Two Models of Opinion-Sensitive Political Theory

This paper examines the role of public opinion surveys within normative political theory: How can evidence about public attitudes, as revealed by large-scale survey methods, inform political ideals and principles? I identify, and evaluate, two contrasting models of opinion-sensitive political theory. On the first account, survey data is used to study the public ‘as political theorists’. This approach, which I term the ‘congruence model’, proceeds in three main steps. First, we use survey methods to investigate popular responses to the same normative questions that political theorists ask themselves. Second, we assess the extent to which public opinion matches the content of candidate normative theories. Third, we consider whether and how to close any gaps, by moving political theory closer to public attitudes. The paper argues that this way of integrating survey data into political theory, which is dominant in recent empirically-informed work on social justice, faces two significant challenges. First, it immediately raises a deep problem about the fundamental status of popular attitudes. When should we ‘mind the gap’ between popular opinion and normative theory, and when do we conclude that the public are mistaken? Second, the congruence model generates methodological difficulties. The concepts and frameworks that shape philosophical debate are typically not replicated, in a clear or stable way, in the public mind. Thus, it is often challenging, using survey instruments, to determine what the public think about the same normative problems that concern the political theorist. The paper goes on to defend a second model, on which we instead use evidence from public opinion surveys to interrogate the speculative social psychology that commonly underpins normative theorizing about politics. Political theorists often rely on background claims about how economic structures or institutional arrangements affect individuals’ self-concept, or other-regarding attitudes and behaviour. These claims are ripe for testing using survey data that allows us systematically to link individual attitudes to the experience of different economic or social conditions. I argue that this alternative approach can deliver deeper conceptual and normative payoffs, whilst avoiding the pitfalls of the congruence model. First, the process of operationalizing complex philosophical ideals through survey questions can function as a tool for conceptual clarification. Second, survey research can help us to test the nature or depth of certain normative commitments. Normative ideals commonly borrow appeal from background assumptions about the empirical conditions for their realization. Thus, conducting empirical work that potentially disrupts those assumptions may lead us to rethink our commitment to the ideals themselves. In developing this argument, the paper discusses two recent collaborative projects that bring together political theory and survey research. In the first study, we generate a new perspective on philosophical debate about the social bases of self-respect, by reanalyzing an existing large-scale survey data set. The second project employs a novel survey experiment to investigate the empirical relationship between distributive and relational ideals of equality. Drawing on these concrete examples, I seek to advance a compelling picture of how, and why, to use survey data in normative political theory.