Media reports suggest that anywhere from 24 percent to 39 percent of Americans oppose raising the debt ceiling, making it appear that a sizable number of Americans would prefer to risk default and create financial disaster in order to compel a delay in the Affordable Care Act. A report Esterling co-authored that was published in Public Opinion Quarterly in 2011 — “Means, Motive, and Opportunity in Becoming Informed about Politics: A Deliberative Field Experiment Involving Members of Congress and their Constituents” (poq.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2011/05/16/poq.nfr001.full) — shows that most citizens do not have fully developed understandings of policies but instead only come to understand the details of a policy when they have a reason to.
“Political reporters, as well as political scientists, spend all day thinking and reading about politics, as does everyone in their social networks, and they tend to forget that most citizens do not have a similar reason to pay close attention to politics,” Esterling explains. “So when they receive a call from a survey firm asking their opinions on policy, the respondent answers the policy questions with whatever happens to come to mind when they are read the question, usually relying on the question itself for information on how to answer. So, survey respondents will hear the words ‘debt ceiling’ and think to themselves that debt is bad, and so answer that the ceiling should not be raised.”
If, however, the survey question were worded with enough information that the respondent could understand the issue and make an informed response they likely would answer the question differently, Esterling says. A better way to ask the debt-ceiling question would be: “Later this month Congress will need to decide whether to raise the nation’s debt ceiling in order to pay its obligations. If Congress does not raise the debt ceiling, the nation would go into default, and most economists state that a default would create a new worldwide recession, where many people would lose their jobs and many people’s retirement and savings would shrink. If faced with this choice what would you do?” Raise the debt ceiling? Not raise the debt ceiling?’
The question also could be worded to include whether the respondent would like to tie the increase in the debt ceiling to negotiations over the Affordable Care Act or to spending cuts or tax increases and risk default in those scenarios, Esterling says. “But the point is that simply asking non-expert citizens their opinion on the debt ceiling and reporting their responses as if they were useful for guiding policy is misguided, and in this case, dangerous.”
Kevin Esterling website http://www.politicalscience.ucr.edu/people/faculty/esterling/index.htmlAmericans Moderate Views in Deliberative Democracy Experiment http://newsroom.ucr.edu/2507
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