Do elites control public opinion?
Three lines of evidence suggest they do.
Written by Emil O. W. Kirkegaard.
There are two main ways we can think about the relationship between political parties and the voters.
In the shopping or spatial matching model, parties are equivalent to supermarkets and voters are equivalent to their customers. Parties pick a set of policies they hope will attract voters. Voters then inspect the parties’ policies and decide which set is closest to their own views. The party with that particular set is the one they vote for. If their views change, they reconsider which party to vote for. This model can be illustrated graphically as follows:
The three plots show the positions of various Dutch political parties on six political dimensions. (You can find a list of Dutch parties on Wikipedia.) Theoretically, the voter could place themself on each of these dimensions and then try to find the closest party, taking into account their relative importance. For example, someone who is in favor of environmentalism (right-hand side) has a multitude of options available, but only if they are against nuclear power. If they are in favor of nuclear power (top half), there is only one party that shares their views, Volt. If they are in favor of neither, there is no party that represents their views (bottom left quadrant).
In this model of politics, voters are like customers in a supermarket browsing the various products and trying to make an optimal choice. But there is another view of parties’ role in a democracy, which claims they are opinion makers rather than opinion sellers. This is a variant of elite theory, according to which most of the power in a society is held by a small minority that tends to get its way no matter what the voters want. Parties first attract voters through broad ideological appeals and by the charisma of their leaders. Once they’ve been attracted to one or other party, voters become partisans and will tend to support their party’s policies, even if they abruptly change – and even if they go against voters’ own prior views.
The two models are not entirely inconsistent in that democracy can feature both elements – though the elite theory is arguably the less obvious of the two. Is there a way to test it? Yes – a Danish study from 2020 by Rune Slothuus and Martin Bisgaard provides some important evidence.
The researchers had surveyed the same individuals five times between 2010 and 2011. As it happens, two major parties abruptly changed their positions on two contested policies during precisely this period. (One policy concerns a type of early retirement and one a kind of unemployment benefit.) Hence the authors looked to see whether the parties’ voters switched their own views in response to the parties’ changing stances. They quantified the parties’ changing stances by coding statements by politicians in newspaper articles:
We see that around May 2010, the Liberals (a center-right party) and the Danish People’s Party (a nationalist/populist party) changed their positions from being against to in favor of reducing the unemployment benefit. Similarly, the Liberals went from being opposed to supporting the abolition of early retirement in January 2011.
By modelling voters’ views on the same policies before and after the relevant changes, the researchers were able to identify an opinion-making effect:
Each dot corresponds to a time at which subjects were asked for their view on the unemployment benefit. Black dots correspond to voters for the Liberals and the DPP; grey dots to votes for other parties. As you can see, the Liberal and DPP voters were initially slightly in favor of reducing the unemployment benefit. Yet they became much more supportive after their party changed its policy position. The voters moved with the party. By contrast, no change was seen among voters for the other parties.
The same pattern can be observed for the policy concerning early retirement:
Important to note here is that only the Liberal party changed its policy, not the DPP, and only the voters identifying with the Liberal party changed their views.
Was the effect driven by voters who were not really committed to a particular view in the first place? No. The researchers examined voters who were initially against the policy change –between 20 and 30% of the voters – and found that these voters changed their views the most. On a scale of 0 to 1, from completely opposed to completely in favor, the voters who were initially opposed moved between 0.20 and 0.36 towards the new party policy, which is a substantial change.
Of course, if a given voter is already in favor of some policy, it is not possible for them to move further in favor of it, so in a way it is not surprising those who were against initially showed the largest changes. Unfortunately, they did not examine whether some voters switched parties, as one would expect from the shopping model. So it is not possible to compare the relative explanatory power of the two theories based on this study.
Slothuus and Bisgaard’s study is just one example of political elites influencing the public at large. More evidence comes from a 2014 book by Martin Gilens, Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America, as well as a paper presenting the core results. In the study, Gilens compiled data from hundreds of surveys carried out across decades in the US. He showed that while the opinion of the voter at the median income correlates well with the opinion of the voter at the 90th percentile, when they disagree policy tends to reflect the opinion of the latter. Politicians, it seems, implement policies that rich people favor, even if they are against the wishes of the public at large. This finding is arguably relevant to the debate around immigration policy in Western countries, though that’s beyond the scope of this article.
Studies of the Great Awokening by scholars like Zach Goldberg and David Rozado provide a third line of evidence. In particular, time-series analyses indicate that the media’s use of woke terms (antiracist, racism, whiteness etc.) predates the public’s change in views on woke topics like racial reparations and police reforms – and may therefore have caused the change in views. If this interpretation is accepted, it is yet another example of elites (in this case, journalists writing for prestigious newspapers and magazines) shaping people’s attitudes around important topics.
Various kinds of evidence indicate that elites can engineer sizeable changes in public opinion – including on matters of policy. If we accept elite theory, broadly understood, we might be more likely to agree with Nathan Cofnas that defeating wokeness comes down to the question: how does one convince the elites?
If you liked this article, then do check out Liegent. They provide book summaries in both text and audio format, and have a number of relevant titles, such as The Populist Delusion by Neema Parvini (a.k.a. Academic Agent). Use promocode APORIA to get 10% off your sign up.
Emil O. W. Kirkegaard is a social geneticist. You can follow his work on Twitter/X and Substack.
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A very interesting and informative article, but I think the conclusion is off. The question we should be asking (and answering) is not how to convince the elites, but how to replace them.
Excellent if depressing analysis. But this is essentially why what was once radical leftism became the mainstream-they targeted the super-rich for conversion. And it’s an ancient technique. Christian missionaries were most successful when they converted kings and emperors, who then converted the rest of the populace. Christianity won the West when it converted Constantine the Great. The top of society can influence or force the rest of society to follow. Critical to this in the modern age has been essentially a deal between the business/billionaire class and radical leftist activism, which is that radical ‘progressive’ social ideas will be pressed by business and elite interests in return for those leftists no longer caring about class differences and wealth disparities in any manner except as a rhetorical device.