The discourse and American public opinion: The case of welfare spending

Popular support for American welfare policies dipped sharply during the mid-1990s. The purpose of this article is to determine why this pronounced, but temporary, shift in public opinion occurred. We use data from the CPS National Election Studies to examine several explanations for temporal variability in citizens' attitudes toward welfare spending. Our results show that these changes follow similar variations in media content. Individual-level opinion change was also based entirely upon political motivations (e.g., ideology and partisanship) rather than economic beliefs or racial attitudes. We argue that this provides evidence, admittedly somewhat indirect, that elite rhetoric guides and shapes mass opinions.