Search

This paper critically examines what the Gallup polls have been telling us over the past twenty five years about what Americans believe about human origins. It begins by documenting how these beliefs have or have not changed over time in the American public as a whole and among different demographic segments of the population. We also look at the relationship between such beliefs and a variety of social, political, and religious indicators with differing degrees of relevance to the so-called "culture war" in American politics and society. We then turn to a more fundamental question about whether the standard Gallup question on Americans' beliefs about human evolution, which presumably underlie the "culture war" over the teaching of human evolution in the public schools, is measuring what we think it's been measuring all these years: biblical literalism, belief in God, or something else? ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presidential popularity or "approval" ratings have become the most closely monitored political indicator in American public opinion polls today. As a consequence, numerous scholars have tried to explain how presidential popularity changes at the aggregate-level in response to real-world events and crises such as wars, scandals, and changes in the national economy. Though this research has provided plausible accounts of aggregate-level changes in public support for the president, it has told us little about the cognitive dynamics of change at the individual level. In contrast, cognitive-psychological explanations have focused on how the mass media "prime" the ingredients of presidential approval ratings at the individual level. The authors contend, however, that a far more parsimonious explanation can account for gradual changes in presidential popularity over time, as well as for sudden shifts in approval ratings before and after "rally" events such as the onset of the war in Iraq, and September 11, 2001. Our question ambiguity hypothesis posits that real-world events reported in the mass media produce changes in presidential popularity ratings largely by altering the meaning of the vague and ambiguously worded, standard presidential-approval question, an alteration that violates the cardinal assumption of survey measurement: the same psychological stimulus principle and its corollary, the constant psychological stimulus principle. Regression analyses of presidential approval ratings for George W. Bush in Ohio Polls before and after September 11, 2001, and in Gallup Polls, conducted between February 2001 and December 2005, demonstrate how the meaning of the standard approval question continually shifts over time. The authors conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings for the measurement of presidential popularity and its widely misunderstood meaning in policy circles, the White House, and the press. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]