Public Perceptions of the American People

该项目支持一项全国性调查、焦点小组和一项实验，以调查公众对美国人民的看法。以前对美国公众舆论的研究往往集中在人们对政治家、政策、制度、民主价值观和进程的看法上。令人惊讶的是，很少有人研究人们是如何看待美国人民作为一个群体的，或者人们对这个群体的认同程度，尽管在美国人民主权的概念下，人民是一个关键的政治角色。首席调查员认为，我们需要发现人们自己是如何看待美国人民的，以了解他们对民主的信念。两种截然不同的政治理论强调了理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发展假设以进行测试。詹姆斯·麦迪逊（James Madison）和其他人所支持的字面观点认为，美国人民是容易犯错的，他们有着广泛不同的利益。解决这些问题的办法是建立一种制度结构，保护政府不受人民突发奇想的影响，并理解人民对政府的各种要求。一种更为社群主义的观点认为，人们追求自己广泛多样的利益会损害民主政府。民主政府需要一种团结的力量把人民团结在一起，而这种团结的力量就是强大的民族集体认同。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民观念的影响。公众对政府的看法是否同样受到其对美国人民看法的影响？研究人员评估了这个关键问题。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等方面来描述美国人民；调查人们对美国人作为一个群体的认同程度；并确定这些特征的后果以及不同政治态度的国家集体认同。这个项目提供了迄今为止公众对美国人民态度的最详细的了解，并为那些对了解人们对民主政府、美国人民和群体认同的态度感兴趣的人提供了一个极有价值的数据集。

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.