Political Behaviour 2 Exam

what is public opinion?

what people think

Aggregation of individual opinions 

Collective will 

Those opinions held by private persons which governments find it prudent to heed

Measuring Public Opinion

Public opinion is hard to measure, it is still hard to measure public opinion even w/ alternatives

another aspect with public opinion is hard to find methods that are representative

surveys

big data

Protests / rallies

Town hall meetings

Letters to elected officials

Social media

Public vs Private Expression and opinion

public = intended for audiences

private = expressed in confidentiality

• Polls are private and anonymous.

• Riots are public but may allow anonymity.

Structured vs. Unstructured

• Riots = unstructured, expressive, flexible

Sample surveys = highly structured, require expertise, limit responses

definitions for structures vs unstructured are the standard ones

Uncivil Disagreement (book)

The main concept the book looks towards is social sorting- in which the political parties have become more than just representing policy positions, but also representing social groups. As a result, this creates social polarization, which encompasses stereotyping, prejudice, and emotional instability. With said polarization, the parties are more unwilling to compromise, and instead more willing to escalate conflict.

Us vs. Them mentality

as social identities become more linked with parties, parties become more involved in American political decision-making, behaviour, and emotion.

Surveys

Surveys offer one way to measure public opinion

Can’t trust polls

• Can design the survey to better match what you want - public or private / structured or unstructured

• Surveys are one of the few ways we have to gather opinion data from those less motivated to express through other means

• Big data often not accurate

Blood Test Analogy

• Taking blood for blood test- assume that that blood sample is representative 

  Hard to have blood test for whole country, easier if its just one person

Dimensions of public Opinion

• Direction

• Extremity

• Intensity

• Salience

• Stability

• Informational content

• Variation among groups

• Ambivalence

Direction

which side are ppl on 

ex: self-identified ideology

When it comes to politics, do you usually think of yourself as a liberal, a conservative, a moderate, or haven’t you thought much about this?”

Conservative ———— 32%

Moderate ————— 22%

Liberal ————— 21%

Don’t know ———— 25%

Extremity

 does the opinion fall toward the end of the range of possible opinions or towards the middle? 

Example: ideology

Extremely conservative ———— 3%

• Conservative ———— 17%

• Slightly conservative ———— 12%

• Moderate ———— 22%

• Slightly liberal ———— 9%

• Liberal ———— 10%

• Extremely liberal ———— 3%

Intensity

Personal importance

How much you personally care- how strongly you feel about it in relation to you 

Sample question: how important is that issue to you personally

Stability

Is overall opinion changing? if so in what direction? • If we an an individual the same question at two points in time, do we get the same answer?

Examples: • Opinions about gay marriage, Identification with a political party

Opinions on gay marriage have changed over time

a way to measure whether an opinion has changed over time is to do a panel study (long term) of individuals over time

Information content

How much people know the issues 

Variation among groups (cleavages) 

whether opinions of various societal groups (based on age, race, party etc) are similar or different

Ambivalence

opinion about an issue is characterized by conflicting underlying values

Nuances in beliefs due to complex topics in of itself, people don’t believe black and white 

Examples: attitudes toward death penalty and abortion

The questions are simple minded- yes or no, - wont be ambivalence

Do not overestimate the public’s ___ but not underestimate their __

knowledge, intelligence

Political knowledge measurement

People will offer an opinion even when they do not know the topic asked in a question

People believe things that are not true

Contested truth

things can be debatable

Belief System

one way to think about political beliefs

 a configuration of ideas and attitudes where the elements are bound together by some form of constraint or functional interdependence 

Static Constraint

in one single moment in time my opinions are correlated with each other and these are my beliefs that I’m set on

Dynamic constraint

if I change my mind abt an issue do I change my mind abt other issues (later?) 

 the change is causily related to the first thing that happened… slowly your opinions turn a certain belief and affect other opinions

Non attitudes thesis

 ppl don’t have meaningful beliefs even on issues they should have beliefs about- issues that have led to intense controversy among elites for a long time

Ideologues

• People who understand what goes with what

• Most people are not ideological 

Group interest 

 Converse category- do these set of politics help people like me or my social group?

Nature of the times

 Converse category capture vague reactions about whether times feel better or worse within that context of that time period

No issue content

Converse Category- Evaluate candidates based on personal traits or admit no political understanding

Converse’s Black and White Model

Small % of people with real, stable attitudes on an issue

Much larger % with random, “non-attitudes” on that issue

 most ppl have one or two issues they care abt only 

Ideology

“Ideology expresses what people take to be right and proper”

“Opinions and actions justified in ideological terms lay claim to what all members of a political community should value”

“Ideas that comprise ideology form organized structure”

“Implies that ideas are arranged in orderly, predictable patterns”

Converse says…

 people always changing their minds, instability in survey questions

period effects

Super deep polarized time. When converse was doing the study, they weren't ideological, but maybe they weren't, because the parties weren't that different,

durable political imprints

Why does change happen?

