POLI 311: 1- Public Opinion and Ideology

attitude

• Evaluative judgement of some concept and can vary in terms of:

  • Direction 

  • Intensity

  • Consistency over time

  • The knowledge of beliefs supporting it or otherwise linked to it 

Opinion

• Opinions are an expressed version of an attitude

Opinions vs Attitudes

• Opinions are an expressed version of an attitude

• Opinions are measurable, attitudes are not

Opinions are measurable because they are verbalized, specific expressions, while attitudes are unmeasurable because they are deep-seated, internal psychological states.

Belief system and constraint

• A group of ideas and attitudes in which the elements are bound together by a form of constraint of functional interdependence (what goes with what)

• Constraint comes in different forms: 

  • Logical - ex: if we need to raise taxes, need to redistribute wealth

  • Social - ex: going along with the vision of a certain social group/ “I identify as working class so I will abide by the ideologies of the working class”

  • Psychological 

• Attitudes and beliefs are interdependent

Black and White Model

Converse argued that most ordinary citizens do not think in terms of a coherent liberal-conservative ideological continuum.

Nonattitudes

A large portion of the public who do not have true underlying attitudes or ideological anchors on many political issues. When asked survey questions, their responses vary unpredictably over time—essentially acting as if they are flipping a coin or giving random/spontaneous answers

Critical perspectives

Basic idea is that people do have constrained belief systems, but that they do not necessarily overlap with Converse’s liberal-conservative dimension. However, Converse argues that this is untrue as he has found that the mass public tend to have more nonattitudes

Attitudinal Ambivalence

People might appear to generate their issues not at random but because they have a lot of different considerations floating around in their minds, and they are not necessarily constrained or even in agreement with one another

Issue publics

People DO care deeply about some issues even though its not enough to make them highly informed. This simplifies decision-making in the following ways:

1. It’s easier to obtain information on a limited selection of issues

2. All people need to do is pick a candidate according to the issue they care about.

3. People are more likely to WANT to obtain information about an issue they care about.

If individuals are “ideologically innocent” and lack meaningful policy attitudes, can they be good democrats and, can a democratic system thrive?

According to the issue public idea we discussed earlier, people might care very deeply about a few issues even if they don’t know a whole lot else about politics

 Because of this heightened interest, they will…

 … be motivated to learn more about those issues

 … develop a relatively sophisticated understanding of the policy choices

in that domain

 … weight their political choices especially heavily on what candidates say

about those issues

Heuristic

The issue public idea is a subset of a broader phenomenon: heuristics

 A heuristic is an information shortcut that people use to make decisions as if they were fully informed

Ideology, identities and policy can serve as heuristics

Exogenously-imposed constraint

Simplicity is also be imposed by the political system, as people in a democratic system are usually only asked to make simple choices.

As a result, somebody whose belief system is characterized unconstrained and mostly non-attitudes, or somebody who is highly ambivalent, can appear rock-solid consistent because the political system simplifies the issue for them

How does the political system simplify political choice?

 Political elites provide opinion leadership designed to influence/capture the issue public around a given concern

 Values often framed as “right” versus “wrong”, with little gray areas

 Public choices are typically framed as “we” (not “I”) to encourage people to think sociotropically rather than about their own

private interests

 Set of alternatives (“choice set”) is organized well in advance, limited in number, disjunctive, and exhaustive

Can collectives be rational?

A random collection of “non-attitudes” provides no clear

public opinion signal (all “noise”)

 But when opinion leaders provide cues…

 …the issue public concerned over that policy will follow

 Adding competing opinion leaders (and Issue Publics) leads

to all kinds of interesting hypotheses regarding polarization

Problem with heuristics

• People mislabel political “objects”, e.g. having the wrong belief about what a politician has said or done.

• People also misattribute judgments about cause and effect, which matters if their primary heuristic for voting is past performance (or “how well has the incumbent performed?”) eg. a large wave of shark attacks cost Woodrow WIlson NJ in the 1916 U.S. presidential election

• Worldview polarization - when different faces of a heuristic become strongly associated with whole sets of beliefs and behaviors. it can split people and groups into different frameworks of beliefs

Selective perception

When heuristics cause bias by tainting information coming into peoples’ minds

Aggregation of individual-level ambivalence/non-attitudes can produce a “sensible” rational-looking public

Aggregation of individual-level ambivalence/non-attitudes can often produce a “sensible” rational-looking public.

• But this is no guarantee. The “effect” of aggregation depends on:

  • The nature and distribution of opinion leadership in the electorate

  • The extent to which opinion leaders activate meaningful “issue publics”, “group cues”, and “heuristics” at the mass level

  • The degree to which they are associated with worldview polarization and selective perception