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We argue that the standard methodology for assessing the impact of Supreme Court decisions on public opinion, which relies on national surveys to measure public attitudes before and after relevant Court decisions, fails, among other grounds, to account for the fact that the overwhelming majority of Court decisions speak to particular constituencies only. We assess the impact of the Supreme Court's decision in Lamb's Chapel v. Center Moriches on the geographic constituencies involved in the case. We interviewed a random sample of residents in the town of Center Moriches and in the surrounding county of Suffolk, New York, before and after the decision. Consistent with the elaboration likelihood model of persuasion (Petty and Cacioppo 1986), we find that high levels of information about the decision increases support for the Court's decision among those for whom the decision is relatively less salient.

Public opinion on government policy is group-centric: that is, strongly influenced by the attitudes citizen possess toward the social groups perceived as the beneficiaries of the policy: Though common-place, this mode of political thinking is not inevitable. In four experiments, we show that group-centrism hinges in part on how issues are framed in public debate. When issues are framed in ways that draw attention to a policy's beneficiaries, group-centrism increases; when issues are framed in ways that deflect attention away from the beneficiaries, group-centrism declines. We conclude by drawing out the implications of these findings for the concept of frame, considered both as a rhetorical weapon in elites' hands and as a cognitive structure in citizens' minds.

The economy being the key to presidential popularity, what is the economic intelligence inspiring the approval judgments of American voters? According to one school of thought, the public relies on the current performance of the economy (the retrospective voter), while a rival makes the case for expectations about the future economy (the prospective voter). I conduct a time-series analysis combining consumer surveys and presidential approval polls (1960-1993). The results unequivocally reject the prospective claim and confirm the retrospective one. Depending on the measure used, economic expectations either prove too sensitive to political interventions (change in the White House, wars, and scandals) to shape presidential approval; or else, economic expectations do no more than encapsulate information about the current state of the economy. The research bears out the wisdom and the fairness of the retrospective calculus. To judge a president's performance in office is not a question about things to come but about things done.

The comment by Michael B. MacKuen, Robert S. Erikson and James A. Stimson on 'Presidents and the Prospective Voter' misses the point. They only restate the claim they made in 'Peasants or Bankers? The American Electorate and the US Economy.' They also again fail to take into account political factors which greatly influence presidential approval. The measures that they present in their standard model of analysis also prove the opposite of what they claim. The measure of economic expectation is based on past retrospection.

Helmut Norpoth's 'Presidents and the Prospective Voter' presents the idea that the president's approval rating is based on retrospection. This challenges the idea presented in the article, 'Peasants or Bankers? The American Electorate and the US Economy,' which claims that presidents are rated according to economic expectation. Norpoth claims that the public does not exhibit such behavior which manifests prospective economic reasoning. However, standard multivariate analysis shows otherwise.

Little of the considerable research devoted to the connections between the Supreme Court and the mass public has addressed popular attitudes toward nominees to the High Bench. Here we hope to stimulate interest in this important and understudied area by examining the wellsprings of opinionation and sentiment toward the confirmation of Justice Clarence Thomas. Relying on data from CBS News/New York Times polls and using statistical models of opinion-holding and support for Thomas' confirmation, we examine whether citizen attitudes were grounded in policy preferences, political orientations of long-standing such as partisanship, ideological convictions, group ties, and presidential approval. We also develop and directly link a model of the formation of opinion toward the nomination a model of activation, in which citizens assimilate information and form an opinion - with a model of sentiment, in which citizens develop a positive or negative feeling toward the nominee. We report dramatic and systematic shifts in the sources of opinion mobilization which accord well with the intuitive expectations that flow from the temporal order of events and controversies associated with this battle. We find, among the mobilized, substantial and enduring associations between sentiment toward Thomas and summary political orientations, attitudes toward the president, and policy preferences. We also see shifts in the demography of Thomas' support; and, again, these findings accord well with expectations derived from the dynamics of the conflict over the nomination.

This article draws upon cases from the history of disability rights policy-making and from the history of fetal research regulation to explore the role of public opinion in policy-making. Drawing upon Wilson's typology, hypotheses set forth expectations that (a) in episodes of majoritarian politics, policymakers respond to popular concern about an issue; (b) in episodes of entrepreneurial politics, policymakers mobilize popular concern; (c) in episodes of client politics, policymakers act in the absence of popular concern; and (d) in episodes of interest group politics, mobilization of popular concern is contingent upon the prevailing division of public opinion on the issue. The results generally support the thesis that the role of public opinion is a function of the costs, benefits, and organization of interests surrounding policy issues.

Recent research documents the widespread use of heuristics, especially a reliance on elite cues among citizens. Scholars have celebrated this mode of decision making as rational and effective. Using experimental survey data collected from white and African-American respondents, we also identify what appears to be a strong influence of elite messages on mass political judgments, but only among our black respondents. More importantly, the data reveal some of the perils of cue-taking. Although rational, this heuristic may not always be effective.