- generation turnover- but people are stuck in their ways and new gen has different opinion 

People holds onto real stable opinions and change in response to new opinions

Cohort replacement- people have real opinions and don’t change them

People construct responses on the fly- change as elite opinion change- hasty opinion

Cohort Effects

 durable political imprints created by the environment people encounter when they are young

9/11, covid

Age effects

- in contrast, people are changing as they age 

Measurement error

The way you frame questions will change people's answers 

Framing

• Issues and events can be viewed from multiple perspective 

• A frame highlights a particular set of considerations 

• Frames change the chance that people pull considerations into their sample when they answer a question → change the weights 

RAS Model

Active Updating

A big tent theory

Changing environments cause people to change their minds

changes persist because they shift baselines

Settled dispositions

A big tent theory

People are rooted in the past and once they pick a position they stick to it

• Changes revert because people return to baseline

Three stages of belief updating

Acquire- acquire new information

Evaluate- evaluate new information

Combine- combine new information with old information

Acquisition

Selective exposure and “echo chambers”

Limits to selective exposure: Trust vs bias Most consumption is mainstream (fox news conservatives, cnn democrats) Large % don’t care, Competing goals, Weak ties in social networks

Directionally motivated reasoning

People prefer identity‑consistent beliefs over accurate ones.

ex: Racial resentment predicted belief in the Obama “birther” myth.

Confirmation bias

the tendency to search for, interpret, favor and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs

Unbiased evaluation

an assessment conducted impartially and objectively, relying solely on relevant evidence and predefined criteria rather than personal opinions, prejudices, or favoritism.

you’ll change your mind (revise your beliefs) as new evidence comes out that is contrary or different to your prior beliefs

Politically motivated reasoning

when a factual position becomes a marker of group identity, individuals unconsciously adjust their assessments of information—expert testimony, data, arguments, even sensory impressions—to match their group’s position.

Partisan Cheerleading

 respondents give the answer that helps their side, even if they may not sincerely believe it

Nyhan's definition of misperceptions

Beliefs in claims that can be shown to be false

• Unsupported by "convincing and systematic evidence”

What is the problem with this definition?

ex: About 1% of federal employees are “actually working in the office” … not true. They found that about 6% of federal workers “report in person on a full time basis”

statistics can exaggerate or not tell the full story

• Does exaggerating count as a lie? 

  • It can be misperception when it misleads people to believe in false info. (so in the example above, although that dude was exaggerating abt federal workers, it led people to actually believe in it. Therefore, it was a lie)

Thermostatic Politics

 public often pushes back in the opposite direction when policy moves too far one way

you set it to something but never gets what you want- too cold or too hot

Public opinion- ppl responding to politics- public opinion will always go back and forth 

Strength: World is always changing

Weakness

• There is no sweetspot

Cops patrol

• We are like the cops

• We monitor politicians constantly and directly

• We read the news and see what they are doing 

Fire alarm oversight

• We wait for things to go wrong

• We don’t always have to read the news, just wait until we get the alarm

Theoretical medias action contrast

• Agenda setting

  • Network covers a topic more, holding constant the information conveyed about that topic

  • People already have fixed issues about something, but if you talk about it more, people think its more important

• Framing

  • The media providing interpretation by highlighting parts of an issue 

• Partisain coverage filtering

  • People of different parties literally hear different things on the same topic

Is the media to blame?

• Paying people to switch from fox to cnn did have some impacts, but not on vote choice

• Their issue positions did change though, just not the vote choice 

What kind of snapshot of public opinion do protests rallies or social media usually fail to provide? 

Representative picture- people tend to go are the ones who care, so not representative to look at them

Representative sample- sample that encompasses everyone 

Polls good for surface level reading and getting opinions of ppl who r not motivated to voting or go to rallies 

Salience

dimension of opinion asks how high an issue sits on the public agenda, often through the “most important problem question” importance on national level, not intensity (how important it is to you)

Selective exposure

 choosing environments that are more congenial to our prior views? - match our views 

‘considerations

 thoughts sampled from memory when someone answers a survey questions

 3 or 4 considerations abt a certain issue, people are ambivalent about any issue, because ppl are ambivalent abt details of issue, then they have multiple considerations, and those considerations are conflicting, different considerations come top of the head at different times 

Motivated Reasoning

 political commitments shape how people evaluate new evidence