7.1: Attitudes and Opinions

An attitude is an orientation or predisposition toward some object. This object could be a person (such as the president), a group (such as the Republican Party), an idea (such as the death penalty), or something else. An attitude must have an object: approval of the president, warmth toward the Republican Party, and opposition to the death penalty are all attitudes, but approval, warmth, and opposition by themselves are not.

Attitudes are highly influential on political behavior. It is no surprise, therefore, that many people — politicians, journalists, political scientists, average citizens — want to know what attitudes the public holds. But attitudes as they exist in people’s minds are too intricate to be measured directly. The most advanced technology available for brain imaging cannot tell us exactly how someone thinks or feels about tax cuts or drone warfare, much less how strong or durable those thoughts or feelings are.

Although attitudes themselves cannot be directly measured, the expression of those attitudes can be. An opinion is a measurable manifestation of an attitude. Opinions can be spoken, written, or signaled in some other way that expresses an underlying attitude. Thus, the term public opinion refers not to the collective attitudes of a populace but rather the collective expressions of those attitudes.

At best, an opinion is only an imperfect representation of an attitude. Consider the classic public opinion survey question of whether someone approves or disapproves of the job the president is doing. You can probably think of at least a dozen factors that influence your approval or disapproval of the president’s job performance, but pollsters cannot discern those factors from your one-word answer of “approve” or “disapprove,” nor can they distinguish your answer from someone else’s which is the as yours same but for completely different reasons. Like a two-dimensional photograph of a three-dimensional object, no opinion can fully express the attitude on which it is based.