Public Opinion/Polling Flashcards
The thermostat model of opinion-policy linkage – How does it work? How does is account for
typical patterns in opinion – policy linkage, and in what way is this mainly a negative feedback model?
consider the scenario of military spending in times of war and times of peace. In the thermostat model, as spending rises, a smaller percent of the public supports increased spending. Later, spending drops in response, but then there is a greater percent of the public that supports more military spending.
this is a negative feedback loop because the output (military spending) causes the input (public support) to be more or less.
Zaller’s idea of multiple considerations / perspectives. How does polarization relate here? How does Zaller portray the influence of partisan opinion leaders?
zaller thinks that partisan opinion leaders are cue-givers.
Polarization relates because most people now will not even entertain the other party’s opinion.
Zaller’s general argument can be summed up with the “Receive-Accept-Sample” model: your stated opinions reflect considerations that you have received (heard or read about), accepted (if they are consistent with prior beliefs), and sampled from (based on what’s salient at the time). This can be understood with a bucket analogy: Considerations go into your head as if your head were a bucket. When you express an opinion, you reach into the bucket for a sample of considerations; those near the top are more likely to be picked. You then take the average of these considerations, and that’s your opinion (at the moment).
Political heuristics / low-information rationality
when you jump to a conclusion that is improbable in order to not face the truth (Popeye must be strong by another way than by spinach because I ate spinach and I’m not strong)
Explain some of the qualities of aggregate public opinion versus individual-level opinion. What
does this distinction have to do with the Page and Shapiro essay we read?
aggregate political opinion tends to conform to polarization and etc (because of peer pressure and etc), while individual level opinion is more diverse, even within the same party.
Page and Shapiro argue in their essay that public opinion is stable over time, and only changes in the wake of recent events. They also put collective knowledge over individual knowledge.
How stable does party ID tend to be at the individual level? Based on the figures we looked at in
class, approximately what percentage of people shift their party ID from one election to
the next?
Party ID tends to be relatively stable at the individual level.
approximately 10% (?? DC W SHAW)
Distinguish between inside versus outside strategies for political action committees
The Solomon Asch experiment, and the Stanley Milgram experiment – What do they tell us
about conformity to authority? How does one of these relate to the passage of time
experiment we did in class?
These experiments tell us that people will conform to a group or an authoritative figure, even if the action they are doing goes against their personal conscious.
However, in a group, one lone dissenter can prompt others to dissent who may conform otherwise. But people don’t want to start the dissent.
the passage of time experiment showed conformity to one number in the group with only a few crazy outliers.
Sampling error in public opinion surveys (among other aspects of this, how do we calculate it?)
sampling error is calculated by taking the standard deviation of the population over the square root of the sample size.
