Public Opinion Smpa 120

Front 1

Lippman's Definition of "The Public"

Back 1

Looks at it on 2 levels-

Actors: people who try to persuade others (elite/policymakers)

Spectators: audience for actors and follow what's going on with different degrees of interest and they're uniquely compelled to to react in their own ways.

Front 2

Zaller's Defintion of "The Public"

Back 2

3 levels-
1- Political Sophisticates: a lot like Lippmann's actors but go lower so they could just be people who give money to causes and things. Hardest to persuade because they're well informed and have their minds made up.

2- Mass Middle

3- People who can't name the Vice President

Front 3

4 Concepts of Public

Back 3

General Public
Voting Public
Attentive Public
Active Public

Front 4

General Public

Back 4

Populist/democratic ideal that you want to listen to the general public but if a lot of the genral population isn't interested in political affairs it's a little too amorphous and won't have an impact to talk to the general public

Front 5

Voting Public

Back 5

You can poll registered voters, likely voters (voted in past however many elections)

Front 6

Attentive Public

Back 6

Pay special attention to public affairs and talk about public issues. For Lippmann these are the spectators but for some issues this crowd can be small or it can be large.

Front 7

Active Public

Back 7

Zaller's "political sophisticates" who are the advocates, party activists, opinion makers, policymakers, etc

Front 8

Lippmann definition of "public opinion"

Back 8

Consists of pseudo environments where we have a picture in our heads of what we think is true and how we perceive various issues. Example- people on island didn't know their countries were enemies even after war started because newspapers didn't reach the island yet so their pseudoenvironment was that they were friends.

Front 9

Key's definition of "public opinion"

Back 9

Opinions held by private individuals that governments find it prudent to heed

Front 10

Zaller's definition of "public opinion"

Back 10

Opinions are a marriage of information and predisposition. Some things people believe or feel and others mixed in from news coverage

Front 11

Findings from a poll

Back 11

attempts to measure public opinion

Front 12

Glynn et. al. 5 Categories of Public Opinion

Back 12

1- Public opinion is an aggregation of individual opinions
2- Public opinion is a reflection of majority beliefs
3- Public opinion is found in the class of group interests. (interest groups determine what the debates are about)
4- Public opinion is the media's and elite's opinion
5- Public opinion is fiction

Front 13

Enduring Problems of Public Opinion

Back 13

Lack of Competence
Lack of Resources
Tyranny of Majority
Domination by Elites
Susceptibility to Persuasion

Front 14

Enduring Problems of Public Opinion- Lack of Competence

Back 14

Lippmann thing that the democratic theory asks too much of ordinary citizens. When you ask normal people if the govt should raise or lower capital gains taxes they might not know enough to answer intelligently.

Front 15

Enduring Problems of Public Opinion- Lack of Resources

Back 15

John Dewey says that if we had a better way of collecting and disseminating information then people would be better educated and thus more systematic and thoughtful in their decisions

Front 16

Enduring Problems of Public Opinion- Tyranny of majority

Back 16

Theory that majority opinion wins and maybe it's not the "right" opinion. Majority opinion during Jim Crow was to keep segregation.

Front 17

Enduring Problems of Public Opinion- Domination by Elites

Back 17

Elites have money to manipulate others into what they want. Says that too little power is retained by the public.

Front 18

Enduring Problems of Public Opinion- Susceptibility to Persuasion

Back 18

Can be manipulated if someone's beliefs aren't very strong about a topic

Front 19

Basic Info about Zaller's Theory

Back 19

Published in 1992 and is highly influential in the field. Unified, cohesive theory for a previously fragmented field.

Theory addresses attitdue changes and opinion formation, and also poll response formation.

Front 20

Zaller's 4 Main Ideas

Back 20

1- Citizens vary in attention and exposure to political information and argumentation

2- Knowledge is critical part of reaction formation

3- Citizens don't have fixed attitudes on every issue, rather they construct "opinion statements" on the fly

4- "Salience" is key to polling responses - to the construction of opinion statements

Front 21

Zaller's "Recipes" for Opinion

Back 21

Elite Discourse + Individual Attention to Discourse + Political Values and Predisposition = Public Opinion

also

Political Awareness + Political Knowledge = Public Opinion

Front 22

Elite Discourse

Back 22

Elites often distill information down (stereotypes save time). Information isn't neutral and the frames elites place it in can change perception completely.
Elites have to create a depiction of reality simple enough for ordinary people to grasp.

