Political Science: Socialization, Public Opinion, and Ideological Frameworks
Course Updates and Institutional Clarification
Dog-Aided Deletion: Two full lectures were recently lost after a dog jumped on the speaker's bed and erased everything on the Audacity software before it was saved. This has lead to some rescheduling and re-recording of material.
Testing Information: The upcoming test is scheduled for the week of April 6th. The date was pushed back to ensure students had at least two full weeks of online instruction to adjust to the new format, settle into schedules, and move past any initial panic.
Posting Schedule:
Pro-log to Articles of Confederation: This transition lecture (covering the era between the Mayflower Compact/Declaration of Independence and the Articles) is being posted for both Tuesday/Thursday and Monday/Wednesday/Friday schedules. This bridge exists to ensure all students are at the same point logically, especially for those who missed the transition in-class. This will be placed in the March 23rd week.
Ideology and Socialization Lecture: This content is being posted for the week of March 30th to April 3rd.
Test Review: Correct answers for Test 1 (multiple choice) will be posted to the Course Announcements soon. Students are encouraged to use the discussion board to indicate if they prefer a written answer key or a separate verbal/audio review of the questions line-by-line.
The Socialization Process: Values, Beliefs, and Opinions
Definition of Socialization: Socialization is a continuous process occurring every single day of a person's existence where they learn, adapt, adjust, and gather information to form their values and beliefs. There is evidence that socialization begins even in the womb, as infants can recognize their parents' voices before birth.
Core Components:
Values: These are qualities or concepts that individuals hold to be good and desirable. Named examples include truth, justice, the American way, and apple pie.
Beliefs: These are concepts that individuals hold to be true at a fundamental level, such as the belief in a higher power.
The Onion Metaphor: Using a metaphor similar to the character Shrek, humans are described as having layers like an onion:
Internal Core (Inner Layer): Represents Beliefs. These are central to existence and rarely change. Changing them requires significant effort or trauma.
Middle Layers (White Part): Represents Values. These are deeply held and difficult to change, but they are slightly more fluid than core beliefs.
Outer Layer (Paper Skin): Represents Opinions. These are highly fluid and change readily. In Political Science, opinions are often excluded from the core definition of socialization because they are unstable.
Fluidity of Opinions: Public opinion changes often and can be influenced by small experiences. For instance, using the Shazam app to identify a song in a movie can lead someone to buy an album and adopt an entirely new genre of music. Opinions cover topics like fashion, movies, and music.
Agents of Socialization
Definition: Agents of socialization are the people and entities that assist an individual in gaining their values and beliefs.
Primary Agents:
Parents: Despite student resistance to the idea, parents are the number one agent of socialization. Children tend to absorb the values and beliefs of their parents through observation and listening.
Anecdote on Parent Mimicry: A personal story illustrates how the speaker, in high school, wrote a list of things her mother did as a parent that she vowed never to repeat (including disgusting habits like using spit on a thumb to clean a child's face). Years later, the mother returned the list with dates next to each item, marking when she had witnessed the speaker doing exactly what she had vowed never to do.
Secondary Agents: Civil leaders, teachers, Boy Scout leaders, coaches, religious leaders, and youth group leaders.
Role of Peers: While students often believe they side with friends over parents, research shows peers primarily influence opinions (music, fashion, clubs). In core values and beliefs (such as religion), individuals almost always side with their parents. A Christian friend is unlikely to cause a Muslim friend to convert purely through peer association.
Predictive Power of Children: Political surveys are notoriously inaccurate, but mock elections held in kindergartens are highly predictive of presidential outcomes. This is because young children haven't yet learned to lie about their political leanings or that Santa isn't real; they simply repeat their parents' at-home conversations, proving they have absorbed those values even when parents claim to be "Independent" or "undecided."
Political Culture and Survey Validity
Political Culture: This is the sum of values and beliefs of a group of people (e.g., Americans, Texans, Millennials) regarding politics and government.
