A California State of Mind: The Conflicted Voter in a Changing World / Edition 1 available in Hardcover
A California State of Mind: The Conflicted Voter in a Changing World / Edition 1
- ISBN-10:
- 0520236483
- ISBN-13:
- 9780520236486
- Pub. Date:
- 10/08/2002
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0520236483
- ISBN-13:
- 9780520236486
- Pub. Date:
- 10/08/2002
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
A California State of Mind: The Conflicted Voter in a Changing World / Edition 1
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520236486 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 10/08/2002 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 298 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
A California State of Mind
The Conflicted Voter in a Changing WorldBy Mark Baldassare
University of California
Copyright © 2002 Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-520-23648-3
Chapter One
IntroductionThe last years of the twentieth century seemed like the best of times in California. Yet its citizens expressed the worst of fears about the future of the Golden State. What could explain this strangely dissonant outlook in the nation's most economically important and politically influential state-and how has it played out in the political and policy arena? These questions are the focus of this book, especially as they relate to voters' choices in the 2000 election.
At the turn of the twenty-first century, two major, competing forces had emerged as the yin and yang of California political life-we might call it the New Economy meets the New Demography. A booming economy and new wealth generated a euphoric mood, and talk about the present was thus enthusiastic. Yet the state's residents also saw signs of troubling long-term trends, many of which-like congestion, pollution, and increasing income inequality-are related to the state's growth and changing demography. People's concerns about these trends and future quality of life were compounded mightily by another trend that developed, paradoxically, during times of plenty-a widespread distrust of government. Californians, by and large, did not believe that government had the ability to handle problems or that it even had their best interests at heart.
The confluence of these trends could have many political implications for California. It could affect what issues matter to people and could make them think differently about what government should be doing to solve problems. In a state where policymaking for the past twenty years has been guided by the political principle "smaller is better," it could conceivably alter views about resources the government needs and how involved government should be in serving the public good. Ultimately, it could alter people's thinking about the kinds of leaders they need to elect, change the fortunes of political parties, and give new purpose to exerting policy influence through the initiative process.
How these trends affected and may affect California politics is evident in voters' issues and priorities leading up to the 2000 election and is recognizable in the election outcomes. The 2000 election provided choices for Californians who wanted to express their feelings about new directions for public policy. Voters could have broken with the twenty-year "tax revolt" and supported candidates and ballot measures that stood for more taxes and government spending. The outcome could have signaled the start of a new era for the Golden State: one in which the public, comfortable with the present, would look to government to solve tomorrow's problems. In fact, this election was not all that different, and the reasons why distrust undermined confidence in the future during this time of plenty offer important insights into California's future.
Californians and Their Government Study
This book documents a large-scale study, Californians and Their Government, conducted by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) over the course of the 2000 elections and followed up in spring 2001. We began this journey with focus group interviews around the state to gauge the public's mood and concerns. We then conducted a comprehensive series of public opinion surveys before, during, and after all the votes were tallied. We asked Californians about a wide range of issues, including the elections, tax-and-spending policy, public policy issues that were being debated at the time, and, most important, how they felt about their federal, state, and local governments. In spring 2001, we conducted another set of focus groups.
One of the common complaints about a public opinion poll is that it offers only a snapshot of voters' opinions before an election. In other words, polls are accurate only insofar as they can tell us how people say they will vote on a specific issue at a certain time. The goals we had in mind for this investigation were quite different from the goals of those engaging in preelection polling. We were not interested in predicting a winner, either in the presidential race or for other items further down on the ballot, nor were we concerned about who was ahead and by how much at a given point in time.
Our purpose was to find out how the unusual mix of current prosperity, future worries about growth and change, and voters' distrust in government was affecting policy preferences and ballot choices in 2000. We needed to take multiple measures of each of these dimensions at different times. We also needed to make sure that we interviewed a sufficient number of people to be able to break out the results for important demographic and political subgroups and regions. In the end, we provided an in-depth portrait over time of California voters' opinions during the 2000 elections.
As noted previously, we conducted a series of focus groups in several of the major regions of the state. Focus groups are not intended to be scientific and representative surveys of public opinion. They use qualitative methods and seek to engage groups of people in a structured conversation about issues and experiences. I used the conversations generated in these focus groups for two distinct purposes. First, they helped me to develop survey topics and specific questions on population growth, ongoing change in the state, and the role of state and local government. Second, they provide quotations to bring to life some of the issues and concerns revealed by the surveys. Generally speaking, what we heard in focus groups was largely similar to what we learned from the surveys.
The first set of focus groups was conducted in collaboration with a nonpartisan group called California 2000, which was funded by major state foundations. We joined forces since their interests coincided with the larger goals of my Californians and Their Government project. The focus groups were carried out by the Nelson Communications Group. Eight focus group interviews were conducted in May 1999 in Sacramento, Santa Clara, San Diego, and Los Angeles. In April 2001, with the California elections a fading memory and the state in the midst of an electricity crisis, I returned to Santa Clara, Los Angeles, and Sacramento to conduct a second set of six focus groups. In all, we talked with about 170 individuals in the course of these interviews, focusing on such issues as California's growth trends and the state's future, distrust of government, the role of state government, and elections.
The major data collection effort, however, consisted of a series of large, comprehensive public opinion surveys. One purpose of the surveys was to provide an in-depth profile of political, social, and economic attitudes; public policy preferences; and ballot choices. Another purpose was to build on my previous work on government distrust and to develop a deeper and more thorough understanding of Californians' perceptions of how their government works and what it does, the role it plays in their lives, how well it currently performs, and the place they would prefer for government to have in their lives. This was, of course, in the context of a federal and state government that had surplus funds at its disposal.
