What is public opinion?

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What Is Public Opinion?

• Public opinion is the aggregate of individual
  attitudes or beliefs about certain issues or
  officials.
• Polls are methods for measuring public opinion.
• They are considered the most reliable indicator
  of what the public is thinking.

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Does Public Opinion Matter?

• Presidents are often the subject of public
  opinion polls.
• Presidents with higher degrees of public support
  as measured by public opinion polls are able to
  use that support to leverage Congress to act in
  support of their agendas.
• Example President George W. Bush
• Post 9-11 approval rating high Passage of USA
  PATRIOT ACT
• Post Katrina approval rating low Defeat of
  Immigration Reform Act
• Approval rating
• Job performance evaluation for the president,
  Congress, or other public official or institution
  that is generated by public opinion polls and
  typically reported as a percentage

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What Factors Are Most Commonly Measured with
Public Opinion Polls?

• Efficacy
• The extent to which people believe their actions
  affect the course of government
• Political Trust
• The extent to which people believe the government
  acts in their best interests
• attributes

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Scientific Polls and Survey Research

• Method of polling that provides a fairly precise
  reading of public opinion by using random
  sampling.
• Historically, newspapers used unscientific straw
  polls
• Modern Random Sample Polls
• Method of selection that gives everyone who might
  be selected to participate in a poll an equal
  chance to be included.
• Most popular is the Gallup Poll

In the 1930s George Gallup developed a
scientific approach to polling,
greatly increasing its accuracy and authority.
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How Do Scientific Polls Work?

• A poll draws a sample from a larger population,
  but first the population must be defined.
• A sample is a subset of a population from which
  information is collected and analyzed in order to
  learn more about the population as a whole. The
  norm for an accurate sample size is around 1,000
  people.
• The population is the group the poll is to
  represent.
• A poll must be representative of the population
  being assessed.
• Representative means a polling sample that is not
  biased, in which all members of the population
  have an equal chance of being included.

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How Are Polls Collected?

• There are various ways to collect the information
  being sought in a poll.
• In-person interviews
• Telephone polls
• This is the dominant method of collecting public
  opinion. Random numbers from a phonebook or
  database are selected as a population sample.
• Internet polls
• As more and more people start to use computers
  and the web, Internet polling will likely become
  the dominant platform for survey research.

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Are Internet Polls Reliable?
Many Web sites, especially of news organizations,
invite participation in polls. How reliable do
you think the results are?
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Election Polls

• Tracking Polls
• Polls that seek to gauge changes of opinion of
  the same sample size over a period of time,
  common during the closing months of presidential
  elections
• Exit Polls
• Polls that survey a sample of voters immediately
  after exiting the voting booth to predict the
  outcome of the election before the ballots are
  officially counted
• Note Both are used to try to predict the outcome
  of elections before they take place.

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Presidential Election Polls
Sequential editions of the Orlando Sentinel
following election day 2000 testify to the
confusion wrought by news medias calling the
election on the basis of exit polls and early
returns, which in this case were misleading.
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Other Types of Polls

• Push Polls
• Polls that are designed to manipulate the
  opinions of those being polled
• Push polls are not scientific.
• They are often put out by a candidates campaign
  or a special interest group.
• They often seem like objective public opinion
  polls, but include misleading information about
  the candidates opponent or the interest groups
  opposition.

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Errors in Polling

• Confidence Intervals
• Statistical range, with a given probability, that
  takes random error into account
• Sampling Error (aka Margin of Error)
• Measure of the accuracy of a public opinion poll
  reported as a percentage

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Errors in Polling (Contd)

• Question wording
• The way in which a question is worded can greatly
  influence the answers given.
• Limited Respondent Options
• Giving participants in the sample only the choice
  of two or 3 answers, like yes, no or I dont
  know
• Non-attitudes
• Sources of error in public opinion polls in which
  individuals feel obliged to give opinions when
  they are unaware of the issue or have no opinions
  about it

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The Future of Polls

• The science and method of polling is in
  transition
• Telephone surveys are influenced by the growing
  number of cell phones, as many pollsters do not
  have access to cell phone exchanges and many cell
  phone users, especially young people, do not have
  land lines, which are used in telephones polls.
• The declining response rate, caused by a general
  polling fatigue among the public is decreasing
  the ability of pollsters to capture public
  opinion accurately.
• Internet polls represent the future for measuring
  public opinion. Through the Internet, polls can
  be done quickly and cheaply.

