SYMPOSIUM: WHAT DO WE OWE EACH OTHER? Public Opinion and Collective Obligations Samuel Popkin Published online: 3 August 2007 # Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2007 Abstract This article attempts to identify the general principles that underlie public reasoning about collective obligations and that help explain when political parties can create new obligations or defend existing ones. I use these principles to President Clinton’ s unsuccessful attempt to create government health-care plan and attempts by President Bush to privatize Social Security. The success of a party in selling – or defeating – an obligation depends upon what people believe about the competence and capacity of government and the value of autonomy – choices made by each citizen; whether people perceive the obligation as providing floors or establishing ceilings by limiting choice or otherwise restricting opportunities for the better-off; and whether the program is more like insurance or more like welfare. A party’s ability to maintain credibility with voters also depends upon whether party leaders can suppress issues that threaten intra-party elite pacts. When attempts to suppress “taboo” issues like “stem cells” or “black crime” fail, the party loses credibility with its voters and attempts to defend or sell obligations fail. Keywords Obligation . Republican . Democrat . Social justice . Public opinion . Elections . Welfare The presidential election of 2008 is a particularly critical election for deciding what our obligations to each other will be. Since neither party has a current president or vice-president competing for the nomination, and since there are also likely to be more voters dissatisfied with their parties than at any time since 1968, we can expect wide-open intra-party fights among Democrats and Republicans. These fights will center on what government can do better collectively than what people can do individually through markets, what government should do for people at various times in their life, and how to determine priorities among competing obligations. These contests are taking place at a time when alternate forms of news and information about politics—cable, internet, bloggers, etc.—are changing power structures within political parties. The changes in media, along with primaries, open up both parties to challenges—on the right and on the left within each party. These challenges will affect the ability of candidates and parties to build a national consensus and erode the power of politicians to control the political agenda and keep topics off the table that threaten elite pacts within the parties. Politicians and parties do not introduce programs to educate the public or to build a consensus on what is good for America, despite pious claims to the contrary. They defend or promote obligations to renew and build constit- uencies, or to split the opposition. They renew and build the constituency for a program by persuading voters the program is good for the country. They split the opposition by finding programs that grass roots members of the other party support, but which the party elites cannot endorse without breaking elite pacts. Behind the phrase “It takes a village…;” is an implicit assumption that, once upon a time, there was more sharing, more mutual concern, and more social capital, that villages were like extended families with extensive mutual obliga- tions. While it is true that villages were the places that always had to take you in, to paraphrase Robert Frost, village policies were not more altruistic, generous or redistributive than is America today. Peasants were too poor to be romantic about their fellow villagers. Rather, villages were more like stock exchanges than families. Then as now, Soc (2007) 44:37–44 DOI 10.1007/s12115-007-9008-x S. Popkin (*) Political Science, University of California, San Diego, San Diego, USA e-mail: spopkin@ucsd.edu