Robert A. Dahl stressed that a key feature of the democratic process is that citizens are able to acquire an “enlightened understanding” of political issues sufficient to defend their interests. This raises a fundamental, but surprisingly understudied, empirical question: Does political debate lead citizens to form policy opinions consistent with their general principles and interests, or does it lead citizens to form opinions that simply match the preferences of political elites? We address this question with an innovative, multi-wave panel survey with embedded experiments to study how Danish citizens formed opinions toward a novel policy question relating to the European Union that was eventually subject to a nationwide referendum. Our panel precedes public debate on the issue, allowing us to study how citizens from different political parties and with different general orientations toward the European Union respond to elite debate in both the real world over time and in the microcosm of an experiment meant to emulate part of that debate. We find that the vast majority of citizens arrive at opinions consistent with their general orientations and respond to the debate, to specific arguments, and to party position-taking in sensible and predictable ways. Even though debate sways public opinion as a whole — which in previous work has been taken as evidence of sizable elite manipulation — that movement belies the underlying sensibility of individual citizens’ reasoning.
Biography
Rune Slothuus is a Professor of Political Science at Aarhus University. He studies public opinion, political psychology, and political communication. His current research focuses on how citizens form political opinions in response to communication (such as issue frames, arguments, and source cues) about political events, debates, and policy issues.
Slothuus’ work has appeared in American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, Public Opinion Quarterly, and other journals. He is also a co-author (with Paul M. Sniderman, Michael Bang Petersen, and Rune Stubager) of the book Paradoxes of Liberal Democracy from Princeton University Press.
Rune Slothuus is the Principal Investigator of the project “When and How Political Parties Influence Public Opinion Formation” (with Jamie Druckman from Northwestern University and Thomas Leeper from London School of Economics), funded by a Sapere Aude: DFF-Starting Grant from the Danish Council for Independent Research. He is also a Co-PI and senior researcher within the POLIS research unit, studying party competition and public opinion dynamics.
In 2015, Slothuus received the Erik Erikson Early Career Award from the International Society of Political Psychology. His work has also been recognized by best paper awards from American Political Science Association, International Communication Association, and International Society of Political Psychology, and Slothuus was the first recipient of the Faculty of Social Science Research Prize in 2009.
He obtained the PhD degree in political science from Aarhus University in 2008 and has studied political psychology at Stony Brook University and political communication at Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR).
