Slide 1: Public Opinion: What do you think?
This Animated Learning Module considers the contours, sources, and impact of public opinion.
Slide 2: The Power of Public Opinion
Abraham Lincoln said, “Our government rests on public opinion. Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail. Without it, nothing can succeed.”
Slide 3: The Power of Public Opinion
Public opinion polls are useful for determining the approval rating of the president.
This reflects the power of presidential approval.
A remarkable example of the extremes of presidential approval can be found in the presidency of George W. Bush.
Presidential approval ratings generally decline during the course of their time in office, and Bush’s approval ratings went from an all-time high to an all-time low.
The president can get more support for his policies when his approval ratings are high than when they are low.
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Before looking at more examples of public opinion, let’s begin with a definition.
Public opinion is the aggregate of individual attitudes about issues or officials and is the foundation of any democracy.
Knowing what the public is thinking and having public support is a powerful combination.
Politicians must know which way the public leans and what citizens think in order maintain power.
Citizens, on the other hand, must be able to express opinions and know that they are being heard in order to exercise power over politicians.
Of course, elections are the ultimate form of public opinion when it comes to controlling politicians.
However, public opinion polls do serve to fill in the gaps between elections.
Public opinion plays an important role in forging responsiveness and is central to understanding politics.
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In the past, we focused only on elite opinion, which tends to come from the most active and wealthiest members of a political community.
Later, newspapers and other organizations polled the people to assess public opinion, but these so-called straw polls were of limited help because it was unclear who was being surveyed.
Likewise, polls were conducted by mail and in person.
They sought to predict the outcome of elections; however, they were unscientific.
Polls have been scientifically conducted since the nineteen-thirties, but a poorly designed or executed poll can produce misleading, biased, contradictory, and confusing results.
Moreover, there is so much information available from surveys that it is important to know which findings warrant attention and which warrant caution.
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George Gallup, the father of modern polling, is the best-known name in polling today, and his scientific polling and survey research techniques have been refined over the years.
The key to a scientific poll is a random sample.
A random sample gives everyone who might be selected to participate in a poll an equal chance of being included.
Of course, gathering opinions from everyone is not practical.
For example, the U.S. census, a count of the total population required by the Constitution every ten years, has trouble reaching every adult.
So, polls draw a sample from a larger population.
But first the population—the group the poll is meant to represent—must be defined.
It might be, for example, all adults over age 18, or only registered voters.
The sample is a subset of a population from which information is collected and analyzed to learn more about the population as a whole.
A typical size of a sample survey is one thousand people, though it can vary from five hundred to about fifteen hundred.
Size does not matter as much as whether the sample is representative of the population being assessed.
A representative sample means that everyone in that population has been given an equal chance of being asked to participate in the poll and those polled look very much like the actual population.
If a random one thousand people are asked to be part of the survey, they should be representative of the general population.
The key to a representative sample is the randomness with which participants are selected.
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There are different types of polls.
As mentioned before, the U.S. census is a count of the entire population that happens every ten years. But the census does more than just count individuals, it also determines race and ethnicity.
Daily polls that gauge changes in voters’ preferences for the major contenders in an election are called tracking polls.
Another type of survey involving elections is the exit poll, conducted as voters leave the polling booth.
The goal is to learn the reasoning behind the votes the citizens just cast and to predict the outcome of the election before all the ballots are officially counted.
Then there is the push poll, a kind of election poll that is actually a campaign strategy conducted by interest groups or candidates who try to influence the opinions of respondents by priming them with biased information.
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Even when polls are conducted properly, including sample selection, there is still a chance for error.
To capture this uncertainty, poll numbers have a confidence interval built in.
The poll produces a single estimate for the public’s thinking, but this estimate is a range of possible estimates.
The sampling error is about four percent for a sample of six hundred respondents.
That four percent generates the confidence interval.
With that said, caution is always required when interpreting poll data.
There is also the problem of non-attitudes, another source of error.
Many people feel compelled to answer questions even if they do not have an opinion or know much about the question.
They do this because they do not want to seem uninformed; however, their responses create errors in the survey.
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Polling is facing a transition because representative sampling in telephone surveys is increasingly affected by the growing number of cell phones.
Many pollsters do not have access to cell phone exchanges and many cell phone users do not have landlines, which are used in telephones polls.
However, there is little evidence to suggest that people without landlines vote differently from those with them.
Perhaps more important is the widespread use of caller ID and answering machines that are used to screen calls.
The result is that fewer people are willing to participate in telephone surveys.
The declining response rate is lessening the ability of pollsters to capture public opinion accurately.
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Now, let’s move away from the collection of opinion, to where public opinion comes from.
