On his book Presidents and Parties in the Public Mind
Cover Interview of March 20, 2019
The wide angle
In the broadest sense, the book is meant to contribute to
our understanding of how American democracy operates. It is guided by and adds
to the scholarly literatures on survey research, public opinion, political
parties, congressional elections, political parties, and the presidency. The
idea for it emerged from research for an earlier book on the public’s reaction
to President George W. Bush’s performance and policies, particularly regarding
the Iraq War. I suspected that the growing unpopularity of Bush and the war
during his second term might have inflicted collateral damage on the Republican
Party and found evidence that it did. This raised the question of whether performance
ratings of other presidents affected their party’s public standing, and the
answer, after some additional research was a clear “yes.”
While pursuing that question, I discovered the wide variety
of ways in which opinion surveys had, over the postwar period, sought to
measure popular reactions to presidents and their parties. These studies
produced a remarkably rich trove of data for examining myriad ways in which
modern presidents and presidential candidates have influenced how people view
their parties. I reported analyses of some of these data in a series of papers
and journal articles but eventually decided that only a book offered the
latitude adequate to the data and subject. I aimed to finish book with the
completion of the Obama administration, but as I was wrapping it up, Trump was
elected, and the question of how such a bizarrely unorthodox president might
alter the relationships I had been investigating was too intriguing to ignore,
so I added a section on his campaign and early presidency. I continue to collect
data on Trump and the Republican Party and will be updating my analyses of his
administration in future work.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
The wide angle
In the broadest sense, the book is meant to contribute to our understanding of how American democracy operates. It is guided by and adds to the scholarly literatures on survey research, public opinion, political parties, congressional elections, political parties, and the presidency. The idea for it emerged from research for an earlier book on the public’s reaction to President George W. Bush’s performance and policies, particularly regarding the Iraq War. I suspected that the growing unpopularity of Bush and the war during his second term might have inflicted collateral damage on the Republican Party and found evidence that it did. This raised the question of whether performance ratings of other presidents affected their party’s public standing, and the answer, after some additional research was a clear “yes.”
While pursuing that question, I discovered the wide variety of ways in which opinion surveys had, over the postwar period, sought to measure popular reactions to presidents and their parties. These studies produced a remarkably rich trove of data for examining myriad ways in which modern presidents and presidential candidates have influenced how people view their parties. I reported analyses of some of these data in a series of papers and journal articles but eventually decided that only a book offered the latitude adequate to the data and subject. I aimed to finish book with the completion of the Obama administration, but as I was wrapping it up, Trump was elected, and the question of how such a bizarrely unorthodox president might alter the relationships I had been investigating was too intriguing to ignore, so I added a section on his campaign and early presidency. I continue to collect data on Trump and the Republican Party and will be updating my analyses of his administration in future work.