Front 23

Zaller on "Political Predisposition"

Back 23

Citizens aren't just passive receivers of information. Their interests, values and experiences impact their acceptance or rejection of information. Communications and information are filtered by political predispositions and this generates public opinion statements.

Front 24

Zaller: "What is an opinion?"

Back 24

Thinks that most people don't possess true attitudes on every issue about which a pollster might happen to ask about.

People fill their minds with partially consistent ideas, arguments and considerations.

When asked a survey question, they call to mind as many ideas as are immediately accessible. Whatever is at the tip of their tongue.

Front 25

Zaller's RAS Model

Back 25

Stands for Receive, Accept, Sample Model.

Receive new info (Reception axiom)
Decide whether to accept it (resistance axiom)
Sample from info that is salient at the moment to answer the question (accessibility and response axioms)

How he thinks that citizens learn about matters and how they convert that information into opinion.

Front 26

Zaller's 2 Issues with Public Opinion

Back 26

1- People don't have solid opinions
2- Polling is a very imperfect way to get at what opinions they do have

Front 27

Zaller's 3 Problems with Polling

Back 27

1- Response instability over time
2- Response effects.
If I ask you a lot of questions about terrorism and then about how safe you feel, your answer might be different than if i didn't say anything about terrorism before.

3- Question wording effects
The slightest change in wording can change what people say.

Front 28

2 Main Types of Methods of Studying Public Opinion

Back 28

Qualitative
Quantitative

Methods will be mixed (Do a survey and then do interviews on the participants after).

Front 29

Reliability

Back 29

Would it be repeatable? Would you get the same answer over and over?

Replicability and same results measure to same questions.

Front 30

Validity

Back 30

Are you measuring what you think you're measuring?

Front 31

Performing Content Analysis of Mass Media: Advantages, Disadvantages, Concerns

Back 31

Advantages: Rich texture data, unobstrusive and non-reactive

Disadvantages: Labor intensive and costly, manifest content not latent content. Manifest = what's on surface like how many times someone read an article but doesn't show if they understood it.

Concerns: Samples can easily be skewed to conservative or liberal if you aren't careful. Coding schemes have to be perfect. Inter coder reliability needs to be achieved.

Front 32

In Depth Interviews (IDIs)

Back 32

Most qualitative thing to use. Intensive, open ended conversation with an individual.

Issues: hard to get people to talk about sensitive topics 1 on 1 with a stranger.

Better option to interview important people because it's hard for all of their schedules to match for a focus group.

Front 33

Focus Groups

Back 33

carefully planned discussions designed to obtain perceptions of a defined area of interest in a permissive, non-threatening environment

Front 34

Types of Focus Groups

Back 34

In person: conference room, one way mirror, paid, typically 10-12 ppl. Moderator. Homogeneous group. Usually do 8 groups to achieve external validity.

Online: fairly recent. more efficient. More quantitative and easier to generalize results. Can be a one time session or use a bulletin board for people to post whenever during a week.

Front 35

Focus Group Advantages

Back 35

1- Supplementing or complementing other forms of research, either before so you know what to ask in the survey or after to further results.

A compromise of traditional research tools- combines qualitative IDI style with quantitative survey.

Helps understand opinion formation in groups. People change opinions based on peers.

Better approximation of how people form opinions because they aren't in isolation.

Front 36

Focus Group vs. 1 on 1 IDIs

Back 36

Focus groups show the social nature of opinion formation.

Focus group interviews are generally more interesting to the respodnent than individual interviews. As a result, answers are likely to bel onger and more revealing.

Because the questions of the moderator are directed at a group rather than an individual, there's usually more spontaneity in the answers.

Front 37

Disadvantages of Focus Groups

Back 37

Unnatural form of conversation among strangers.

Not representative/generalizable to the larger population. Sample = too small. Krueger says you can make "cautious generalizations"

Reactivity- interaction may skew conversation/actual opinion

Negative- bitch session

Subjective

Front 38

Characteristics of Effective Focus Groups

Back 38

Non-directness: conversation guided by the protocol but it's not dominated by the moderator. They're letting it go wherever it goes.

Non "yes or no" questions: more open ended

Permissiveness, non threatening environment

Depth: follow up questions

Personal context: make people comfortable. homogeneous groups.

Range: covering a range of topics in 2 hours

Specificity: not skimming along top of topics.

