The independent American public: The relationship between elite and mass opinion on American foreign policy in the mass communications age

This dissertation demonstrated that the theory that the elites lead public opinion--strongly advocated by Walter Lippmann and his many intellectual successors in the fields of both public opinion and mass communications studies--was insupportable in two late twentieth century cases when ordinary Americans had easy access to immediate information about both events. An examination of the relationship between elite and mass opinion--on U.S. policy toward the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union before, during and after the May-June 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations and massacre and the August 1991 attempted coup against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev--revealed that there was no clear pattern to the relationship. This lack of pattern was interpreted to mean that the dependence of mass on elite opinion, so long presumed to exist, was not demonstrable, at least in these two cases.; Both cases occurred at a time when, thanks to satellite telecommunications, the American public had access to immediate information about remote events, sometimes the same information available to opinion leaders and policymakers. Both cases met several key criteria: The American people paid close attention in very high numbers; the public's views were recorded in public opinion surveys; there was extensive media coverage of events; and elite opinion about both cases was widely disseminated. The opinions of the elites (operationally defined and quantified by means of content analysis), were compared with the views of the public (recorded in public opinion polls) on 47 issues in the two cases.; Simple chi-square analysis was used to compare the two bodies of opinion. The hypothesis was that if the elites were influencing mass opinion, some pattern of correlation would emerge. None did, which indicated that the Lippmann hypothesis could not be sustained. In addition, no correlation was found between elite opinion and post-graduate education; no special relationship was discovered between presidential opinions and public opinion; and it was not demonstrable that mass opinion divides when elite opinion divides.