Constructing the public will: How political actors in New York State construct, assess, and use public opinion in penal policy making
| Published date | 01 October 2011 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474511414779 |
| Author | Elizabeth K. Brown |
| Date | 01 October 2011 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Punishment & Society
13(4) 424–450
! The Author(s) 2011
Constructing the public
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will: How political actors
DOI: 10.1177/1462474511414779
pun.sagepub.com
in New York State
construct, assess, and
use public opinion in
penal policy making
Elizabeth K. Brown
Niagara University, USA
Abstract
Prior research has failed to attend adequately to the ways in which state-level political
actors in the USA think about and relate to public opinion. While some research has
considered how political actors, such as legislators and state agency staff members,
assess public opinion on penal issues, that body of research has been limited both
conceptually and methodologically. This article argues that an enterprise perspective
on policy making combined with a constructionist perspective on public opinion have
the potential to deepen our understanding of penal policy making. To that end, descrip-
tive data from interviews with a wide range of political actors in New York State are
considered for what they indicate about the dynamics of public opinion construction,
assessment, and use among political actors engaged in penal policy making.
Keywords
policy, public opinion, punishment
Introduction
Evaluations of what political actors think the public thinks or feels about penal
issues have suggested that political actors at the state level in the USA misperceive
public opinion (Bowers et al., 1994; Gottfredson and Taylor, 1984; Johnson and
Corresponding author:
Elizabeth K. Brown, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Niagara
University, Niagara University, New York, NY 14109, USA.
Email: ebrown@niagara.edu
Brown
425
Huff, 1987; McGarrell and Sandys, 1996; Riley and Rose, 1980; Uslaner and
Weber, 1979; Whitehead et al., 1999). The direction of misperception found indi-
cates that political actors, whether narrowly defined as legislators or more broadly
defined to include correctional bureaucrats and interest group actors, perceive
greater public support for harsh penal sanctions than a critical reading of available
public opinion data from polls and other sources indicates. According to prior
studies, most policy-makers perceive the public to be punitive and see public opin-
ion as an impediment to correctional reform (Berk and Rossi, 1977; Cullen et al.,
2000; Gottfredson and Taylor, 1984; Riley and Rose, 1980).
In claiming misperception of public opinion on the part of policy-makers, scho-
lars have implied that ‘true’ public opinion is measured by the surveys and polls
they themselves conduct. Prior research assumes that if political actors do not
perceive public views as they are expressed in survey findings, the perceptions of
political actors must be flawed. Certainly, it is possible, if not likely, that political
actors rely on sources other than survey data when assessing public opinion and
that they perceive or interpret public views differently than do scholars who con-
duct surveys and analyze their results.
It seems that the hegemony of polls in academic discussions of penal policy
making has contributed to lack of attention to variable constructions of public
opinion at the personal and interpersonal levels.1 Indeed, prior research has largely
ignored the notions that public opinion may be more of a construct than an abso-
lute; that political actors are likely to make sense of public opinion in different ways
depending on context, perspective, and other factors; and that alternate, albeit less
rationalized, measures of public opinion such as jury deliberations, focus groups,
interviews, deliberative polls, and public fora may have considerable power
(Braman, 2006; Dzur and Mirchandani, 2007; Fishkin, 1991; Green, 2006;
Johnstone, 2000; Yankelovich, 1991).
While some criminal justice research has sought to elucidate political actors’
perspectives on public opinion, that body of literature has been plagued by a
series of troublesome issues: a limited focus on polling data as public opinion,
lack of attention to ways in which political actors make sense of and use (or
seek to influence) public opinion, and narrow operationalization of who should
be considered a policy-maker. This article makes a case for the importance of
considering how public opinion is constructed, interpreted, and used by the wide
variety of political actors involved in penal policy making. To that end, descriptive
findings from an evaluation of how political actors in New York State constructed,
assessed, and used public opinion in their legislative work on penal issues in 2006
are considered.
This article begins by considering recent contributions from the fields of political
science and public policy on how political actors think about public opinion. The
research approach for this project is then framed according to an enterprise per-
spective on policy making and a constructionist perspective on both penal issues
and public opinion. The data and methods are reviewed and findings from the
research are then presented. Of particular note among the findings is evidence
426
Punishment & Society 13(4)
that political actors appear to discount polls because they see them as potentially
biased sources of public opinion, relying instead on hunches, intuition, and media
coverage for insights into public views. And while journalist interviewees rejected
the notion that their work can or should be considered reflective of public views,
they, along with other political actors, reported watching the behaviors of elected
officials and the movement or lack of movement of legislation as primary sources of
information on public views. The findings suggest that critical consideration should
be given to the complex and dynamic constructions of public opinion in penal
policy making. This article concludes with a discussion of the implications and
limitations of this research and suggestions for future research development.
Prior research
In comparison with the field of criminal justice, the fields of political science and
public policy have given much more focused attention to how political actors read
opinion in the course of their work. In the mid-1990s, for example, Susan Herbst
conducted a study in Illinois of how political actors read public opinion on a range
of policy issues (Herbst, 1998). She was interested in investigating the construction
and assessment of public opinion and models of governance, and the nature of
arguments made about both, among state-level political actors. In the category of
‘political actor’, Herbst included journalists, activists, communications directors,
and legislative staffers, who, she argued, are understudied but critical behind-
the-scenes players assessing opinion and drafting policy. She conducted in-depth
interviews that allowed interviewees to frame arguments about public opinion and
policy making, thus producing rich data on constructions of public opinion.
The findings of her study indicate that political actors as a whole often conflate
media sources and interest group contact/communication with public opinion.
Herbst found that while legislative staffers perceived media content and commu-
nication from interest groups as well informed and representative of at least certain
segments of public opinion, they expressed skepticism about polls, which they
viewed as potentially biased and often used for manipulative purposes. Direct
communication with the public was also generally discounted as unrepresentative
of the public at large. From a more macro-perspective, her research indicated that
not all political actors construct public opinion in the same ways, that their con-
structions of public opinion speak to multiple models of democracy, and that their
ideas about public opinion are internalized and serve utilitarian purposes (Herbst,
1998, 2002).
A recent study built upon Herbst’s work on the construction of public opinion
by investigating how Congressional representatives and staffers read public opinion
on national security issues (Rosner, 2007). Using in-depth interviews and partici-
pant observation with a select group of US Congress members and their chiefs of
staff, Rosner found that political actors are ‘hunter gatherers’ for information on
public opinion. His interviewees reported using a wide range of haphazardly col-
lected indicators of public opinion: letters, email and telephone calls, meetings and
Brown
427
direct contact, personal communications, interest group communications, experts,
media, staff, polls, colleagues, the President, election results, demography, partisan
change, family, students, partisan cues, presence of military facilities and people,
international exposure, their own staff, congressional delegations abroad, foreign
media, polls, and ‘intuition’ (Rosner, 2007).
Not only did Rosner’s research expand greatly the possible sources that might
be considered by policy-makers (at least at the congressional level) to express
public opinion, but he found evidence to call into question a series of assumptions
in prior political science research: that opinion information is collected and used by
policy-makers in ‘intentional’ and ‘issue-linear’ ways (that opinion on X informs
policy on X), that quantitative sources of opinion (polls) are relied upon, and that
assessment of opinion is done in the here and now for current policy issues. Indeed,
he found that none of these assumptions was validated by his qualitative data. He
found reading public opinion to be a complex undertaking in...
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