I conducted eleven surveys, which included the responses of over 22,000 Californians, over the course of a year and a half. Four statewide surveys were conducted in September and December 1999 and in January and February 2000, in advance of the March 7 primary. There was also a special survey on the Central Valley region, conducted in November 1999, and a special survey on San Diego County in July 2000. Four more statewide surveys were conducted in June, August, September, and October 2000, prior to the November 7 general election. These included a special survey on attitudes toward the environment in June 2000. The tenth survey was conducted in early January 2001, two months after the election and a month after the presidential election was finally decided.
The surveys involved random-digit-dial telephone interviews, each with a minimum of 2,000 adult residents. Every survey included the responses of at least 400 Latinos, with the interviews conducted in English or Spanish as needed, so that we could represent this increasingly large and politically influential group. Individual surveys were also large enough to break out the results for the major regions throughout the state (i.e., Los Angeles, the rest of Southern California, the San Francisco Bay Area, the Central Valley), voter groups (i.e., Democrats, Republicans, independents), and demographic subgroups.
We interviewed both voters and nonvoters, so that all Californians were represented, but we also separately analyzed the results of "likely" voters for the questions pertaining to the March primary and November general election. Every survey was about twenty minutes in length and included a range of attitudinal and factual questions. Some of the questions were repeated from national surveys, thus offering a comparison with California. Other questions were repeated in the course of the series and thus provided an opportunity to look at responses over time. Since the surveys were conducted over a relatively short time frame and many of the responses remained in a narrow range, we were also able to merge the responses of survey questions that were repeated over time-such as optimism about the state, political ideology, policy preferences, and demographic characteristics-thus providing a large data base that included the responses of over 22,000 Californians during the 2000 election cycle.
This book, then, offers evidence from two original sources-focus groups and statewide surveys-supplemented with published data from a variety of other organizations. For instance, there are the exit polls of state voters from the major news organizations, such as the Voters News Service and the Los Angeles Times poll. We also analyze the actual vote tallies in the March primary and November general election, as prepared by the California secretary of state. There are demographic and economic data from the U.S. Census, the California Department of Finance, and other sources. Finally, there are public opinion surveys from state and national polling organizations that provide further context on the state and national mood during the 2000 elections.
The Problem of Distrust in Government
The scholarly literature on trust in government has a long and important history in the social sciences. Its status has been elevated by a keen interest in evidence of deep public distrust in government and elected officials that first surfaced in the United States during the tumultuous era of the Vietnam War and the Watergate presidential scandal in the 1970s. Other Western nations had, or have since, experienced distrust in government. Measuring the public's trust in government is no simple task. There are scholars who take a critical aim at the mixed meaning and ambiguous wording of survey questions on trust, the lack of analysis of specific trust concepts, and the misinterpretation of results of studies that seek to measure the causes and consequences of government mistrust through a variety of multiple-measure indices in national surveys (see Barber, 1983).
Over the course of several decades, distrust in government has commonly been defined in two different ways: one is through the level of confidence that people have in the public institutions that serve them, such as the executive and legislative branches of state, federal, and local government; the other is through the general perceptions that the public has toward the ways that the government and its elected officials perform their duties, such as their effectiveness, responsiveness, efficiency, fairness, and honesty. In tandem with these efforts to measure trust in government are the common questions on job approval ratings of current office holders and global satisfaction with the nation's direction; in many ways, these answers also reflect the public's confidence and trust.
Whichever of the two ways one defines and measures trust in government, the results have been consistent over time. There was a high level of trust and confidence in government in the mid-1960s, that is, in the years after the assassination of President John Kennedy, the beginning of the Great Society by President Lyndon Johnson, and the era of strong economic growth and a Cold War threat. Over the next ten years, the national government faced a series of important crises-the Vietnam War, urban race riots, high crime rates, an oil embargo, inflation, and the Watergate scandal-and by the mid-1970s, all measures of trust and confidence in government were showing significant declines. Since then, the public's reports about their trust in government have been fairly negative throughout economic recessions and recoveries, approval and disapproval of specific office holders, and changes of party control and presidential leadership. Many observers say that trust in government reached its lowest point in 1994, the so-called year of the angry voter, during which the Republicans took control of the legislative branch of the federal government, and also a time of deep economic recession. Then trust is thought to have steadied when the economy recovered and even rebounded somewhat for the remainder of the 1990s through 2000. Still, distrust in government was running fairly high by the longer historical standards throughout the entire 2000 presidential election. The measures of trust in federal government showed significant improvements immediately after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001.
There has been a considerable amount of attention devoted to the causes of the public's distrust in government. Some studies have sought to link personal characteristics such as age, education, gender, income, and occupation with attitudes toward government, but others argue that trust in government cannot really be explained by these factors (see Baldassare, 1986; Barber, 1983; Lipset and Schneider, 1983). A few have examined the effects of living in urban and suburban communities on trust in government and have found at most modest effects (Baldassare, 1986; Fischer, 1975, 1984). Some have looked at media biases and a lack of knowledge as the causes of mistrust. Other scholars have focused on the role that historic events, policy decisions, and their outcomes have on the mood of the people toward their government (Citrin, 1974; Miller, 1974a) in light of office holders' responses to crises, emergencies, wars, scandals, economic booms, and fiscal failures; focusing on these causal factors has by far seemed the most promising in terms of explaining time trends in distrust.
Continues...
Excerpted from A California State of Mind by Mark Baldassare Copyright © 2002 by Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission.
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