Commercial and Political Utility: Companies and politicians study culture because if they know what people value and desire, they can offer it in exchange for money (products) or power (votes).
Survey Data Caveat: There is an old saying: "There are lies, damn lies, and statistics." Statistics can be highly misleading, and survey data validity depends on several factors.
Random Sampling: In a high-quality survey, every person in the population being represented (e.g., all females, all Americans) must be equally likely and capable of being selected. If it is about America, every American must have an equal chance of being chosen.
Self-Selection Bias: Media outlets (e.g., CNN, Fox News, MSNBC) often ask viewers to visit their Facebook or Instagram pages to take a survey. This results in a self-selection bias where only people who already watch those programs participate. This reinforces existing views and makes it appear as if of the general population supports a view, when it is actually just of their specific demographic.
Behavioral Biases in Survey Research
Leading Questions: These are debate tools used in military, law, and politics to guide a participant toward a desired answer regardless of their feelings. A person "leading the witness" makes the respondent agree with them.
Example: A political survey asked: "Do you think that a mother should be allowed to kill her own children?" This is a leading question regarding pro-life/pro-choice issues. Regardless of their stance on abortion, most people will answer "No," skewing statistics to support a pro-life agenda.
Salience vs. Intensity:
Salience: Knowledge-based awareness. Using the chemistry metaphor of a saline solution, a brain is "salient" when it is full to capacity with information on a topic. High salience leads to more accurate survey results (e.g., people are currently highly salient regarding the Coronavirus).
Intensity: Depth of feeling. One can be aware of an issue (salient) without caring about it (intense). High intensity usually leads to more research and better survey data.
Warning: People can be very intense about issues they are not salient about, which results in "stupidity" and taking media headlines at face value without original research.
The Halo Effect: The tendency of respondents to give socially acceptable answers to avoid looking bad (e.g., no one admits to being a racist or misogynist). Respondents often "fluff" their answers on the margins.
Education Fluffing: Surveys found that people who hadn't finished college would often check the "College Graduate" box rather than looking like they only had a high school diploma. This skewed data to show a more educated population than existed. Research now includes a "Some College" box to accommodate this.
The "High Liking" Bias: Men have a tendency to lie significantly more on surveys when the interviewer is a young, physically attractive female. They give positive responses to products or ideas to seek the interviewer's approval.
Practical Application: In marketing (e.g., for Nike), hiring supermodels to conduct surveys will result in "crappy data" and skewed positive responses, leading to product failure on shelves because the data was not representative of genuine interest.
Generational and Life Cycle Effects
Generational Effect: Each generation faces unique experiences during childhood that shape values throughout their entire life.
Baby Boomers: Experienced social revolutions and protests; felt a lifelong need to "give back" and find a bigger purpose. First generation where women entered the workforce in high percentages.
Generation X: The "Latchkey Kid" generation with parents out "finding themselves." Identified by Microwave ovens, empty houses, and keys on strings around their necks. Became the "Me Generation" focused on individual achievement, later becoming "Helicopter Parents."
Millennials: The product of Gen X helicopter parenting.
Life Cycle Effect: Values and beliefs change based on the stage of life (single, married, child-rearing), regardless of age.
Parenthood Anecdote: Becoming a parent changed the speaker's values. Before child-rearing, the value was "forgive and forget" regarding punishments (e.g., MIPs or family holidays). After having a child (Aiden), the speaker encountered a situation with an old man named Fred who was a four-time convicted child molester out for cancer treatments.
Value Shift: Realizing the threat Fred posed to her child immediately changed her value of "forgiveness" to a desire for "permanent records" (symbolically, a tattoo on his forehead). The shift was driven by the cycle of being responsible for a helpless dependent, a change that wouldn't have occurred without entering that life stage.
Understanding Cleavages
Cleavages: These are differences within a population.
