Public Perceptions of the American People

美国人民的公众看法

• 批准号: 0111887
• 负责人: Elizabeth Theiss-Morse
• 金额: $ 15.2万
• 依托单位: University of Nebraska-Lincoln
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2001
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2001-08-01 至 2005-01-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0111887&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Public; Perceptions; American; People

This project supports a national survey, focus groups, and an experiment to investigate public perceptions of the American People. Previous research on American public opinion has tended to focus on people's views of politicians, policies, institutions, and democratic values and processes. Surprisingly little work has been done on what people think about the American people as a group or on the extent to which people identify with this group, even though the people are a key political actor given the idea of popular sovereignty in the United States.The Principal Investigator contends that we need to discover how the people themselves view the American people to understand their beliefs about democracy. Two contrasting political theories highlight the importance of understanding how views of the people can affect views of democratic political systems, and the researcher draws on these theories to develop hypotheses to test. The literal view espoused by James Madison and others holds that the American people are fallible and hold wildly diverse interests. The solution to these problems is an institutional structure that protects government from the whims of the people and makes sense of the diverse demands made on government. A more communitarian view holds that people pursuing their wildly diverse interests hurt democratic government. Democratic government needs a unifying force that brings the people together, and that unifying force is a strong national collective identity. This identity helps people to fulfill their obligations to fellow Americans, trust fellow citizens, and want to pursue the common good over narrower interests. In both these theoretical approaches, beliefs about how the government ought to operate are influenced by perceptions of the people. Are the public's beliefs about government similarly affected by its perceptions of the American people? The researcher assesses this key question.The researcher discovers how Americans characterize the American people in terms of their capabilities, their political values, their demographics, and their homogeneity or heterogeneity as a people; to investigate the extent to which people identify with the American people as a group; and to determine the consequences of these characterizations and of a national collective identity for several political attitudes.This project provides the most detailed understanding yet of public attitudes toward the American people and provides an extremely valuable dataset for others interested in understanding people's attitudes toward democratic government, the American people, and group identity.

该项目支持一项全国性的调查、焦点小组和一项调查公众对美国人民看法的实验。以前对美国民意的研究往往集中在人们对政客、政策、制度以及民主价值观和进程的看法上。令人惊讶的是，关于人们对美国人民作为一个群体的看法，或者人们对这个群体的认同感，尽管人民是美国人民主权的概念的关键政治参与者，但令人惊讶的是，几乎没有做过什么工作。首席调查员认为，我们需要了解人民自己是如何看待美国人民的，以了解他们对民主的信仰。两种截然不同的政治理论强调了了解人民的观点如何影响民主政治制度的观点的重要性，研究人员利用这些理论来开发假设以进行检验。詹姆斯·麦迪逊(James Madison)等人信奉的字面意思是，美国人民容易犯错误，并持有广泛不同的利益。解决这些问题的办法是建立一种制度结构，保护政府不受人民心血来潮的影响，并对政府提出的各种要求作出合理的解释。一种更社区主义的观点认为，追求广泛不同利益的人损害了民主政府。民主政府需要一种凝聚人民的凝聚力，而这种凝聚力就是强大的国家集体认同感。这种身份有助于人们履行对美国同胞的义务，信任同胞，并希望追求共同利益，而不是狭隘的利益。在这两种理论方法中，关于政府应该如何运作的信念都受到人们的看法的影响。公众对政府的看法是否也同样受到其对美国人民的看法的影响？研究人员评估了这一关键问题。研究人员发现，美国人如何从能力、政治价值观、人口结构以及作为一个民族的同质性或异质性来描述美国人民；调查人们对美国人民作为一个群体的认同程度；并确定这些特征和国家集体认同对几种政治态度的影响。这个项目提供了迄今为止对公众对美国人民态度的最详细了解，并为其他有兴趣了解人们对民主政府、美国人民和群体认同的态度的人提供了非常有价值的数据集。