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How a Seemingly Innocuous and Intuitive Methodological Choice Confused a Generation of Research on Policy Responsiveness

By on May 4, 2026 in Articles

Peter K. Enns

Sociological Science May 4, 2026
10.15195/v13.a21

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2 Citation

The finding that government policy is, “virtually unrelated to the desires of the low- and middle-income citizens” (Gilens 2005:789), is one of the most influential social science results of the last two decades. This article offers a new perspective on this finding. I show that the seemingly innocuous decision to restrict analyses to data where different income groups’ policy support differs (i.e., a preference gap exists) introduced Simpson’s paradox, leading to misleading conclusions about whose preferences policy reflects. The same concerns apply to analyses of responsiveness to men and women and to partisan groups. I also present evidence that other common approaches for evaluating policy responsiveness can produce equally misleading conclusions. These findings suggest a need to reconsider conventional wisdom about political influence. The conclusion offers methodological recommendations and discusses implications related to understanding social and economic inequality and support for populist candidates.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.


Peter K. Enns: Professor, Department of Government; Professor, Brooks School of Public Policy; Robert S. Harrison Director, Cornell Center for Social Sciences, Cornell University; Co-founder and Chief Data Scientist, Verasight.
E-mail: peterenns@cornell.edu.

Acknowledgments: I thank Gabrielle Sorresso and Claudia Miner for outstanding research assistance, David Bateman, Dan Butler, Scott Desposato, Derek Epp, Chris Faricy, Marty Gilens, Luke Keele, Doug Kriner, Neil Malhotra, Henry Mo, Jacob Montgomery, Tom Pepinsky, Bryn Rosenfeld, Kim Weeden, Ariel White, and Chris Wlezien for extremely helpful comments and feedback, Stephen Parry and Kenneth Tyler Wilcox from Cornell’s Statistical Consulting Unit, and the Cornell Center for Social Sciences for verifying that the data and replication code replicate the numerical results reported in the main text and online supplement to this article. Previous versions of this article were presented at the University of California San Diego Methods Workshop, the 2024 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, the 2024 Annual Meeting of the Society for Political Methodology, the 25th Anniversary of the American Politics Research Group (APRG) George Rabinowitz Seminar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Introduction to Public Policy (PUBPOL 2301), Public Opinion (GOVT 6461), Time Series Analysis (GOVT 6089), and Comparative Political Behavior (GOVT 6594) courses at Cornell University.


Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: Data and code to reproduce all numerical results are available here: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/9QADPC.


  • Citation: Enns, K. Peter. 2026. “How a Seemingly Innocuous and Intuitive Methodological Choice Confused a Generation of Research on Policy Responsiveness” Sociological Science 13: 528-564.
  • Received: December 15, 2025
  • Accepted: February 25, 2026
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Bart Bonikowski
  • DOI: 10.15195/v13.a21


2

Public Support for the Legalization of Undocumented Immigrants during the 2016 Presidential Campaign

By on November 21, 2025 in Articles

Mariano Sana

Sociological Science November 21, 2025
10.15195/v12.a32

Abstract

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I investigate whether the political ascent of Donald Trump, an adamant immigration restrictionist, during the 2016 presidential campaign was accompanied by decreasing support for the legalization of undocumented immigrants. Compiling survey data from 2012 to 2016, I show consistent support for legalization throughout the period. However, support was on the decline until Trump entered the presidential race in June 2015, rising thereafter. I use two Pew Research Center surveys, fielded in May 2015 and October 2016, to document that the increase in support for legalization was spearheaded by females, suburban residents, and self-identified Democrats. No demographic group, however defined, recorded a significant decline in their support for legalization. The political ascent of Donald Trump between mid-2015 and the presidential election of November 2016 was not associated with a decline in support for the legalization of undocumented immigrants but the opposite, consistent with similar trends recorded in Europe following the rise of right-wing parties. I discuss the implications of these findings for research on immigration attitudes.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Mariano Sana: Department of Sociology, Vanderbilt University.
E-mail: mariano.sana@vanderbilt.edu.

Acknowledgments: I benefited from comments and suggestions from Guy Stecklov, Jenny Trinitapoli, and Alex Weinreb as well as those of the editor and anonymous reviewers. My gratitude also goes to Yu-Ri Kim and Alyssa Davis for their research assistance.


Reproducibility Package: Data and code necessary for full replication are publicly available here: https://www.openicpsr.org/openicpsr/project/238445/version/V1/view. Original raw data were downloaded from the Roper iPoll database managed by the Public Opinion Research Archive at Cornell University (https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/ipoll/) and from the Pew Research Center (https://www.pewresearch.org/tools-and-datasets/).

