LIMITS OF ELITE INFLUENCE ON PUBLIC OPINION

One of the major assumptions of John Zaller's RAS model of public opinion is that people need explicit cues from partisan elites in order to evaluate persuasive messages. This puts the public in the position of a passive audience, unable to scrutinize information or make independent decisions. However, there is evidence that people can, under some circumstances, evaluate and use information independently of elite cues. Thus, patterns of public opinion in the months before the Iraq war are inconsistent with the predictions of Zaller's model. While the RAS model usually accounts for the dynamics of public opinion quite well, the situations in which it fails provide us with critical insights into the limits of elite influence.