Public Opinion in America: Moods, Cycles, and Swings, Second Edition

by James Stimson

Public opinion matters. It registers itself on the public consciousness, translates into politics and policy, and impels politicians to run for office and, once elected, to serve in particular ways.This is a book about opinion--not opinions. James Stimson takes the incremental, vacillating, time-trapped data points of public opinion surveys and transforms them into a conceptualization of public mood swings that can be measured and used to predict...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0813366798
• ISBN13: 9780813366791
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 192 Pages
• Dimensions: 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Innovative, Creative, and important

The seminal study of how aggregated public opinion in American moves in rational swings that Stimson labels "moods". Covers moods of liberalism into waves of conservatism and provides evidence of why the country changes its moods over time.