Individual Opinions

1
Individual Opinions

• GOVT311 Lecture 10

2
Political Knowledge

• Some people are political junkies
• Most people have little knowledge about
  government.
• Almost everyone knows the name of the president
• About half know the name of their congressperson
• About 2 in 10 know the name of the Chief Justice
• When an issue raises in importance, people learn
• Knowledgeable people tend more liberal on social
  issues and more conservative on economic issues
  (Erikson and Tedin p. 65)

3
How does Knowledge Opinion?

• Economic way of viewing politics For the Median
  Voter Theorem (Downs) to work, people must be
  able to evaluate the costs and benefits of policy
  choices
• Psychology views
• On-line perspective people keep a running tally
  in their heads (campaigns)
• Memory based people store considerations and
  use these to make judgments on issues
  (low-information). This implies that
  accessibility of considerations is important.

4
Response stability

• In panel studies, when asked the same question,
  people will sometimes respond differently,
  especially on issues that are not particularly
  salient (E T p.67)
• Some interesting observations
• When intermediate answers are allowed, there is
  more evidence of response stability (such as
  abortion questions, p.68)
• The amount of time between panels does not seem
  to make a difference on the magnitude of response
  stability

5
Explaining Response Instability

• Non-attitudes people without true attitudes will
  provide a response even if they dont have one.
  These people will exhibit response instability
  (problem political knowledge is not correlated
  with response stability)
• Measurement Error surveys themselves are prone
  to error that might cause response instability
  (such as framing and question wording)
• Response Probability people have propensities to
  answer a question in a certain direction, these
  probabilities may change over time, such as with
  national mood swings such as Sept. 11 (memory
  based)

6
Ideology

• Ideology opinions that are connected by a
  logical consistency of core political values. (E
  T p. 72).
• Ideology can be sociotropic people who are
  rich may be liberal, even though liberal policies
  may hurt their pocketbook.
• Ideologue a person that places politics in the
  context of ideology.
• Ideology may change over time
• Ideology may be dependent on the issues of the
  day

7
Ideological Consistency(E T p.76-7)

• Most people are ideologically consistent, though
  there are a number of people who are not.
• Some issues break across ideology, such as
  abortion
• People like more spending they like both guns
  and butter
• People with more knowledge do tend to be more
  ideologically consistent
• People with more knowledge are more ideological
  (p.83)

8
Knowledge and Partisanship

• People generally figure out where the two parties
  are ideologically (ET p.85).
• Conservatives tend to align with the Republicans
  and Liberals with the Democrats (p.87)
• Persons with most knowledge are the strongest
  partisans (p.88)