Public Opinion and Political Socialization

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Public Opinion and Political Socialization
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The Definition

• Bentham
• Utilitarianism
• Public opinion should lead to a government that
  rules in a way that brings the greatest happiness
  to the greatest number
• Difficulty in defining public opinion
• Does public really have an opinion?
• Are we actively interested?
• Politically relevant opinions held by ordinary
  citizens that they express openly

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Struggles with Public Opinion

• People have conflicting opinions
• Sometimes our opinions conflict with reality
• So do we have to be informed to have a reasonable
  opinion?

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How Do We Measure It?

• Polls are the most basic
• Use a sample to measure attitudes of a population
• Laws of probability
• Marbles
• Must have random selection based on probability
  samples
• Size of sample mattersnot size of population
• Sampling error
• 1,000 individuals in sample has sampling error of
  /- 3 percent
• Problems with polls
• Hard to have a population
• We dont all have phones, for example
• Nonopinions
• Social desirability bias
• Interviewer effects

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Political Socialization

• Process by which we acquire political opinions,
  beliefs, and values
• Occurs throughout life but most impacted by
  childhood learning
• Effect is cumulative
• Agents
• Family
• Schools
• Media
• Peers
• Leaders and Institutions
• Churches

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How We Think Politically

• Cultural
• Ideological
• Conservative, liberal, libertarian, populist
• Divided between economic and social policies
• Group
• Religion, class, region, race/ethnicity, gender,
  age
• But there are crosscutting cleavages at times
• Party identification

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But Does it Influence Policy?

• Some say that politicians are insensitive...others
  find the opposite effect
• Certain issues have their own effects
• i.e. Social Security
• Some issues are too divisive to be satisfied
• The question of whether government cares enough
  about public opinion is normative

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For Tuesday

• Patterson Chapter 7
• Connell What are the basics Connell says a
  website needs? His article was from 1998what is
  he missing that we know about in 2010?
• Maor What does the Maor article teach us about
  handling campaign speeches? What do you find
  interesting? Surprising?