7.2: Attitudes and Opinions

An attitude is an orientation or predisposition toward an object: a person (such as the president), a group(such as the Republican Party), an idea(such as the death penalty), or something else. The object is necessary: 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. Unsurprisingly, 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 measure directly. The most advanced brain-imaging technology cannot tell us exactly what someone thinks about tax cuts or drone warfare, much less how strong or durable those thoughts are.

Attitudes themselves cannot be directly measured, but their expression 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, public opinion refers not to the collective attitudes of a populace but rather the collective expressions of those attitudes.

At best, an opinion is an imperfect representation of an attitude. Consider presidential approval. You can probably think of at least a dozen factors that influence your approval or disapproval of the president’s job performance, but no one can 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 same as yours but for completely different reasons. Like a two-dimensional photograph of a three-dimensional object, no opinion fully expresses the attitude it reflects.

Although it is sometimes possible to infer a person’s attitudes based on his or her opinions, it is important not to get carried away. Consider the act of voting. In the United States, the Democratic and Republican parties differ significantly in their positions on various issues (including those summarized in Figure 7.1 below). However, the fact that a person votes for a candidate from one of those two parties does not mean that he or she agrees with the majority of that party’s members on all or even any of the issues. The vote could have been based on the candidates’ personalities, the job performance of the incumbent candidate or party, or a plethora of other factors. Voting is an expression of an opinion, but the opinion being expressed is simply a preference for one candidate over another. We can speculate about the reasons for that preference, but we can’t no for sure without more information.

Figure 7.1: Percentage of Democrats and Republicans agreeing with select issue positions, 2023 (Source: Gallup)