Chapter 5: Public Opinion and Political Socialization 55
CHAPTER 5
Public Opinion and Political Socialization
Learning Objectives
After reading this chapter, students should be able to do the following:
1. Define the key terms at the end of the chapter
2. List three factors affecting sample accuracy
3. Contrast the majoritarian and pluralist models in their assumptions about public opinion
4. Explain what is meant by the shape and stability of the distribution of public opinion
5. List the agents of both early and continuing political socialization and describe their impact
6. Show how social or demographic characteristics (such as education, income, ethnicity, region, religion, and so forth) are linked to political values
7. Outline and explain important factors that shape issue positions of nonideologues
8. Analyze how the two-dimensional typology of political ideology presented in Chapter 1 applies to the actual distribution of political opinions among Americans
Chapter Synopsis
The history of capital punishment in the United States demonstrates several characteristics of public opinion: (1) The public’s attitudes toward a given government policy vary over time. (2) Public opinion places boundaries on allowable types of public policy. (3) Citizens are willing to register opinions on matters outside their expertise. (4) Governments tend to react to public opinion. (5) The government sometimes does not do what the people want. If the government does not do what the people want, can it properly be called a democracy? This chapter compares the majoritarian and pluralist models of democracy (introduced in Chapter 2) by focusing on their assumptions about public opinion and examining the validity of those assumptions.
Before the development of opinion polling, there was no reliable way to know what the people wanted. Sampling theory, combined with computer technology, has enabled researchers to study public opinion much more accurately. The statistical theory of sampling is accurate if (1) the sample is selected randomly; (2) the larger the sample, the more accurately it represents the population; (3) the greater the variation within the population, the greater the chance one random sample will differ from another. Two important characteristics of the distribution of public opinion are its shape (skewed, bimodal, and normal or bell-shaped) and its stability over time.
The process of political socialization—how people acquire their values through the interplay of cultural factors, knowledge, and ideology—underlies the formation of public opinion. The family, schools, and the community and peers are early agents of political socialization. Later influences include neighbors, fellow workers, club members, the mass media, and the voting experience. Political values, the foundation of public opinion, are shaped differently for each individual through the political socialization process. Still, people with similar social backgrounds tend to share similar political opinions. Education, income, region, religion and religiosity, race, and ethnicity are all factors that affect values. Of these, the latter three produce greater opinion divergence today on issues that compromise freedom at the expense of either order or equality.
Most people will classify themselves along a liberal-conservative continuum, but few will reflect true ideological thinking in public opinion surveys. A two-dimensional framework for assessing the values of order and equality yields four ideological categories of comparable size. Liberals favor equality, but not order. Conservatives want government to enforce order, but not equality. Libertarians oppose government actions for either purpose. Communitarians want more government action to promote both order and equality. Liberals and conservatives have less difficulty placing themselves on a traditional liberal-conservative scale than do communitarians or libertarians.
People who lack a consistent set of political attitudes and beliefs rely on four factors to form political opinion: self-interest, information processing, opinion schemas—or preexisting knowledge and opinions that are applied to specific issues—and political leadership. Despite the complexities of individual opinion formation, strong correlations have been found between people’s social background and general values and their specific opinions.
In some instances, public opinion appears to be stable and well defined and thus in conformity with the majoritarian model of government decision making. More often, public opinion is sharply divided, inconsistent, and based on relatively superficial knowledge. Politically powerful groups frequently are at odds over what policies government should adopt. Division and disagreement among influential, competing interests allow leeway for political decision makers to rely less on disparate public opinion and more on bargaining and compromise, a pattern more characteristic of the pluralist model. Public opinion is viewed as a force that rarely casts the decisive vote, but one that helps set broad parameters for government policy.
Parallel Lecture 5.1
This lecture parallels the treatment of public opinion and political socialization in the text.
