Question

Does public opinion shape policy, or does policy shape public opinion? Provide an example of a national scenario that has happened

Answer 1

Public opinion is the summation of individual attitudes, sentiments or views held by grown-up people. Public opinions can be swayed by public associations and political media. Mass media uses a broad range of advertising techniques to get their message out and change the peoples’ opinions. By assessing the opinions at the personal level and combining them, the percentage of the population with particular views and preferences can be established. Public opinions affect policy both positively and negatively depending on the overall general public view on the policy. Governments have in many occasions devised the use of public opinions for guiding their public information and helping in the making of government policies. The fundamental representation of democracy is the provision of a method through which public opinion and public policy are dependably and frequently interacted.

How public opinion influences policy

Representation largely depends on a reactive public which watches and responds to what the government is doing. Little advantages are gained on policies where the public is not attentive and uninformed on their preference. Public opinion on policies is very important to representation democratic system as a part of representation itself. A public that is quick to respond behaves like a thermostat as it adjusts its preferences for more or less policy depending on what policy makers do. State governments should develop policy outputs that replicate the concerns of the public and organized interests. Interest groups can also participate various roles standing-in as public or clients representatives as a broker of political information or as policy experts. Public opinion should hold larger weight on policy- making when a mood of the public is successfully communicated by use of interest group activities. The interest group serves as a representative of the mood of the people with their own policy goals. Population based approximations have been used but their effects have been difficult to ensnare from the split effects of socioeconomic conditions

For example, by examining the effect of public opinion of environmental, health and education policies, the conservatives will prefer a free market situation whereas the liberals will pursue a government centered regulation to address these problems in aforementioned areas. By using interest groups, the more groups that are organized around a particular policy area, the more authority that advocacy community has on public policy outputs. By increasing the numbers of advocacy communities, they are able to communicate their ideas to policymakers more frequently and urgently. Public interests group serve as representative by including an interaction between the public and the organized interests. The environmental groups serve to represent a broader public as compared to health and education.

The governments’ political situations such as party control of country’s legislature and governorship, together with party competition with the state, is also a policy determinants. Party competition within the state as a government political condition affects public policy and thus affects public opinion. A party competitiveness will create a positive public policy and public opinion. External State conditions are also determinants of public policy, which may include population indicators, economic, and geographic conditions. For example, richer states usually have more capital to spend on environmental programs and are more likely respond to a higher increase in taxation since their higher incomes exceeds the threshold to satisfy more basic needs. Higher incomes levels have an encouraging relationship on environmental policy.

The mass public opinion concerning American foreign policy has been expressed inconsistently and rationality and on incoherence on the other side. In general, the American public do not support the foreign policy due to lack of their involvement in the policy making process. According to Witt Kopf (1990) this is because the American people are ill informed and not interested about foreign policy with equivalent weakness to demonstrate that unstable foreign policies are liable to manipulation by political elites.

Poverty rates affect both health and education policy’s negatively. Contrasting to access to health care the burden of education expenditure for impoverished population is in general manifested in increased states spending compared to local expenditures because small income base of regions with larger poor people. The proportion of locally raised education income is a good indicator of how states fund their education system. Some states preserve a high level of control over their schools systems and thus provide the bulk of the required funding.

The Federal government and both state and local governments have in many times hiked cigarette excise taxes in the current years from 24cents per pack to 34 cents per pack with a total of 19 states complying with the increase. The two effects of the reputation of cigarette excise taxes can be predicted in that one is to create revenue from smokers who continue to smoke and also to persuade minor smokers to quite. The problem that is being addressed is the extent to which tobacco control policies affect the public opinion towards smoking. Tobacco management policies can be used to change inexperienced assumptions on fitness risks caused by smoking and can serve as an alternative for health teaching. The execution of tobacco taxes can eventually change public opinions towards smoking. Several alternatives for public opinion have been developed towards smoking and have been scrutinized with relationship between alternatives and the changes in policy on cigarettes. Smokers who prepare to stop smoking obviously ridicule smoking more than the smokers who don’t want to stop. The health behaviors of those who are affluent calculated by the attainment of education may serve as an important pointer for public reaction towards smoking. For that reason, the dominance of smoking by intention to stop and education achievement arguably serve as better alternatives for attitude towards smoking than the rate of smoking alone. The proxy for the public response towards smoking is related to the explicit support of tobacco control policies and succeeding change in tobacco control laws. The prevalence of educate smokers who don’t want to stop is the best proxy for public reaction towards smoking and accordingly changes in cigarette demand. There is always depressing relationship between excise taxes hikes and the predominance smoking which is primarily driven by the predominance educated smokers who don’t want to stop. Public reaction towards smoking is a central feature to what extent tobacco policies are implemented. If tobacco control rules such as cigarette excise taxes and smoking bans are related with public reactions towards smoking, then it follows that smoking sentiments influence future demand than the tobacco control policies. The decline in cigarette smoking and the hike in tax reflect to some extent the public reaction towards smoking. Tobacco control policies and public sentiments together help in reducing the rate of smoking.