Types of Cleavages:
Reinforcing Cleavages: Differences that reinforce each other and make groups more distinct (e.g., if you know a person's ethnicity, you automatically know their height, religion, and wealth). This separates society fundamentally.
Cross-Cutting Cleavages: Differences that overlap, making it difficult to predict one characteristic based on another (e.g., Hispanics who are both rich and poor; tall and short). America has more cross-cutting cleavages; you cannot tell much about a person just by looking at them.
Gender Gap on Use of Force: In public opinion, there are rarely differences between men and women on gender issues like abortion or birth control. However, women are consistently less likely to support the Use of Force (military conflict, strict three-strikes-out prison policies). This explains why men lean Republican and women lean Democrat.
Elites vs. Non-Elites in Public Opinion
Timing Difference: There are no fundamental differences between elites and non-elites in their interest/saturation curves (e.g., the Ice Bucket Challenge or the Coronavirus interest). The only difference is timing; elites lead non-elites by about months, though the Internet is shortening this lag.
Information Sources:
Non-Elites: Primarily get information from television news (CNN, Fox, MSNBC). TV news often provides only of meat/content and recycles it for . This is described as "Idiocracy-like."
Elites: Get information from original sources (bills, speeches) and data-based newspapers (Financial Times, Wall Street Journal). Elites listen to a minimum of three disparate (unlike) sources to find the truth between extremes. They look for data rather than emotion-based sound bites.
Media Manipulation: Media uses adjectives and specific photography (filters, bad angles, double chins) to control the viewer's visceral response. Elites recognize these objective-driven choices and dig deeper.
Political Ideology and Rational Choice Theory
Ideology: A consistent set of values and beliefs about government, politics, and the structure of government.
Rational Choice Theory: People are rational actors who:
Order their preferences: Like a soda machine, people rank their choices (e.g., Diet Coke at , Dr. Pepper at , Orange Fanta at ).
Act on those preferences: It is irrational to want Diet Coke but press the button for Orange Fanta.
Note on Radical Actions: Even someone like Hitler is considered a "rational actor" within this theory because he ordered his preferences (genocide) and acted upon them. Rationality in this sense describes the mechanism of choice, not the moral quality of the choice.
Tocqueville’s Hierarchy: Based on Alexis de Tocqueville, people prioritize Freedom, Order, and Equality.
Comparative Ideologies based on Preferences
Libertarians:
Preference: Freedom > (Order/Equality).
Stances: Pro-legalization of marijuana/crack, against school uniforms, against gun control (bazookas/F-16s are acceptable), and pro-choice.
Fascists:
Preference: Order > (Equality/Freedom).
Stances: Pro-uniforms, pro-gun control (only government should have arms), and against internet privacy (total state regulation).
Liberals (Democratic Association):
Preference: Equality > Freedom > Order.
Stances: Support same-sex marriage (equality issue). Support gun control as an equality issue (allowing kids in high-crime neighborhoods to focus on education rather than safety). May support school uniforms to promote equality.
Conservatives (Republican Association):
Preference: Order > Freedom > Equality.
Stances: Divided between Economic Conservatives (order through taxes/drug regulation) and Religious Conservatives (moral order). Against gun control to maintain the order of their homes and defense against government-created disorder.
Communism and Socialism:
Communism: Order > Equality > Freedom. Total government control of production and jobs.
Socialism: Equality > Order > Freedom. Partial government control/mixed ownership.
Myth Debunking: Having "social policy" (helping people) does not make a country socialist. Scandinavian countries (Norway, Sweden, Finland) tried socialism in the , it failed, and they moved toward privatization. They have small, ethnically homogeneous populations ( same ethnicity), making them incomparable to the American population of .
Political Capital: Parties only spend "political capital" (money/time) on their number one preference. Democrats prioritize same-sex marriage (Equality) over marijuana (Freedom), while Republicans avoid marijuana stances to prevent alienating either their economic or religious bases.