Chapter Five Public Opinion and Political Socialization

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. 5-2 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.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. 5-3 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

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. 5-4 Figure 5.1: Gallup Poll Accuracy

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. 5-5 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.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. 5-6 Majoritarian Model According to the classic majoritarian model, the government should do what a majority of the public wants.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. 5-7 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.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. 5-8 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.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. 5-9 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.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved Three Patterns of Distribution (Cont’d) Bimodal Distribution: A distribution (of opinions) that shows two responses being chosen about as frequently as each other.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved Three Patterns of Distribution (Cont’d) Normal Distribution: A symmetrical bell- shaped distribution (of opinions) centered on a single mode, or most frequent response.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved Figure 5.2: Three Distributions of Opinion

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved The Distribution of Public Opinion A distribution of opinions that shows little change over time is a stable distribution.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved 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.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved 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.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved Figure 5.3: Socialization, Age, and Public Opinion

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved 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.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved 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.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved Figure 5.4: Deviations of Group Opinion from National Opinion on Two Questions of Order and Equality

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved 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.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved 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.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved 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.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved 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.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved 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

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved Figure 5.5: Respondents Classified by Ideological Tendencies

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved 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.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved 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.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved 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.

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved 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.