Lecture 8: Public Opinion and the Media

1. Lecture 8:Public Opinion and the Media POLI 10: Introduction to American Politics Summer Session I 29 July 2013 Prof. Justin Levitt

2. Friendly Reminders • If you have not confirmed your final paper topic, please do so! Don’t put it off to the very last minute. • I have Office Hours today 12-2; our TA David has Office Hours Wednesday 11-1:30. Please contact us if you’d like to make an appointment! • Reaction papers are on discussion questions, not myths. You must discuss a question corresponding to the day’s lecture.

3. Today’s myth: Media is more divisive than ever. Journalists today present opinion as fact and selectively choose polls and statistics to support their argument.

4. Lecture Overview • Vote Choice and the Origins of Public Opinion • Obtaining Public Opinion • Characteristics of Public Opinion • Political Communication

5. Part I: Voting Behavior

6. Last time • Voting is costly! • The biggest barrier is perception of political knowledge • Therefore, parties put energy into reducing the costs of voting • Party information/position taking • Campaigning, including: • Public appearances • Advertisements

7. How do we decide who to vote for? • Complex question: • Philosophy or ideology • Evaluate past performance • Platform/promises—what they say they’ll do • Party • Group identity • Personal economic/social condition • Single Issue

8. Which is the right way to make your decision? • We ask because normative thought suggests—in a pure, abstract, conceptual world—how we should decide: • Full information • Rational, systematic reasoning • Predictability • Individual, not based on group or family identity • Or does this beg the question that there is a right way to make the decision?

9. The American Voter and its aftermath • Campbell, Converse, Stokes, and Miller (1960) published The American Voter, the first comprehensive, national, survey-driven work on who votes and how they vote • They found very little evidence of voters being sophisticated, or being able to contextualize their answers in terms of coherent ideology, systematic thinking between issues framed by a consistent philosophy, or attitudes, consistent ways of thinking about particular groups or issues. • In fact, even one’s partisanship (identification with the positions taken by a specific party) was not based on reason • Socialization, or factors related to family upbringing, was the most important contributor to party ID and voting—hence voting behavior

10. The “Funnel Model”

11. How we vote, American Voter style • Divided into four “Levels” on the basis of their description of why they voted as they did: • Level A (Ideologues and Near-Ideologues): 12% • Level B (Group Benefits/Partisan): 42% • Level C (Nature of the Times): 24% • Level D (No Issue Content): 22%

12. Final thoughts from The American Voter • Changes in Party ID are rare (because ID is determined based on childhood learning), but may occur because of: • Social forces/National crises (Great Depression, Cold War) • Personal forces/Life cycle events (retirement, graduation, children) • Generally speaking, voters follow the parties, not vice versa • This may cast doubt on democracy—the parties seem to be able to manipulate us to believe what they want us to think

13. Partisan Voting

14. Beyond The American Voter • Other scholars have questioned some of the assumptions: • How are the categories really distinguished? If a person has consistent beliefs but wasn’t on the Liberal/Conservative dimension, why were they “bumped” from Level A? • Why should a person care about every issue? • Why home/family and not group? Why does “socialization” exclude religious, ethnic, racial, class, etc. communities? • However, despite criticism, continues to stand as the foundation of the field

15. The View from Social Psychology • Greater emphasis on group membership and position • Social network analysis demonstrates that voting and vote choice may even be “contagious” among members of a social group (if you’re sharing a dorm room with three people who voted in the last election, you’re more likely to vote in the next) • Highlights the importance of issue publics, voters who care strongly about a particular issue or set of issues—we will see more on this later • Groups may change across time

16. The Issue Public/Single-Issue Voter Model

17. Economic or Pocketbook Voting • Levels A (“Ideological and Near-Ideology”) and C (“Nature of the Times”) form the two sides of the theory of representation from the Congress lecture • From Level A we get Prospective Voting, which is relying on the candidates’ promises and platform • From Level C we get Retrospective Voting, which is looking back at the record of the incumbent (or his/her party) • Evidence for retrospective voting is clearer than prospective voting, but referring to concrete measures beats abstract

18. Obama Approval and State of the Economy

19. Bush Approval and Gas Prices

20. “No Issue Content” Voters • Opinion Leaders may provide convenient shortcuts for low-information voters • Image can serve as a shorthand for relatability* and trustworthiness • *Not a real word • http://video.msnbc.msn.com/jansing-and-co/47232389#47232389

21. Conclusions • Normative goals and real world processes clearly at odds • Vote choice is not particularly tied to political sophistication, though turnout is • Vote choice is closely linked to social and psychological development: Group membership, social networks, and family history all contribute • Many voters rely on more immediate factors

22. Part II: The Quest for Public Opinion

23. The Importance of Public Opinion • Public Opinion is the suit politicians stuff themselves into • V.O. Key defines it as “those opinions held by private persons which government find it prudent to heed” • A government that ignores public opinion can lose its legitimacy, and even fall into revolution (as in the Arab Spring) • Elections give politicians and parties incentives for listening to and following public opinion

24. Discovering Public Opinion • Just like marketing, specialists in analyzing public opinion use a lot of different methods: • Random telephone or mail surveys • Self-selected surveys/panels • Screened focus groups • Each method has its strengths and weaknesses—for example, focus groups allow much more interaction between surveyors and interviewees at the cost of being able to generalize to the greater public