Front 39

Definition of nonattitudes

Back 39

Non-genuine opinions, about topics to remote from citizen's concerns, knowledge and/or interests. Political opinions that are fleeting, not well considered or lack meaning for the people who hold them.

Front 40

Importance of nonattitudes

Back 40

Misleading portrait of public opinion. Ties back to Lippmann saying that ordinary people don't know much about politics

Front 41

Evidence of Nonattitudes

Back 41

Public Affairs Act of 1975: asked people their opinion on this fake act and 30% of people said they knew it and had a favorable opinion of it even though it doesn't exist.

Front 42

Bishop (2005) on Nonattitudes

Back 42

Much of what passes as public opinion is an illusion because most respodnents have weak or no genuine opinions. Their responses are vulnerable to survey format, wording, order and response alternatives.

Front 43

6 Causes of Nonattitudes

Back 43

1- People don't want to appear uninformed

2- Preference for choosing a neutral response over admitting they don't know. "Somewhat agree" answers. Including a "no opinion" makes the survey better so there aren't false results.

3- Lack of Salience: one thing that matters is whether an issue matters at all (Zaller)

4- Surveys digging too deeply past people's level of information and/or interest

5- Weak attitudes/low relevance

6- Importance of different issues impacted by their attention in the news. (debt ceiling debate caused more opinions to suddenly rise)

Front 44

Who Nonattitudes Help and Hurt

Back 44

Help: can help those who want to show the public feels a certain way about "X" issue. if they don't care about results being falsely inflated/reliable.

Hurt: Can hurt if you want a reliable, valid measurement of opinion on a topic.

Health care reform is an example. Complex issue that you can change words of questions about and get different answers. People used this to skew results towards their side.

Front 45

2 Solutions for Minimizing the Problem of Nonattitudes

Back 45

Corrective Steps
Yankelovich Solution

Front 46

Corrective Steps

Back 46

Include multiple survey questions that assess the same issue in different ways. If they answer the same way in all of the differently worded options then they most likely aren't a non-attitude.

Include screener question "Do you have an opinion on...?"

Include language within the question itself such as "or have you not heard enough to have an opinion?"

Include neutral responses or "no opinions" Nonattitudes can tend to choose the neutral option to avoid offending anyone.

Front 47

Yankelovich Solution

Back 47

Assess the strength of conviction of the opinion

"Mushiness index" components:
1- How issue affects respondent personally
2- How well informed the respondent feels
3- How much the respondent discusses the issue with family and friends
4- The respondent's assessment of how likely it is his views will change

Front 48

2 Important Factors when Developing Surveys to Avoid Nonattitudes

Back 48

1- Is this issue relevant to the concerns and interests of citizens?

2- Is there enough knowledge on the issue?

Front 49

Domestic Issues vs Foreign Affairs in Public Opinion

Back 49

People generally know more about domestic issues than foreign issues

Front 50

Things not to do in a Survey

Back 50

Loaded words and inflammatory phrases

Double negatives

Order of wording with/in questions (people tend to pick first option in a list)

Ambiguity

Complexity

Context within the question

Argumentation in question

Social desirability (ppl saying they voted one way when really it was the other because the president ended up being bad or good)

Double barrel questions (2 part questions that force people to answer one way that they don't necessarily agree to all parts of)

Front 51

Visual (and Programming) Effects

Back 51

Programming instructions are used in online surveys and they won't let a person move on to the next question without answering the current. But a "no opinion" should be included to avoid skewing results for people who just want to move on.

Front 52

Good or Bad Question-
#1- Please rank the following national issues in terms of how important they are to you personally
• 1- Education
• 2- Immigration
• 3- Health Care
• 4- Environment

Back 52

Bad. Doesn't have economy as option even though it's a major issue to people and it already ranks responses in the eyes of some people. Shouldn't use numbers, use bullets or dashes.

Front 53

Good or Bad Question-
#2- Do you agree or disagree with: “The U.S. should not increase its reliance on nuclear power”
• Agree
• Disagree

Back 53

Bad because it's a loaded question (reliance on..) and there's no option for "don't know" or "no opinion"

Front 54

Good or Bad-
Do you bathe regularly or no?
• Yes
• No

Back 54

Bad because it's socially unacceptable for respondent to say no. Doesn't define "regularly"

Front 55

Good or Bad-
How closely do you follow news and current events?
• Very Closely
• Somewhat Closely
• Not too Closely
• Not Closely at All

Back 55

Bad because it's scaled weirdly. Hard for someone to decide how closely they follow news based on other people.

