Measuring Americans’ Issue Priorities a New Version of the Most Important Problem Question Reveals More Concern about Global Warming and the Environment

For decades, numerous surveys have asked Americans the ‘‘Most Important Problem’’ (MIP) question: ‘‘What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?’’ Global warming and the environment have rarely been cited by more than a small number of respondents in these surveys in recent years, which might seem to suggest that these have not been the most important issues to Americans. This paper explores the possibility that an additional method of assessing the public’s priorities might support a different conclusion. Three experiments embedded in national surveys (two done via the Internet, the other done by telephone) show that when asked the traditional MIP question, respondents rarely mentioned global warming or the environment, but when other respondents were asked to identify the most serious problem that will face the world in the future if nothing is done to stop it, global warming and the environment were the most frequently mentioned problems. Furthermore, a large majority of Americans indicated that they wanted the federal government to devote substantial effort to combating problems that the world will face in the future if nothing is done to stop them. Thus, future surveys might include both versions of the MIP question to more fully document Americans priorities. DAVID YEAGER is a PhD candidate at Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA. SAMUEL LARSON is an undergraduate at Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA. JON KROSNICK is Frederic O. Glover Professor in Humanities and Social Sciences, Professor of Communication, Professor of Political Science, Professor of Psychology (by courtesy) at Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA, and is University Fellow at Resources for the Future. TREVOR TOMPSON is director of polling at Associated Press, Washington, DC, USA. The authors thank Kinesis Survey Technologies, LLC, for the use of their Internet questionnaire administration software and thank Michael Murphy and Mark Shwartz for very helpful comments. Some data analyzed here were collected via the Face-to-Face Recruited Internet Survey Platform (FFRISP), funded by the National Science Foundation [0619956 to J. A. K., Principal Investigator]. *Address correspondence to Jon Krosnick, 432 McClatchy Hall, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94028, USA; e-mail: [email protected]. doi: 10.1093/poq/nfq075 The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Association for Public Opinion Research. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] at S taford U nirsity on A ril 3, 2011 poq.oxjournals.org D ow nladed fom At any moment in history, nations face complex multiplicities of problems, and choices must be made about where to devote legislative attention. Democratic policy-makers make these decisions guided partly by the polity’s concerns, which legislators learn about via letters and telephone calls from constituents and via opinion polls identifying problems that the public considers most important for the country (e.g., Cobb and Elder 1972; Kingdon 1984, 1995; Peters and Hogwood 1985; Walker 1977). Therefore, to understand the ups and downs of an issue on the legislative agenda, we must understand the issue’s ups and downs on the public’s agenda. The most frequently used survey measure of the public’s agenda is the socalled ‘‘most important problem’’ (or MIP) question, developed by George Gallup in the 1930s (e.g., ‘‘What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?’’) and variants of it. Since 1950, more than 450 surveys have asked the MIP question, according to the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research’s archives. The MIP question has been the focus of much research tracking trends (e.g., Smith 1980; 1985) and testing the news media agenda-setting hypothesis (e.g., Althaus and Tewksbury 2002; Holbrook and Hill 2005; McCombs 2005). The starting point for the investigation reported here is an observation about the results produced by this question in recent surveys regarding global warming and the environment. In a CBS News/New York Times poll conducted in September of 2009, just 1% of respondents said something related to ‘‘the environment,’’ and no one was categorized as mentioning ‘‘global warming’’ in particular. In prior surveys by those organizations, dating back to 2007, the percentage of respondents mentioning the environment or global warming never rose above 3%. Meanwhile, ‘‘the economy’’ and ‘‘unemployment’’ have been mentioned most often since January of 2008, when 24% of respondents mentioned them. The economy and unemployment reached a high of 61% in January of 2009, and eased back to 48% by December of 2009. Frequent mentioning of the economy in response to the MIP question during this period probably resulted from ‘‘real world cues’’ indicating that the American economy was in serious trouble (see, e.g., Behr and Iyengar 1985). The frequent mentioning of the economy may also have been a result of news media agenda-setting (e.g., Iyengar and Kinder 1987), because the economy received far more news media attention during this time than did the environment (see Pew Research Center for the People and the Press 2009a; 2009b). Frequent mentioning of the economy suggested to some observers that many Americans placed top priority on the economy during this period. For example, based on answers to the traditional MIP question, the New York Times (Rohter 2008) concluded that ‘‘the economic slowdown is the issue most on the minds of Americans.’’ This conclusion seems to be based on two assumptions: (1) that the MIP question accurately identifies the problems that Americans consider to be the nation’s most important, and (2) that Americans think most about the problem(s) that they believe are currently the nation’s most important. 126 Yeager et al. at S taford U nirsity on A ril 3, 2011 poq.oxjournals.org D ow nladed fom Therefore, one might infer that the absence of mentions of global warming in response to the traditional MIP question signals that it was not an issue at the top of Americans priorities. However, this conclusion might be premature. The traditional Gallup question focuses on problems facing only the United States and only on problems that exist today. If Americans also assign priority to solving problems that face both the U.S. and the world, and if Americans look ahead to the future and want to deal with impending threats, then answers to the traditional MIP question might only partially document public priorities and might omit worldwide problems that constitute future threats. Consequently, supplementing the traditional MIP question with an additional question with different wording might yield a fuller picture of the public’s priorities. Specifically, surveys could also ask: ‘‘What do you think will be the most important problem facing the world in the future?’’ But moving in the direction of asking such a question uncovers another interesting consideration: optimism about solutions. We hypothesized that some respondents will think that a problem will be extremely serious if nothing is done to remedy it, but that society will in fact take successful steps to remedy it, so it will not in fact end up being a serious problem. So we tested another version of the MIP question: ‘‘What do you think will be the most important problem facing the world in the future if nothing is done to stop it?’’ This wording is designed to elicit mention of problems that people believe will be averted. To compare the results obtained by these different question wordings, we conducted three experiments embedded in national surveys of American adults. In the first study, respondents were randomly assigned to be asked one of four different open-ended versions of an MIP question: Traditional. ‘‘What do you think is the most important problem facing the country today?’’ World. ‘‘What do you think is the most important problem facing the world today?’’ World/Future. ‘‘What do you think will be the most important problem facing the world in the future?’’ World/Future/Serious/Unstopped. ‘‘What do you think will be the most serious problem facing the world in the future if nothing is done to stop it?’’ Note that the last wording replaced the word ‘‘important’’ with ‘‘serious,’’ a decision made because we thought ‘‘important’’ sounded less natural than ‘‘serious’’ in this question. A later experiment explored whether this wording change was consequential. 1. See the online supplement (http://poq.oxfordjournals.org/) for additional details on our methods and results. Measuring Issue Priorities 127 at S taford U nirsity on A ril 3, 2011 poq.oxjournals.org D ow nladed fom