  • Citation: Sana, Mariano. 2025. “Public Support for the Legalization of Undocumented Immigrants during the 2016 Presidential Campaign” Sociological Science 12: 804-832.
  • Received: August 18, 2025
  • Accepted: October 9, 2025
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Maria Abascal
  • DOI: 10.15195/v12.a32

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One Sentiment, Multiple Interpretations: Contrasting Official and Popular Anti-Americanism in China

By on August 21, 2025 in Articles

Yinxian Zhang, Di Zhou

Sociological Science August 21, 2025
10.15195/v12.a22

Abstract

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This study contrasts official and popular expressions of anti-Americanism in China by comparing narratives from People’s Daily and Zhihu between 2011 and 2022. Using computational and qualitative methods, we examined sentiment trends, topics, and opinions in official and popular discourses. We find that although both discourses have become increasingly negative toward the United States, they diverge significantly in specific expressions: official discourse mirrors Western liberal critiques of American social problems but attributes these issues to American democracy, whereas popular discourse blends left- and right-wing populism and blames liberal elites and capitalism for the American decline. These findings highlight both the limits of state control over public opinion and the pluralistic nature of nationalist expressions. The study also situates Chinese anti-Americanism within a global zeitgeist, discussing how populism transcends borders and shapes local political discourse in unexpected contexts.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Yinxian Zhang: Department of Sociology, CUNY Queens College. E-mail: yinxian.zhang@qc.cuny.edu.
Di Zhou: Department of Sociology, New York University. E-mail: di.zhou@nyu.edu.

Acknowledgments: This study was financially supported by the 2025 CUNY Faculty Fellowship Publication Program (FFPP) and a PSC-CUNY Research Award (68208-00 56). We are deeply grateful to Yinxian Zhang’s FFPP mentor and fellow participants— Sarah Hoiland, Cindy Bautista-Thomas, Philippe Marius, Nicole McKenna, Douglas Medina, and Prash Naidu—for their invaluable comments and suggestions on earlier drafts.

Conflicts of Interest Statement: The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research and publication of this article.

Author Contributions: YZ: research design, data collection, data analysis and visualization, and writing and editing. DZ: data collection, sentiment classification, and writing (data and methods).

Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: The reproducibility package is available in an OSF repository (Zhang and Zhou 2025; https://osf.io/wxjnr/). Although the original Zhihu posts and People’s Daily articles cannot be shared for legal reasons, we have provided the complete code and derivative data (without text content) for colleagues to replicate the quantitative/computational analyses. Full Zhihu data can be collected via GitHub APIs and the People’s Daily database can be accessed through institutional subscriptions.

  • Citation: Zhang, Yinxian, and Di Zhou. 2025. “One Sentiment, Multiple Interpretations: Contrasting Official and Popular Anti-Americanism in China” Sociological Science 12: 511-536.
  • Received: April 6, 2025
  • Accepted: June 17, 2025
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Kieran Healey
  • DOI: 10.15195/v12.a22

0

Subjective Political Polarization

By on November 27, 2023 in Articles

Hyunku Kwon, John Levi Martin

Sociological Science November 27, 2023
10.15195/v10.a32

Abstract

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Although the political polarization literature has provided important insights in understanding the structure of political attitudes in the United States at the aggregate level, and how this has changed in recent years, few attempts have been made to examine how each individual subjectively perceives political space and how she locates herself vis-à-vis her political in/out groups at the individual level. To examine such subjective polarization, this paper proposes an approach that examines the trifold relationship between a political actor and the two major political parties. Such relational properties are studied by looking at how each individual locates herself in relation to political in/out groups. Using the American National Election Studies Dataset, this paper sheds new light on the patterns and trends of mass polarization in the United States and demonstrates that subjective polarization has a distinct contribution to partisan animus, or “affective polarization.”
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Hyunku Kwon: Department of Sociology, University of Chicago
E-mail: hyunkukwon@uchicago.edu

John Levi Martin: Department of Sociology, University of Chicago
E-mail: jlmartin@uchicago.edu

Acknowledgements: We thank Eric J. Oliver, Elisabeth Clemens, Oscar Stuhler, Austin Kozlowski, Benjamin Rohr, and Jake Burchard for their comments and suggestions on the earlier draft. We also appreciate the input from the participants of Culture and Action Network. Previous versions of this paper were presented at the meetings of 2020 American Politics Workshop and Politics, History, and Society Workshop at the University of Chicago, and at the 2021 meeting of American Sociological Association.

Supplemental Material

  • Citation: Kwon, Hyunku, and John Levi Martin. 2023. “Subjective Political Polarization.” Sociological Science 10: 903–929.
  • Received: August 3, 2023
  • Accepted: August 23, 2023
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Peter Bearman
  • DOI: 10.15195/v10.a32


0

Trust and Public Support for Environmental Protection in Diverse National Contexts

