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Digital trace data have the potential to offer rich insight into complex behaviors that were once out of reach, but their use has raised vital and unresolved questions about what is—or is not—public opinion. Building on the work of James Bryce, Lindsay Rogers, Herbert Blumer, Paul Lazarsfeld, and more, this essay revisits the discipline's historical roots and draws parallels between past theory and present practice. Today, scholars treat public opinion as the summation of individual attitudes, weighted equally and expressed anonymously at static points in time through polls, yet prior to the advent of survey research, it was conceived as something intrinsically social and dynamic. In an era dominated by online discussion boards and social media platforms, the insights of this earlier "classical tradition" offer two pathways forward. First, for those who criticize computational social science as poorly theorized, it provides a strong justification for the work that data scientists do in text mining and sentiment analysis. And second, it offers clues for how emerging technologies might be leveraged effectively for the study of public opinion in the future.

Analysis of three cross-sectional polls administered by the Gallup Organization at 10-year intervals—in 1990, 2000, and 2010—demonstrates that partisan identification has become an increasingly important determinant of environmental concern within the American mass public. Polarization on global warming is especially clear, even when compared to a variety of other social, economic, and political problems, but party sorting seems to occur only as citizens acquire information and become familiar with elite cues. The implications of this for the U.S. environmental movement and the strategies it employs are discussed.

On Tuesday, August 9, 1864, the New York Times published an unassuming editorial titled "Adirondack." Despite consuming nearly a full column down the right side of the page, to a causal reader that day the topic might have seemed trivial, or at the very least indistinguishable from the news that surrounded it. Inspired perhaps by the oppressive summer heat, the unnamed author -- long suspected to be Charles Loring Brace -- felt compelled to extol the advantages of the vast North Woods, where "within an easy day's ride of our great City," there exists, "a tract of country fitted to make a Central Park for the world." The suffocating realities of the industrial age must have made the solitude of wilderness seem irresistibly attractive. Adapted from the source document.

Students of electoral behavior on statewide ballot propositions have long suspected that, in the absence of typical cues & informational shortcuts, voters are more dependent on political campaigns to simplify choice & shape electoral decisions. This article uses survey data from two prominent & contrasting case studies in CA & MA to examine the importance of issue-framing (ie, how issues are symbolically presented) in initiative campaigns. In the end, results suggest that although factors such as campaign spending may be important in understanding the broad conditions under which these measures succeed or fail, it is sometimes the content of the message that matters most. 3 Tables, 2 Figures, 34 References. Adapted from the source document.

Gallup data (1991) are used to present a methodological critique & reevaluation of the literature on the dimensionality of environmental concern. Given the frequent, yet problematic, use of environmental batteries that ask respondents to express opinions using a common response format, confirmatory factor analysis is used here to correct for both random & nonrandom sources of measurement error. Results suggest that not only can the standard environmental battery used by Gallup be reduced to relatively few latent factors, those factors are strongly correlated across a diverse set of environmental issues, as well as among several broad idea elements thought to define environmental concern. While current results offer compelling evidence of the near unidimensionality of environmental attitudes, & of the willingness of many Americans to express concern for environmental quality, ultimately, dimensionality alone may be insufficient proof that public attitudes on the environment have matured into a sophisticated & constrained social paradigm or belief system. 4 Tables, 58 References. Adapted from the source document.