Front 56

Good or Bad-
#5- How many people are in your family?

Back 56

Bad because it doesn't talk about extended or immediate family. Differs from culture to culture.

Front 57

Good or Bad-
Which of the following is the best way to cut Medicare costs so that the program will remain solvent: (RANDOMIZE ORDER OF CHOICES)
• Decrease benefits to seniors
• Decrease payments to doctors and hospitals
• Cut fraud and waste

Back 57

Bad because it assumes people want to cut Medicare and that they want it to remain solvent.

Front 58

Good or Bad-
What is your favorite color?
• Blue
• Red
• Green
• Yellow

Back 58

Bad, doesn't have all color options

Front 59

8- Do you favor or oppose the Feds decision to employ quantitative easing in reaction to the economic situation?
• Favor
• Oppose
• Don’t know/Refused

Back 59

Bad because it has confusing language. very technical terms.

Front 60

9- do you agree that Ben Bernanke should be tried on treason?
Yes
No
Don't know/refused

Back 60

Bad because a lot of people don't know who he is without explanation so they would assume he did something bad and maybe just say yes.

Front 61

Question Ordering and Context

Back 61

Go from General to Specific Questions

Context can also mean societal. Asher example about gay rights.
Order of choices within a question influence outcome.

Try not to have a really long survey

Front 62

File Drawer Model

Back 62

says that when asked a question about an issue, the respondent will go into their "file drawer" of opinions and retrieve their usual response.

Zaller rejects this model.

Front 63

Why does Zaller reject File Drawer?

Back 63

Problems with File Drawer:
Assumes level of knowledge and engagement that most individuals do not have

Response instability over time

Response effects (question order)

Question wording effects

Front 64

Zaller's Model: 2 phenomena

Back 64

1- How citizens learn about matters that are for the most part beyond our direct experience

2- How citizens convert this info into opinions

Front 65

Zaller's Model: Definition of Political Predispositions

Back 65

stable, individual level traits that may affect individuals' reaction of political communication

Front 66

Zaller's Model: Definition of Considerations

Back 66

any reason that might induce an individual to decide a political issue one way or the other. They are a combination of cognition and affect (belief). Carried in elite discourse

Front 67

Zaller's Model: 2 Types of Political Message

Back 67

1- Persuasive: arguments or images providing a reason for taking a position of point of view. If accepted they become considerations.

2- Cueing: contextual info about the ideological or partisan implications of a persuasive message. Enables citizens to perceive the relationship between the persuasive message they receive and their political predispositions.

Front 68

Zaller's 4 Axioms

Back 68

Reception Axiom
Resistance Axiom
Accessibility Axiom
Response Axiom

Front 69

Reception Axiom

Back 69

The greater a person's level of cognitive engagement with an issue, the more likely he or she is to be exposed to and comprehend political messages concerning the issue.

Front 70

Resistance Axiom

Back 70

People tend to resist arguments that are inconsistent with their political predispositions but they do so only to the extent that they possess the contextual info necessary to perceive the relationship between the message and their predispositions

Front 71

Accessibility Axiom

Back 71

The more recently a consideration has been called to mind or thought about the less time it takes to retrieve that consideration or related considerations from memory and bring them to the top of the head for use.

Front 72

Response Axiom

Back 72

Individuals answer survey questions by averaging across the considerations that are immediately salient or accessible to them.

Front 73

Elite Communication on Mass Attitudes: Mainstream Effects

Back 73

When political elites agree on an issue, people receive one message and tend to agree with this position. Especially those with greater awareness.

Example: Late summer 1971, national inflation was 7%. Nixon gives speech annoucing surprise decision to impose wage and price controls on economy and his support among Republican activists goes from 37% to 82%.

Support overall went up 10%. Dems already favored this

Front 74

Elite Communication on Mass Attitudes: Polarization Effects

Back 74

When political elites disagree on an issue, public opinion tends to be polarized. People with greater awareness will have attitudes coinciding with existing predispositions and follow the elites along their party line

Examples: End of Vietnam war, Persian Gulf War, Iraq War

Front 75

What 4 factors influence/correlate with knowledge?

Back 75

1- Demographics
Education- single best predictor of knowledge. Greater than 6 in 10 college grads in the high knowledge groups.

2- Attention and interest
Positive correlation between how much citizens know and how avidly they follow news.

3- By media source
Regular audiences of Daily Show, Colbert, NPR, O Reilly, Rush are all in higher knowledge groups than normal people.

