The Rational Public? A Canadian Test of the Page and Shapiro Argument

Over a decade ago, Page and Shapiro challenged the classical view of public opinion by arguing that Americans’ collective policy preferences, instead of being volatile and meaningless, were ‘rational’ in the sense that they were reasonable and stable over time. We propose the first non-American test of Page and Shapiro’s argument. We analyze 60 years of trends in Canadian public opinion on policy issues (1941–2001). Our results reveal that Canadian public opinion appears to be as stable as American public opinion. However, since government acts in advance of public opinion more often in Canada than in the United States, we argue that stability must be viewed as a reflection of collective complacency as much as it is a sign of a rational public opinion. Multivariate regression analyses of changes in public opinion further indicate that, other things being the same, the stability of public opinion is positively affected by issue salience and by the number of times a survey question is repeated. Although the positive impact of these variables on stability is consistent with the collective rationality model, we show that it can also be explained without assuming that opinion is collectively rational in the sense implied by Page and Shapiro.