Paul J. Quirk

Misinformation and the Currency of Democratic Citizenship

Scholars have documented the deficiencies in political knowledge among American citizens. Another problem, misinformation, has received less attention. People are misinformed when they confidently hold wrong beliefs. We present evidence of misinformation about welfare and show that this misinformation acts as an obstacle to educating the public with correct facts. Moreover, wide-spread misinformation can lead to collective preferences that are far different from those that would exist if people were correctly informed. The misinformation phenomenon has implications for two currently influential scholarly literatures: the study of political heuristics and the study of elite persuasion and issue framing.

Conceptual Foundations of Citizen Competence

This article considers some of the challenges that attend efforts to assess citizen performance. We begin by demonstrating the often- unarticulated complexity of evaluating performance in any domain. To do this, we identify four distinct conceptual elements that comprise an evaluation—identification of task, selection of criterion, choice of empirical indicator, and explication of standard—and illustrate with an example that is relatively free of ambiguity: performance in basketball. Using this framework, we then review research in three general areas of study: mass belief systems and issue consistency, political knowledge, and the use of political heuristics. We find that no study articulates all four elements (or adequate substitutes associated with an alternative framework). As a result, problems arise. Most significantly, any particular study is likely to use criteria that are unsatisfactory in important respects or to employ empirical indicators that do not validly measure the criteria. Across studies, conclusions often vary as a function of unarticulated differences in assumptions, definitions, and measures. We conclude by drawing a few lessons for future research, while also recognizing the impressive progress that the study of public opinion and citizen competence has made over the last 40 years.

The Cooperative Resolution of Policy Conflict

I develop an approach for analyzing the conditions for cooperative resolution of policy conflict. I analyze certain policy conflicts as bargaining situations, with opportunity for cooperation, among opposing issue factions. As a framework for analysis, I present an informal game-theoretic interpretation of nonzero-sum policy conflict. With that foundation, I derive implications about the conditions for cooperative outcomes with respect to several aspects of the policy process: issue content, the structure of conflict, leadership, party politics, and political institutions.

Evaluating congressional reform: Deregulation revisited

An evaluation of the changes in Congresss structure that occurred in the 1970s requires attention to three dimensions of its performance as a policymaking institution: representation of interests, deliberation, and conflict resolution. Considered this way, the changes seem to have enhanced some aspects of congressional capacity (especially the representation of broadly-based interests) but to have diminished others (especially deliberation and conflict resolution on issues that are salient to mass constituencies). The resulting strengths and weaknesses help to explain differences in congressional performance on trucking deregulation and natural gas deregulation in the late 1970s and early 1980s. To some degree, they have altered the opportunities, strategic considerations, and central skills for policy analysts who seek to influence congressional decisions.

Industry Influence in Federal Regulatory Agencies

Federal regulatory agencies are often assumed to be excessively responsive to and influenced by the corporate interests they are supposed to regulate. On the basis of direct empirical examination, Paul Quirk challenges this assumption as it relates to four United States federal regulatory agencies. Through a series of interviews with high-level officials of the Federal Trade Commission, the Civil Aeronautics Board, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, he determines whether and what kinds of incentives exist to adopt policies favorable to industry.Originally published in 1981.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.