I. Introduction
A. Public opinion: the collected attitudes of the citizens concerning a given issue or question.
B. Characteristics of public opinion
1. The public’s attitudes toward a given government policy can vary over time, often dramatically.
2. Public opinion places boundaries on allowable types of public policy.
3. If asked by pollsters, citizens are willing to register opinions on matters outside their expertise.
4. Governments tend to respond to public opinion.
5. The government sometimes does not do what people want.
II. Public opinion and the models of democracy
A. Opinion polling
1. Involves interviewing a sample of citizens to estimate public opinion as a whole
2. A reliable way to measure public opinion
B. Sampling a few, predicting to many
1. Statistical theory of sampling: a sample of individuals selected by chance from any population is representative of that population.
2. Factors determining the accuracy of a sample
a) How the sample is selected: randomly
b) Size of the sample: larger is more accurate.
c) Amount of variation in the population: greater population variation leads to differing random samples.
3. Most national polls survey about fifteen hundred people and are accurate 95 percent of the time within 3 percent.
4. Polls can still be wrong because of other factors, such as question wording.
C. The models of democracy make different assumptions about public opinion.
1. Majoritarian model: assumes that a majority of the people holds clear consistent opinions on government policy
2. Pluralist model: assumes the public is often uninformed and ambivalent about specific issues
III. The distribution of public opinion
A. Shape of the distribution
1. The shape of the distribution refers to the pattern or physical form of the responses when counted and plotted. (See text Figure 5.2.)
a) Skewed distribution: an asymmetrical but generally bell-shaped distribution of opinion; its mode, or most frequent response, lies off to one side.
b) Bimodal distribution: a distribution of opinions that shows two responses being chosen about as frequently as each other.
c) Normal distribution: a symmetrical bell-shaped distribution centered on a single mode, or around the most frequent response.
2. Implications of the distributions
a) When public opinion is normally distribution, the public tends to support moderate policy on an issue.
b) When opinion is bimodal (sharply divided), there is great potential for political conflict.
c) When opinion is skewed, most respondents share the same opinion, and those with a minority opinion risk social ostracism.
B. Stability of the distribution
1. Stable distribution: a distribution of opinions that shows little change over time.
a) Some political attitudes change very little over time.
(1) Capital punishment
(2) Ideological orientations
b) Sometimes attitudes shift within sub-groups, but are not reflected in over-all public opinion (e.g., college students were much more liberal in the 1970s).
c) Political attitudes can change dramatically (e.g., racial integration of public education).
IV. Political socialization
A. Political socialization: the complex process by which people acquire their political values
B. The agents of early socialization
1. Two principles characterize early learning:
a) The primacy principle: what is learned first is learned best.
b) The structuring principle: what is learned first structures what is learned later.
2. Influence of any socialization agent depends on:
a) Extent of one’s exposure to it
b) One’s communication with it
c) One’s receptivity to it
C. Agents of early socialization
1. Family
a) Children learn a wide range of values—including political values—from their parents.
b) Children learn party identification in much the same way they learn religion.
(1) If both parents strongly identify with the same party, children are likely to adopt that identification.
(2) Those who change their partisanship are more likely to shift to being independent than to shift to the other party.
c) Children are socialized more reliably into religion than political party because
(1) Most parents care more about religion than politics.
(2) Religious institutions recognize the value of socialization.
2. School
a) Elementary schools (not higher education)
(1) Introduce authority figures outside the family
(2) Teach the nation’s slogans and symbols
(3) Stress the norms of group behavior and democratic decision making
(4) Children generally leave primary school with a sense of national pride and an idealized notion of government.
b) Secondary schools
(1) Often teach civic responsibility
(2) Offer more explicitly political content
(3) Create greater awareness of the political process and its most prominent participants
(4) End up learning much more about the politics of your era than previous era
c) College level
(1) Can be like high school, or very different: depends on encouragement to question authority
(2) Attitude change is more likely to come from sustained interactions with peers than from particular courses.
3. The community and peers
a) Community: people of all ages with who you come in contact because they live or work near you.
(1) Homogeneous communities exert strong pressure to conform.