By on June 8, 2016 in Articles

Malcolm Fairbrother

Sociological Science, June 8, 2016
DOI 10.15195/v3.a17

Abstract
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Worldwide, most people share scientists’ concerns about environmental problems, but reject the solution that policy experts most strongly recommend: putting a price on pollution. Why? I show that this puzzling gap between the public’s positive concerns and normative preferences is due substantially to a lack of trust, particularly political trust. In multilevel models fitted to two international survey datasets, trust strongly predicts support for environmental protection within countries and, by some measures, among countries also. An influential competing theory holds that environmental attitudes correlate mostly with left versus right political ideology; the results here, however, show that this correlation is weaker and varies substantially from country to country—unlike that with trust. Theoretically, these results reflect that environmental degradation is a collective action problem and environmental protection a public good. Methodologically, they derive from the more flexible application of multilevel modeling techniques than in previous studies using such models.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Malcolm Fairbrother: School of Geographical Sciences, Cabot Institute, Centre for Multilevel Modelling, University of Bristol
Email: ggmhf@bristol.ac.uk

Acknowledgements: The author thanks Diego Miralles, Laura De Vito, Jan Mewes, and Jonas Edlund for helpful comments on earlier versions of this article, and audiences at the Institute for Futures Studies (Stockholm), Umeå University, Örebro University, Gothenburg University, Stockholm University, and the Institute for Social and Economic Research (Essex) for many constructive suggestions and criticisms. The research on which the article is based was funded in part by the Riksbankens Jubileumsfonds (Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences, project number NHS14-2035:1), and a Fellowship from the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Bristol.

Supplemental Material

  • Citation: Fairbrother, Malcolm. 2016. “Trust and Public Support for Environmental Protection in Diverse National Contexts.” Sociological Science 3: 359-382.
  • Received: March 3, 2016
  • Accepted: March 13, 2016
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Sarah Soule
  • DOI: 10.15195/v3.a17


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Pulling the Trigger: How Threats to the Nation Increase Support for Military Action via the Generation of Hubris

By on May 25, 2016 in Articles

Yuval Feinstein

Sociological Science, May 25, 2016
DOI 10.15195/v3.a15

Abstract
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Previous studies of public opinion in the United States have reported positive associations between national hubris and support for military actions. This article argues that in addition to its stable aspect, national hubris has a contextual aspect: under perceived symbolic threats to the nation, national hubris increases and boosts support for military action. To test this argument, which is grounded in a sociological and social psychological understanding of individuals as members of collectivities who pursue a symbolic politics of status achievement and maintenance, a survey-experiment was conducted with a nationally representative sample. In the experiment, participants who were exposed to rhetoric that highlighted symbolic threats to the nation to justify an impending military action against Iran’s nuclear facilities reported higher levels of national hubris and were more likely to support the military action than either participants who were exposed to internationalist rhetoric or those in the control group.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Yuval Feinstein: Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Haifa
Email: fyuval@soc.haifa.ac.il

Acknowledgements: The author is grateful to the National Science Foundation for providing the funding for this research. The author also thanks Terece Bell, Jeremy Broekman, Philippe Duhart, Jennifer Eggerling-Boeck, Vered Kraus, Robert D. Mare, Zeynep Ozgen, David O. Sears, Andreas Wimmer, and Meir Yaish for their help and advice regarding theory, research design, and manuscript preparation. Previous versions of the article were presented at the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association (2012), the Association for the Study of Nationalities (2012), and the Israeli Political Science Association (2013). I thank conveners and audiences for stimulating comments and challenging criticisms

Supplemental Material

  • Citation: Feinstein, Yuval. 2016. “Pulling the Trigger: How Threats to the Nation Increase Support for Military Action via the Generation of Hubris.” Sociological Science 3: 317-334.
  • Received: January 4, 2016
  • Accepted: February 8, 2016
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Sarah Soule
  • DOI: 10.15195/v3.a15


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Secrets and Misperceptions: The Creation of Self-Fulfilling Illusions

By on November 3, 2014 in Articles

Sarah K. Cowan

Sociological Science, November 3, 2014
DOI 10.15195/v1.a26

Abstract
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This study examines who hears what secrets, comparing two similar secrets — one which is highly stigmatized and one which is less so. Using a unique survey representative of American adults and intake forms from a medical clinic, I document marked differences in who hears these secrets. People who are sympathetic to the stigmatizing secret are more likely to hear of it than those who may react negatively. This is a consequence not just of people selectively disclosing their own secrets but selectively sharing others’ as well. As a result, people in the same social network will be exposed to and influenced by different information about those they know and hence experience that network differently. When people effectively exist in networks tailored by others to not offend then the information they hear tends to be that of which they already approve. Were they to hear secrets they disapprove of then their attitudes might change but they are less likely to hear those secrets. As such, the patterns of secret-hearing contribute to a stasis in public opinion.
 Sarah K. Cowan: New York University  E-mail: sarahkcowan@nyu.edu

Supplemental Material

  • Citation: Cowan, Sarah K. 2014. “Secrets and Misperceptions: The Creation of Self-Fulfilling Illusions” Sociological Science 1: 466-492.
  • Received: July 22, 2014
  • Accepted: August 31, 2014
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen,  Olav Sorenson
  • DOI: 10.15195/v1.a26

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