How People Make Meaning in a Fragmented Democracy: Implications for Incorporating Public Opinion into Public Policy

Abstract

Scientists and policymakers often rely on polls to measure the opinions of the American public. They collect brief responses from large samples of Americans and use quantitative methods to aggregate those responses in ways that allow them to construct measures of what the “average American” thinks. Policymakers then (sometimes) use those averages to inform public policy. In this article, I raise questions about the utility of that approach for policymaking, given what social and behavioral scientists have learned about the fragmentation of (American) democracy and its implications for heterogeneity in people's experiences. I review research on social fragmentation, its implications for how people who are differentially positioned in society perceive and make meaning of the world around them, and the implications for the policies they support. After reviewing those processes, I end by offering alternative approaches for incorporating public opinion into the policymaking process.