(2) Schools may introduce conflicting values.
b) Peers: your friends, classmates and coworkers; usually your age
(1) Groups may offer protection against community pressures.
(2) Allow individuals to develop political attitudes that may be substantially different from their parents and other community authority figures
D. Continuing socialization
1. Peers assume greater importance in adulthood.
2. Mass media emerge as socialization agents.
a) Older Americans tend to rely on newspaper and television.
b) Younger American tend to turn to radio, magazines, and the Internet.
3. Memory, self-interest, and exposure becoming increasingly important
V. Social groups and political values
A. People with similar backgrounds share similar experiences and tend to develop similar political opinions.
B. Two National Election Study questions illustrate commonalities and differences:
1. Under what conditions, if any, should abortion be permitted? (freedom versus order)
2. Do you think the government should guarantee a job to everyone willing to work? (freedom versus equality)
3. Responses to these questions were analyzed according to education, income, region, race and ethnicity, religion, and gender. (See text Figure 5.4.)
C. Education
1. College-educated individuals are likely to choose freedom over social order (believing, for example, that abortion is a woman’s choice).
2. People with more education also tend to favor freedom over equality (less likely to support government guaranteed jobs and living standards).
D. Income
1. Wealth is consistently linked to opinions favoring limited government role in promoting order and equality.
2. Has the same effect as education
E. Region
1. Regional differences have declined in importance.
2. Movement of people and wealth to the South and Southwest has equalized income in the various regions.
3. Greater regional difference on social issues than on economic issues
F. Race and ethnicity
1. Ethnic minority groups
a) European ethnics: Irish, Italians, Germans, Poles—largely Catholics and Jews—who came in the late 1800s and early 1900s
b) African Americans
c) Hispanics
(1) Largest minority group in the United States
(2) Consist of both whites and nonwhites
(3) People of Latin American origin called Latinos/Latinas; people who speak Spanish called Hispanics (Haitians and Brazilians are Latino but generally not Hispanic)
d) Asians and Native Americans
2. African Americans and other minorities display similar political attitudes on questions about equality.
a) Racial minorities tend to have low socio-economic status: position in society, based on a combination of education, occupational status, and income.
b) Minorities have benefited from government actions in support of equality.
3. The abortion issue produces less difference from whites.
G. Religion
1. Religious makeup of the United States
a) 53 percent Protestant
b) 25 percent Catholic
c) 2.6 percent Jewish
d) 19 percent No affiliation or other
2. Religiosity has little effect on attitudes about economic equality.
3. Religiosity has a powerful influence on attitudes about social order.
a) Evangelicals and Jews strongly differ on abortion.
b) Evangelicals and Jews both support Israel.
H. Gender
1. Women are more likely than men to support social equality.
2. Less difference between men and women on the abortion issue
VI. From values to ideology
A. The degree of ideological thinking in public opinion
1. There is little evidence that voters have ever used ideological labels with facility.
2. Most people use the terms “liberal” and “conservative” in generic ways.
3. The tendency to use appropriate ideological terms grows with education.
4. Ideologues hold a consistent set of values and beliefs about the purpose and scope of government and tend to evaluate candidates in ideological terms.
a) Although most Americans readily place themselves along a simple liberal-conservative continuum, few understand what those words mean in an explicitly political sense.
b) Many seem to choose the easy response and locate themselves in the center, or “moderate,” category because they do not clearly understand the alternatives.
B. The quality of ideological thinking in public
1. People describe themselves as liberal or conservative for symbolic value as much for reasons of ideology.
2. Two themes emerge in people’s descriptions of liberal and conservative.
a) People associate liberals with change and conservatives with tradition (the freedom-order continuum).
b) People feel liberals support intervention to promote economic equality and conservatives favor more individual economic freedom (the freedom-equality continuum).
C. Ideological types in the United States (See Figure 5.5.)
1. Liberals, 23 percent of respondents
2. Conservatives, 32 percent
3. Libertarians, 22 percent