Judgment and opinion

 Exactly a year ago, I had a post about a survey question from 1993 on whether members of Congress should follow public opinion or their own judgment when voting on issues.  I wasn't planning on marking the anniversary, but by coincidence I recently ran across other questions on the same issue, from 1939 and 1940.  They aren't identical to the 1993 question, but seem similar enough to be compared.  The overall distributions:

            Own       Public     

1939     38            59          A
1940     32            64          A
1940     35            39          B
1993     23            70          C

The exact questions:
A.  Should members of Congress vote according to their own best judgment or according to the way the people in their districts feel?
B.  In cases when a Congressman's opinion is different from that of the majority of people in his district, do you think he should usually vote according to his own best judgment, or according to the way a majority of his district feels?
C.  When your representative in Congress votes on an issue, which should be more important:  the way that voters in your district feel about the issue, or the Representative's own principles and judgment about what is best for the country?

The percent choosing the "own judgment" option is substantially lower in the 1993 question than in all three of the 1939-40 questions. It seems to me that the addition of  "what is best for the country" in the 1993 question made the "own judgment" side sound more favorable, so if the differences in question wording mattered they probably understated the change.  In looking at the 1993 question, I had found that education didn't make much difference.  The 1939 and 1940 surveys didn't ask about education, but they had variables for occupation and interviewer's rating of social standing.  People of "higher" position were a bit more likely to say that representatives should follow their own judgement, but it was only a small difference.  I tried a few other demographic variables, which didn't make much difference.  So the major story is simply the difference in the overall distributions.  Of course, 1993 was 30 years ago, so we don't know what's happened since then.   It seems strange that no one has asked about the issue since then, so I'll make another attempt to find questions.

The 1939 survey also asked about a question I've written about before "Do people who are successful get ahead largely because of their luck or largely because of their ability?"  The same question was also asked in 1970 and then in 2016.  My previous post on this question reported the distribution (16% said luck in 1939, 8% in 1970, and 13% in 2016), but didn't look at group differences.  In 1939, there were large differences by economic standing:  

                                       Luck     Ability
Wealthy                           3%          97%
Average +                       7%           93%
Average                         11%          89%
Poor+                             17%          83%
Poor                                23%         77%
On relief                         30%         70%

Unfortunately, the individual data for the 2016 survey is not available in the Roper Center or ICPSR--I will try to track it down, although I think the odds are against me.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]