Making Sense of Public Opinion

Reviews / Votes

'Claudia Strauss's new book resolves one of the central mysteries of public opinion: how can Americans hold contradictory views on salient issues like immigration? She uses the trope of conventional discourse to reveal the complexity of thinking that lies behind the simplistic renderings of public opinion that are too often extracted from surveys. The book is required reading for anyone who wants to think seriously about public opinion and the politics of policy options.' Richard Alba, City University of New York 'Claudia Strauss provides a thorough discussion of the various immigration and social welfare discourses that shape public opinion. She shows convincingly that people draw on wide-ranging conventional discourses that they hear and read about in their daily lives, often resulting in seemingly contradictory positions held at the same time. A must-read for anyone interested in how public opinion is formed and how individuals chose among competing views on such important issues as immigration and social welfare.' Leo Chavez, University of California, Irvine 'Scholars, pundits, and politicians have tried for decades to understand how people come to hold political opinions and preferences, why different people hold distinct views, and whether such views can be changed. I thought that I had read every conceivable explanation - ranging from deeply felt ideologies to apparently trivial variations in surveys' question wording, and everything in between. But here is an innovative and exciting explanation; Claudia Strauss's conception of conventional discourses cuts through an amazing amount of chatter and gives a new perspective on what citizens say, believe, and fear.' Jennifer Hochschild, Harvard University