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How Do Individuals Acquire Their Political
Opinions?

• Socialization
• Impact and influence of ones social environment
  on the views and attitudes one carries in life, a
  primary source of political attitudes
• Parents, friends, media, community, and so on

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How Do Individuals Acquire Their Political
Opinions?
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Other Factors Affecting Socialization

• Generational Effects
• Effects on opinion from the era in which one
  lives
• Self-Interest
• Concern for ones own advantage and well-being
• Rationality
• Acting in a way that is consistent with ones
  self-interest

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The Role of Elites in Public Opinion

• Elites can influence citizens if two conditions
  are met
• First, citizens must be exposed to the message.
• Second, citizens must be open to the message.
• Elites
• Group of people who may lead public opinion, such
  as journalists, politicians, and policymakers
• Elite Theory
• Idea that public opinion is shaped by discourse
  among elites and is a top-to-bottom process

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The Shape of Public Opinion

• What roles do party identification and ideology
  play in shaping public opinion?
• Party Identification
• Attachment or allegiance to a political party
  partisanship.
• Political Ideology
• Set of consistent political beliefs
• Conservatives are those people who tend to
  identify themselves with the Republican Party.
• Liberals are those people who tend to identify
  themselves with the Democratic Party.
• Independents are those people who do not feel a
  sense of identification with either of the two
  major political parties.

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The Shape of Public Opinion Independents in the
Electorate
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Liberal Self-Identification
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Shaping Public Opinion

• The way in which we view politics is then seen
  through a perceptual lens shaped by the set of
  political beliefs.
• Perceptual Lens
• Ideological framework that shapes the way
  partisans view the political world and process
  information
• Levels of conceptualization
• Measure of how ideologically coherent individuals
  are in their political evaluations

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Is Public Opinion Informed?

• The public is generally uniformed about key
  aspects of government.
• Only 10 percent of the public knows the name of
  the Speaker of the House.
• Only about one-third can name one U.S. Supreme
  Court justice.
• Only about one-half of Americans know which party
  controls Congress.
• Fewer than one-half know the name of their own
  congressional representative.

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Does This Mean Public Opinion Is Uninformed?

• Political Saliency
• Political saliency is an indication of the
  importance and relevance of an issue to an
  individual.
• Voters ARE relatively well-informed on issues
  that matter to them.
• The public can learn about issues if they are
  made salient through the media.

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Voter Shortcuts

• Low Information Rationality
• Idea that people do not need to have lots of
  information to make good decisions
• Party Labels
• Using party labels to make decisions allows
  citizens to make choices with a high degree of
  reliability without having a high degree of
  knowledge on the issues.

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What Is Polarization?

• Polarization
• Condition in which differences between parties
  and/or the public are so stark that disagreement
  breaks out, fueling attacks and controversy

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Political Polarization in the United States
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Is Congress Polarized?

• Since 1975, Congress has become more polarized.
• A look at the DW Nominate Scores , which are a
  record of individual and roll-call votes in
  Congress starting with the 1st Congress, shows
  that members of Congress are voting more
  frequently with their party members than they
  have in the past.

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Is American Public Opinion Polarized?

• Are Americans Polarized?
• On the surface, it may appear as though Americans
  are polarized. The red state/blue state divide
  looks evident on any map however, political
  scientists like Morris Fiorina argue that America
  is not nearly as polarized as the map might
  tell us.
• Fiorina and other scholars argue that Americans
  are, by-and-large, centrist and the divide is
  more rural vs. urban than red state vs. blue
  state.

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Group Differences

• How does membership in a group affect a persons
  public opinion?
• Socio-economic status
• Age
• Religion
• Race and Ethnicity
• Education
• Gender Gap
• Differences in the political attitudes and
  behavior of men and women.

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Group DifferencesReligious Tradition and Views
on Immigrants
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Group DifferencesPercentage with Some College
Education
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Public Opinion and Public Policy

• Does public opinion affect public policy?
• American support for a policy often has an impact
  on the success of that policy.
• Rally-around-the-flag effect
• Surge of public support for the president in
  times of international crisis

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Public Opinion and Public Policy
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Public Opinion and Public Policy
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Focus Questions

• How does public opinion influence public policy?
• In what ways are elected officials responsive to
  public opinion? How responsive should they be?
• Is every citizens voice equal, or are some
  people more influential? Why?
• How well does polling capture public opinion?
  Should polls direct public policy?
• Does public opinion provide a gateway or a gate
  to democracy?