Eric Levitz writes:

The American public is in the mood for “big government.” According to the distinguished political scientist James Stimson’s “Public Policy Mood estimate” — a widely respected tool for measuring shifts in ideological opinion across time — the U.S. electorate is more sympathetic to left-wing economic policy today than at anytime in the past 68 years (which is as far back as Stimson’s data goes).

Tracking ideological change across decades is inherently difficult, since some policy questions fall out of surveys as time passes, while others enter them. And what qualifies as the “liberal” or “conservative” position on a given issue can also evolve over time. This is most conspicuously apparent on social and cultural policy, where Barack Obama’s 2008 position on gay marriage would put to the right of some congressional Republicans in 2019.

But Stimson’s index confines itself to the role of government in the economy, or as he puts it, “the New Deal and Great Society agendas.” And on this dimension of public opinion, the arc of history has most definitely not bent in a consistently liberal direction. In fact, before the American public’s mood hit a new peak for economic liberalism in 2018, the high point for such attitudes had been 1961. [Continue reading…]