25. Random Polling • Perhaps the most important development in the 20th century in terms of campaigning was the development of scientific polling—a way of capturing mass public opinion • The best method for generalizing to the greater public is random polling, a method in which a list of telephone numbers or addresses is randomly generated or selected and used to contact individuals • Better than self-selection/self-reporting polls like the Literary Digest poll

26. Tradeoffs of a Random Poll • Advantages: • Accurate within a precise margin of error • Small sample size needed (1200 sufficient) • Surveys may be weighted to reflect different populations as needed • Disadvantages: • Subgroup data may not be available without oversampling • Difficult to determine if your sample is truly random; weights may lead to inaccurate results if non-respondents are systematic • Little to no depth

27. Conducting Polls: The Professionals • There are two kids of polling houses: Partisan and Non-Partisan • Non-partisan firms like the Pew Foundation, Gallup, or Rasmussen try to accurately report public opinion • Often work with media corporations such as the New York Times, CBS, or USA Today, who sponsor these polls in exchange for first crack at reporting the results • May have partisan bias (see next slide) but often not intentional

28. Partisan bias of non-partisan polling firms, Nov. 2012, fivethirtyeight blog

29. Conducting Polls: On the Campaign Trail • Partisan pollsters work with one party. Each party has polling teams in-house, and most serious campaigns have their own polling team or contract with a partisan firm • Parties are caught between competing pressure to accurately gauge how the are doing and trying to use polls to further their message • Parties often engage in push polls as part of the campaign • “Were you aware of Barack Obama’s ties to the Palestinian Liberation Organization?” (2008 push poll) • “Are you aware that the Catholic Church does not consider Mormons, like Mitt Romney, to be Christian?” (2012 push poll)

30. Drawing Conclusions from a Poll • “Guess what? The polls (and Nate Silver) were right.” (Washington Post headline, Nov. 7, 2012) • Theoretically, if the voter model is accurate, a random sample will be correct within the margin of error 95 times out of 100 • One problem is that sometimes people are not honest: • Winner Bonus—more people claim to vote for the winner • Bradley Effect—overreport support for minority candidates • Issue Public—only a few people care, but they care passionately • Latent Public Opinion—as Zaller discusses

31. Latent Public Opinion • Not all opinion is honestly expressed • Sometimes, people may not even know they feel the way they will on Election Day • I like the iceberg analogy—latent opinion is much deeper and larger than what’s revealed on the surface, but difficult to see, especially from close up • The vote on Gun Control is a great example

32. The Iceberg of Latent Public Opinion Revealed Public Opinion Latent Public Opinion

33. Part III: Public Opinion in the United States

34. Public Opinion in the Electorate • As we said in Lecture 1, Americans agree on a lot of things! • 97% say Freedom of Speech is important • 91% say the Right to Vote is the most important right guaranteed in the Constitution • However, on other issues, Americans differ in systematic ways, and public opinion reflects that, generally being: • Stable over time • Generational, or changing over time • Situational, or reflecting the nature of the times • Partisan, or reflecting differences between Liberals and Conservatives

35. Hold on! It’s Lecture 9 and we’re only just now talking about “Liberal” and “Conservative”? • By and large, political processes are similar across the ideological spectrum • Both parties have similar organizations, norms, and behaviors (i.e. Conventions, fundraising and election goals) • All voters face costs of a similar nature • Political culture and the respect for the Constitution are similar across the political spectrum

36. So what do Liberal and Conservative mean? • http://www.bennylingbling.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/leftright_EU_1416.gif

37. Type 1: Stable—Abortion

38. Type 2: Generational—Gay Marriage

39. Type 3: Situational—Defense Spending

40. Type 4: Partisan—Gun Control

41. Small groups, big impact • Oftentimes, an issue is only important to a subset of voters • These groups tend to wield disproportionate influence within the party on their issues • Gay marriage within the Democratic Party • Vouchers within the Republican Party • We can think of this in terms of costs, particularly the advantages small groups have in information • Next time we will talk about which groups succeed and fail

42. Part IV: The Media and Politics

43. Gathering Information • Most of us turn to the media for all kinds of information: from traffic and weather to the Royal Baby • Information has an essential role in reducing the cost of voting • The same institutions and organizations that are set up to make sure we get the best information about whether crop tops are in this season also can help us gather the info we need to vote

44. Media in the Middle • News organizations serve a valuable function by covering politics • Parties and candidates would prefer to control their brand • Parties in power have the urge to force the media to cover them the way they would like using law • Monopolies on media, especially state-run media monopolies, may exacerbate this problem • Therefore, the Constitution guarantees Freedom of the Press

45. Role of the Media • What do the media need to do? • Keep their reporters employed • Ratings! (Subscribers, views) • How do they do this? • Provide information • Entertain • Build public support/outrage • Scoop—insider or sensationalize

46. Influencing Public Opinion • John Zaller (same as we saw earlier) discusses two strategies journalists use to influence public opinion: • Priming is preparing the audience to feel a certain way by leading up to what you want to say with statements designed to trigger related emotions • Framing is putting a statement in a context designed to trigger a specific response • http://www.kusi.com/story/22759071/they-want-it-stopped

47. Tuning into different sources • Main dimensions of variation are age, partisanship, and political engagement • Older citizens are more likely to read newspapers, watch TV • Younger people use the Internet (55% of readers of the New York Times read online) • Republicans are more likely to watch Fox, read the Wall Street Journal, and enjoy sports • Democrats are more likely to watch MSNBC, read the New York Times, and enjoy the arts

48. News Consumption by Age and Media

49. Party ID and turnout by station

50. Partisanship by website