Chapter Five Public Opinion and Political Socialization.
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Transcript of Chapter Five Public Opinion and Political Socialization.
Chapter Five
Public Opinion and Political
Socialization
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Public Opinion and the Models of Democracy
• Public Opinion is the collective attitude of the citizens on a given issue or question.
• Statistical sampling theory does not claim that a sample exactly matches the population, only that it reflects the population with some predictable degree of accuracy.
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Three Factors Determine the Accuracy of a Sample:
• How the sample is randomly selected
• The size of the sample—the larger the sample, the more accurately it represents the population
• The amount of variation in the population
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Figure 5.1: Gallup Poll Accuracy
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Public Opinion and the Models of Democracy (Cont’d)
• The majoritarian and pluralist models of democracy differ greatly in their assumptions about the role of public opinion in democratic government.
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Majoritarian Model
• According to the classic majoritarian model, the government should do what a majority of the public wants.
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Pluralist Model
• In contrast, pluralists argue that the public as a whole seldom demonstrates clear, consistent opinions on the day-to-day issues of government.
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Distribution of Public Opinion
• Government must analyze the shape and the stability of the distribution of public opinion.
• Shape of the Distribution: the shape of the opinion distribution depicts the pattern of all the responses when counted and plotted.
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Three Patterns of Distribution
• Skewed Distribution: An asymmetrical but generally bell-shaped distribution (of opinions); its mode, or most frequent response, lies off to one side.
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Three Patterns of Distribution (Cont’d)
• Bimodal Distribution: A distribution (of opinions) that shows two responses being chosen about as frequently as each other.
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Three Patterns of Distribution (Cont’d)
• Normal Distribution: A symmetrical bell-shaped distribution (of opinions) centered on a single mode, or most frequent response.
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Figure 5.2: Three Distributions of Opinion
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The Distribution of Public Opinion
• A distribution of opinions that shows little change over time is a stable distribution.
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Political Socialization
• Political Socialization is the complex process by which people acquire their political values.
• Agents of Early Socialization include two fundamental principles that characterize early learning• Primacy principle—what is learned first is learned
best • Structuring principle—what is learned first structures
later learning. Agents that structure early socialization are the family, school and community and peers.
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Political Socialization (Cont’d)
• Continuing Socialization includes newspaper and television news for the older American’s source of political news, while younger Americans are more likely to rely on radio, magazines or the Internet.
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Figure 5.3: Socialization, Age, and Public Opinion
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Social Groups and Political Values
• No two people are influenced by precisely the same socialization agents or in precisely the same way. People with similar backgrounds, however, do tend to develop similar political opinions.
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Social Groups and Political Values (Cont’d)
• Examples used to demonstrate this included abortion and guaranteed employment.
• Perspectives applied to these issues included education, income, region, race and ethnicity, religion and gender.
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Figure 5.4: Deviations of Group Opinion from National Opinion on Two Questions of Order and Equality
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The Quality of Ideological Thinking in Public Opinion
• Studies of the public’s ideological thinking find that two themes run through people’s minds when they are asked to describe liberals and conservatives.
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From Values to Ideology
• Liberals are associated with change and Conservatives with tradition.
• Liberals support intervention to promote economic equality while Conservatives favor less government intervention and more individual freedom in economic activities.
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The Quality of Ideological Thinking in Public Opinion (Cont’d)
• Liberals are people who believe that government should promote equality, even if some freedom is lost in the process, but who oppose surrendering freedom to government-imposed order.
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The Quality of Ideological Thinking in Public Opinion (Cont’d)
• Conservatives are people who place a higher value on freedom than on equality when the two conflict. Will restrict freedom when threatened with the loss of order.
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The Quality of Ideological Thinking in Public Opinion (Cont’d)
• Ideological Types in the United States also include:
• Libertarians: People who favor freedom over both equality and order
• Communitarians: People who favor equality and order over freedom
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Figure 5.5: Respondents Classified by Ideological Tendencies
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The Process of Forming Political Opinions
• Political knowledge is not randomly distributed within our society. People with equivalent knowledge of public affairs and levels of conceptualization are equally likely to call themselves liberals or conservatives.
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The Process of Forming Political Opinions (Cont’d)
• The self-interest principle—the implication that people choose what benefits them personally—plays an obvious role in how people form opinions on government policies.
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The Process of Forming Political Opinions (Cont’d)
• An opinion schema constitutes a network of organized knowledge and beliefs that guide a person’s processing of information regarding a particular subject.
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The Process of Forming Political Opinions (Cont’d)
• Public opinion on specific issues is molded by political leaders, journalists and policy experts.
• Politicians serve as cue-givers to members of the public.
• Issue framing is the manner in which a politician or interest group leader defines an issue when presenting it to others.