Public Opinion and Public Policy: The Case of Kennedy and Civil Rights

The connection between presidential policy making and public opinion remains a subject of considerable dispute. Current debate centers on two conflicting accounts (for classic studies of public opinion and policy making, see Miller and Stokes 1963; Weissberg 1978). On one side, Stimson (1991) and Stimson, MacKuen, and Erikson (1995) have contended that levels and changes in global public mood lead to adjustments and real policy change from politicians between elections and also affect the composition of the branches. At any single period, the public holds opinions about what the government should do with regard to defense, health care, crime, and so on. If we take these separate policy preferences and trace them over time, a pattern emerges in which instead of divergent trends for different issues, there is common movement along a single dimension of desire for more (liberal) or less (conservative) government activity. (1) The presidency and the two chambers of Congress respond remarkably similarly, and quickly, to levels and changes on this dimension-public mood--in terms of policy output: for the presidency and the House, a point shift in current public opinion yields more than one point in policy.... Hardly indifferent, these politicians are keen to pick up the faintest signals in their political environment. Like antelope in an open field, they cock their ears and focus their full attention on the slightest sign of danger. (Stimson, MacKuen, and Erikson 1995, 559) This is a theory of the primacy of global public opinion, or global public mood--global referring to the notion of a single dimension of public opinion that spans preferences over separate issues--on policy makers. Pitted against this view are theories of a narrower, more policy-specific influence of public opinion. They point to the difference between the stability of public mood and dramatic shifts in public attentiveness to particular policy areas (Jones 1994); to examples of stronger effects on policy of the salience of specific issues than the direction of global public opinion (Best 1999; Jacobs and Shapiro 1994; Wlezien 1996); and to the variation of the influence of public opinion with context and time (Jacobs and Shapiro 1992, 1993, 2000), policy area (Sharp 1999; Wlezien 1995, 2000), and the stage in the policy-making process (Cohen 1997). Their common theme is that policy makers have a narrower focus when it comes to public opinion. For example, if a decision on defense spending is affected by public sentiment, it is public sentiment on the issue of defense, even if opinion on this issue exhibits a trend at odds with the direction of global public opinion. This set of arguments are referred to here as issue-specific theories of the relationship between policy making and public opinion. This article concentrates on two key issues to assess the validity of these theoretical perspectives: first, the extent to which decision makers view public opinion in global- or issue-specific terms, and second, the nature of the ensuing link between public opinion and public policy. It examines the development of civil rights policy (2) during the administration of John Kennedy. There are three reasons for this choice. First, civil rights under Kennedy presents a clear puzzle for the perspective that politicians adopt and adjust policy decisions according to their perceptions of global mood. Stimson's (1991) measure indicates that domestic policy mood was more liberal early in Kennedy's administration than at any other time in the series (which began in 1956). Yet Kennedy was slow to respond to this historic opportunity, introducing radical legislation only later when the public's mood was more conservative. (3) Stimson thus contended, "One could argue that Kennedy [for example] had an opportunity for fundamental and far-reaching change similar to Reagan's" (p. 127). (4) Second, civil rights during the Kennedy era allows an assessment of the relative importance to politicians of global trends in opinion when set against issue-specific opinion characterized by sectional variance and shifts in salience. …