Since public opinion is the aggregate of citizen attitudes and beliefs, this chapter looks at the major forces that shape political thinking on a personal level.
Those forces are found in the social and political environment in which one grows up, and the generation and family into which one is born.
Self-interest also affects political attitudes, as do the ideas of opinion leaders such as journalists, political observers, policy makers, and experts.
Socialization is the process by which our attitudes are shaped, and each of us is a product of socialization from our family, friends, and community.
Parents commonly pass on political attitudes to their children, including party identification.
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There are also generational effects that are not limited to life-altering events; for instance, one such effect can be the era in which one is young and first active as a citizen.
Forming political opinions is more than a psychological process tied to socialization.
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People respond to the context in which they find themselves and are rational in that they act in a way that is consistent with their self-interest.
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As mentioned earlier, elite opinion tends to come from the most active and wealthiest members of a political community.
Slide 14: Partisanship
Public opinion is also shaped by partisanship and ideology; these are forces that provide useful frameworks for understanding the public’s thinking on issues.
Partisanship, or party identification, represents an individual’s allegiance to a political party. This psychological attachment to a party usually forms when an individual is young. It forms a perceptual lens that shapes the way partisans view the political world and process information.
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In addition, partisanship has a complex relationship with political ideology. .
Liberals tend to be Democrats and conservatives tend to be Republicans, and ideology speaks to both political and social values.
If at first this outlook appears bleak, there is some optimism to be found.
First, the public, collectively, seems to make reasonable choices.
Voters hold presidents and legislators accountable; failures are punished and successes are rewarded.
Although individuals do not know all the details about candidates’ views on all the issues, they do tend to know candidates’ views on the issues that are salient to them.
The public can learn quickly if an issue is salient enough to them and receives attention in the news media.
Personal decision-making is not always based on complete information, which explains why some answers may shift over time; yet public opinion is more stable than one might think.
Individuals often rely on cues and intuitions to make decisions, rather than on an analysis of detailed information.
Scholars have termed such thinking ‘low information rationality’.
When the differences become stark, however, the danger is that polarization fuels controversy and personal attacks to the point that compromise and consensus become impossible.
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Polls are a great help although they can be flawed because well-measured public opinion does not always produce a sound direction for the country, which requires an informed citizenry.
Surveys of public opinion, or polls, are the most reliable indicator of what the public is thinking.
But polls are not the only source of public opinion.
In one recent Supreme Court case, the Justices sought to gauge public opinion on what constituted “cruel and unusual punishment” by looking at laws passed by state legislatures.
Other sources of public opinion are attendance at rallies and protests, letters sent to elected officials or newspapers, the amount of money given to particular causes or candidates, the content of newspaper editorials, and information gathered from day-to-day conversations with average Americans.
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Congress has become more polarized over the last thirty years.
Public opinion has demonstrated that certain factors can predict or explain responses to questions.
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For example, socioeconomic status is a combined measure of occupation, education, income, wealth, and relative social standing or lifestyle.
There are differences in opinion based on a person’s socioeconomic status.
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Age also influences opinion on issues, because the stage of one’s life affects how one thinks about issues.
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Religious affiliation is another indicator of opinion.
For example, Protestants tend to be more politically conservative than Catholics or Jews.
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Then there is the gender gap, the differences in political attitudes among men and women, which emerged in 1980.
Men tend to prefer more defense, and women tend to favor social welfare programs.
This is often referred to as the guns-and-butter argument.
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Another divide in public opinion is found in race and ethnicity, especially when it concerns affirmative action programs.
Minority groups tend to favor affirmative action programs and non-minority groups tend not to.
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As indicated earlier, the population being studied must be identified.
Our population is increasing in level of education. This too, produces different results.
More education tends to result in greater tolerance of others and more self-interest when it comes to taxes and government spending.
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Political scientists often measure the public’s faith in the political system by looking at polls.
Two of the most common efforts involve assessing whether the people trust their government and whether they believe their participation in government matters.
The latter is called ‘efficacy’.
Political trust and efficacy have both generally declined over the last fifty years.
Public trust and efficacy respond to changes in government and can fluctuate depending on whether the nation is experiencing good or bad times.
All in all, public opinion, despite its flaws, is an extremely important part of politics in America.
Slide 25: Critical Thinking Questions
Here are some questions to consider for this chapter:
How does public opinion influence public policy?
In what ways are elected officials responsive to public opinion?
How responsive should they be?
Is every citizen’s voice equal, or are some people more influential? Why?
How well does polling capture public opinion?
Should polls direct public policy?
Does public opinion provide a gateway or a gate to democracy?