Aggregate polling models cannot reveal how individual citizens change their views

Evidence

In the dominant approach, time series statistical methods are applied to aggregated public opinion data. The typical model includes a handful of macroeconomic measures, an indicator or two to reflect the costs of war, and a miscellaneous set of measures to stand for crises, scandals, domestic unrest, presidential initiatives, and more. Although this approach can point with authority to the important national and international events that drive change in popular support in the aggregate, it cannot tell us about the dynamics of individual change. The aggregate time series results may tell us that scandal weakens the president’s support with the public but not how scandal affects the thinking of individual citizens. Other than making the analytically convenient but highly unrealistic claim of homogeneity (that all citizens react in exactly the same way), the time series work is silent on what, exactly, citizens are doing. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1566

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Poll-driven politics is undemocratic because it bypasses public opinion formation — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 99; Latent public opinion rarely diverges from expressed collective policy preferences — Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, Testing Theories of American Politics:…, 22