Why we should be more optimistic about the competency of American voters

The traditional view that voters have stable beliefs about what government should do and what policies they prefer has become unstuck, with many commentators and academics now doubting that voters approach politics with any consistent preferences. In new research, Melanie Freeze and Jacob M. Montgomery reject this view, arguing that public opinion is generally stable across many issues, and that the public is getting better at connecting their preferences to their ideology. By removing random and time-dependent errors from election and survey data, they find that preferences on a range of issues such as abortion policy and gay marriage have been relatively stable and have also become more closely correlated with party identification over the past two decades.