]

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"To what extent can political elites reshape public opinion through their words or policies? Stable Condition addresses that question through a detailed study of Americans' opinions about the Affordable Care Act (ACA) between 2009 and 2020. While researchers have produced a rich body of scholarship about the role of specific factors in shaping ACA attitudes, this book departs from prior research by providing a competitive assessment of several credible explanations for Americans' views on the ACA. These explanations range from personal experiences with the policy to messaging, partisanship, racial attitudes, and thermostatic responses to presidential policymaking in which the public gravitates toward the status quo. By considering varied explanations simultaneously, this book is positioned to advance this study's broader goal: the characterization of the potential for enduring elite influence on public opinion. A central tenet of representative democracy is that elected officials act with the consent of the governed, which has come to mean at least the periodic authorization of the citizenry via elections. But the prospect that political leaders can bend public opinion threatens to invert that relationship. The risk is that instead of acting on some vision of the public interest, leaders will manipulate public opinion so as to build support for their own ends. Even in a democracy, leaders may not enact the will of the people so much as reshape it to match theirs. Assessing elite influence in democracies requires us to consider its two main avenues together: messaging and policy"-- Provided by publisher.

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