Elites and the public on other things

In my last post, I wrote about differences between the opinions of elites and the public on tariffs.  The same survey also asked about seventeen possible foreign policy goals--whether they should be "very important," "somewhat important," or "not important."  I compared the percent saying "very important" among the general public and four elite groups--politics, business, the media, and experts.  (I left out labor and religious leaders, mostly for reasons of time, but partly because I didn't think they had that much impact on foreign policy).  There were positive correlations among all the groups--that is, if one group thought a goal was important, so did all the others, but the correlations among all of the elite groups were higher than the correlations between the elites and the public.  For example, the lowest correlation between any two elite groups was .85 (the media and politicians); the highest correlation between an elite group and the public was .66 (the media). 

There was a difference between the public and elites on the importance of "protecting the jobs of American workers."  81% percent of the public said that should be a very important goal, which was third of the seventeen items, just barely behind "stopping the flow of illegal drugs into the United States" (83%) and "preventing the spread of nuclear weapons" (82%).  Among elites, it ranked 9th:  between 27% (elites) and 49% (political) said it should be very important.  Among the public, "controlling and reducing illegal immigration" was eighth, with 57% saying it should be very important.  Among elites, it was dead last, with between 18% (politicians) and 25% (business) saying it should be very important.  Those were the two biggest discrepancies--the next was stopping the flow of drugs.  The biggest discrepancy in the other direction was "defending our allies' security"--about 60% of the elite groups and 45% of the public thought it should be very important.   

I then distinguished between members of the public with and without a college degree.  My expectation was that the opinions of people with a college degree would be somewhere in between those of elites and people without a degree--that more educated people would be influenced by the views of elites through the media and the educational system.   That was true, but they were a lot closer to the views of the less educated public than to those of elites (a mix of roughly 15% elite and 85% less educated).  They were farther from elites on one issue--"reducing our trade deficit with foreign countries."  Between 20% and 35% of the elite groups, 50% of people without a degree, and 55% of people with a degree thought that was very important.  My interpretation is that more educated people are more likely to be aware of the trade deficit and that most of them aren't familiar with the arguments for why it's not necessarily that important. 

The basic conclusion is that there was a substantial difference between the public and elites on the importance of two of the issues that Donald Trump emphasized most strongly in his campaign--reducing illegal immigration and protecting jobs.  Of course, this survey was taken 20 years ago, but it has been repeated since then, most recently in 2014.  I will look at the 2014 survey in the future, and I expect to see the same pattern.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]