4- Engagement
90% of top third are registered to vote, compared to 77% of medium knowledge group and 53% low knowledge group.

Front 76

Pew Methodology?

Back 76

Open ended questions harder to answer than closed/multiple choice or true/false (recall vs recognition)

Front 77

Does Knowledge Matter? 2 views

Back 77

View 1: Most citizens lack sufficient knowledge to make meaningful choices about policy that represent their true interests

2- Others argue that using info shortcuts, citizens can approximate the requisite levels of knowledge

Front 78

Heuristics

Back 78

comes from Greek meaning "to discover" and means a simple, fast method, short cuts or procedures that help someone make a decision/opinion about a candidate or issue.

Examples: party id, ideology, endorsement, viability, candidate appearance

Front 79

How can an uninformed electorate function efficiently?

Back 79

Collective opinion model (heuristics on a macro scale)

Most people follow what their party thinks. If it's scattered then this doesn't apply

Front 80

Lau and Redlawsk: Experiment Setup

Back 80

Electronic Info Board. Columns of boxes scroll down computer screen and disappear, replaced by others at top of the screen. Interrupted by campaign ads. Some types of info appear more than others.

L&R observe info gathering of participants and their vote choices at the end in mock election.

Front 81

Lau and Redlawsk: Findings

Back 81

Voters use heuristics

Heuristics are more helpful to political experts than to novices.

There are even some examples where experts can be led astray. (Unstereotypic candidates)

In this and other work, L&R find that voters get superior guidance from simple heuristics than from attempts to account for lots of info. Impossible to absorb everything so it makes more sense to just use heuristics.

Front 82

Ideology

Back 82

Overarching set of beliefs regarding the proper role of govt in society, in regulating the economy, and in individuals' lives. Typically described as left to right in US.

Front 83

Kinder- "Diversity and Complexity in Public Opinion"

Back 83

Finds that a great majority of people do not adhere to a set of beliefs/ideology and have a clear grasp of what ideology is

Front 84

Converse Results

Back 84

Methodology: assessment of open ended responses to national surveys

2.5% active use of ideological terms

10% near ideologues

88% everyone else ideological innocent

Front 85

Converse versus Zaller

Back 85

Zaller says 75% are in mass middle, only 2-5% are political sophisticates, other 25% are clueless

Converse says 2.5%, 10%, 88% breakdown

Front 86

Converse Definition of Ideology and Constraints

Back 86

A "belief system" is a collection of ideas which are connected by function. "Constraint" is the degree to which a particular belief is predictive of another belief.

Front 87

Counter claims to Converse

Back 87

Nie, Verba and Petrocik- found increase in ideology in 1964 and declined in 1976. Attributed change to a more ideologically polaried environment (Vietnam and Civil Rights)

Methodological Problems

Front 88

Challenges to Converse- Conover and Feldman

Back 88

Conover and Feldman (1981) found relationship between identity as liberal or conservative and people's issue positions.

3 in 10 Americans never think of themselves as liberal or conservative.

39% identify as "moderate, middle of the road"

Significant but low correlations between label and opinions on issues

1/3 who do characterize themselves in ideological terms do so in any depth or substance

Front 89

Lane- Methodology

Back 89

Interviewed 15 working class men in one town in Long Island.

Advantage: In depth interviews

Disadvantage: subjective judgment is bound to get into it. Not easily replicable, therefore not reliable.

Front 90

Lane vs Converse

Back 90

Two feuded constantly over whose study was better.

Had different definitions of ideology and different methodologies

Front 91

Kinder's Conclusions

Back 91

Most Americans are ideological innocents- no sophisticated ideological framework.

They do have political opinions though. Some true opinion, some nonattitudes.

Fragmented, narrow, and diverse

Front 92

5 Ultimate Sources of Political Beliefs

Back 92

1- Personality
2- Self interest
3- Group identification
4- Values
5- Inferences from history

Front 93

Lane on Conceptualization of Political Discourse

Back 93

Principles and Pragmatism
Morselizing and Contexutalizing
Contexutalizing and Ideologizing
Rigidity and Compromise
Differentiation

Front 94

Source of American Political Values/Ethos

Back 94

Political Socialization: societal norms, education, the media, political rhetoric

Front 95

American Political Values (7)

Back 95

Egalitarianism/Equality
Individualism
Freedom
Democracy
Capitalism
Moral Traditionalism
Limited Govt