Exam 2 Flashcards
Anthony Downs (Individual lvl calculations)
PB - C > 0
- P: Pivotality
- B: Benefits
- C: CostsCONCLUSION: Rational People don’t vote
Riker and Ordershook
PB - C+D > 0
- P: Pivotality
- B: Benefits
- C: Costs
- D: Civic Duty - Willingness to PayRational: D>C = vote
Irrational: D
Public Opinion
attitudes held by the citizens about political issues, events, leaders, and institutions
Attitudes
Psychological constructs that involves a response to a stimulus in an individuals enviroment
What are the 3 types of Attitudes?
- Affect
- Evaluation
- Cognition
Affect - Describes an emotional reaction to a stimulus
- Likes and Dislikes
- Happiness and Sadness
- Joy and anger
- Measure using scale or words
Evaluation - assessment about the desirability about an object
1) (Un)Desirability
a) (In)Equity
b) (Un)Fair
c) (In)Justice
2) Effectiveness
a) (In)Competence
b) (Un)Responsive
3) Trends
a) Better or Worse
Cognition - Knowlege
- Awareness about an object
- Lvl of knowlege about an object (Quantity)
- Degree of knowledge about an object (Quality)
Importance:
- Difference between what people know and what they think they know
- Cognition bias/Perceptual Screening
Political Socialization
The process of developing political attitudes
Development occurs through four venues:
1) Family
2) Schools/Educaiton
3) Social circles
4) Political Environment
What are the two different models of Political Socialization?
1) Agent-based model
- Family (greatest importance)
- Schools/Education
- Social circles
- Political Environment (Least importance)
2) Life Cycle model
- Early Childhood (0-7)
- Late childhood (7-13)
- Teenage/Adulthood (13-25)
- Adulthood (25+)
What survey instruments are used to sample Public Opinion?
The Afrobaromater (Surveys)
ANES (American National Election Studies)
Pew (Pew Research Center)
Survey sample
A smaller segment of the population used to determine aggregate opinion
(Relates to Probability sample, Sample Size, Margin of Error
Probillity sample
everyone has equal chance
- probability = ideal
- non-probability = realistic
Sample Size
get a fraction to represent total
Margin of Error
degree of uncertainty
What are the Measurements of Public Opinion?
- Nominal level:
ex. Sex (Female or Male), Religion (Baptist, Catholic, Atheist) - Ordinal level:
ex. Agreement (strongly agree, agree, neither, disagree, strongly disagree), Educaiton (High school diploma, some college) - Interval level
ex. Ideology (1-100; 1 = very liberal, 100 = very conservative), Hours of Media viewership
Reliablitlity
asking a question now and again in future
Validility
is the question getting the result you wanted
face - looking at wording of question
construct - looking at interpretation of question
Precision
using appropriate lvl of measurement
-scale, choices, scale size: interval ordinal, nominal
What are the forms of Traditional Media?
- Broadcast media - radio, tv: news channel, 24hr news channel
- Print media - newspaper - declining
- Alternative media - late night show, satire
What are the 4 types of Online Media?
- News aggregators - links to other websites; not really self written
- Niche journalism - written for a particular ideological party
- Citizen journalism - Citizens posting their opinion and analyses
- Social Media - Political figure sending out information and opinion
What are the effects of the media?
- Agenda setting (McCombs and Shaw 1974)
+News make people aware of issues (what to think about) - Framing (Nelson, Clawson, and Oxley 1997)
+(How to think about it) Implications - Social media and participation (Zuniga, Jung, and Valenzuela 2012)
+‘Reliance of social media as a source of news’
*(+)reliance = (+) trust (+)participation
*(-)reliance = (-) trust (-)participation
What is Protest and why protest?
it is an assembly of crowds to indirectly confront government officials and institutions
- Grievances
- Political opportunity
- Collective identity
Groups choose to protest because they:
- have preferences
- government does not support preferences
- group preferences are either provided to some but not others or not given to any one
examples: Civil Rights movement, Gay Rights movement, Vietnam War protests
Protest occurs because of political opportunity structures:
- Availability of mayor-council governments vs manager-council governments.
- “Model Cities” funding and responsiveness to need.
- Non-partisan elections
- Or anything regarding the design of an institution that promotes the attainment of individual goals
Protest occurs because of a movement towards a collective identity:
- Preferences are unrealized at an individual level
ex. “I wish that I had X.” - Protest occurs when preferences shift away from the individual level to the group level
ex. “I wish that WE had X.” - Or protest occurs because the potential success of an individual does not terminate on that individual, but instead are magnified by a whole.
Voting
- Method of selecting individuals to serve as members of government
- Representative form of democracy
- Opposite of direct democracy - individuals have no say in daily policy making
- Individuals are agents who select representatives to engage in the management of the country
What are the 2 steps in the process to vote?
1) Registering to vote \+eligibility \+documentation 2) Voting \+Prior on election day \+On election day
Voter turnout:
Voting age populating (VAP)
VAP = # voters / # citizens (18+)
Voting eligible populating (VEP)
VEP = # voters / # citizens (18+, non-felon, sufficient)
Factors that affect C and D in the formulas:
- Demographics
- Political environment - Economics (Nation or individual), war (support?), etc. - vote when you want to hold people accountable
- Mobilization - tell people to vote, canvasing (personal, effective), mail (least effective), telephone (no effect); Green and Gerber (2004)
- Electoral competition - More candidates running = more people vote
- Institutional constraints - laws in place ex. Imprisoned felons can’t vote (48 states), felons on parole can’t vote (36 states), felons can’t vote. period. (11 states)
Who do people vote for?
- Retrospective voting - assess the past record of candidate
+assess past performance - past experience, past - Prospective voting - predicting future performance
- Incumbents - incumbency - looking at current office holder (Advantage! More likely to get re-elected)
