Public Opinion, Participation, and Voting

1. Public Opinion, Participation, and Voting Chapter 8

2. What is Public Opinion? Public Opinion The distribution of individual preferences, for or evaluations, of a given issue, candidate, or institution within a specific population

3. What is Public Opinion? Intensity – how strongly people feel about their opinions Latency - political opinions that people may hold but have not fully expressed Salience – extent to which people feel issues are relevant to them

4. Measuring Public Opinion • Random sample – in this type of sample, every individual has a known and random chance of being selected: • the questions must be asked in clear, unemotional language • people must have some knowledge of the things they are asked about • for any pop. over 500,000, at least 1,065 respondents are necessary to provide a 95% confidence, +/- 3% • each person must have an equal chance of being interviewed • even the most accurate polls have some sampling error - the term for the measurement of relative accuracy of a public opinion poll

5. How do We Get Our Political Opinions and Values? Political Socialization The process most notably in families and schools by which we develop our political attitudes, values and beliefs

6. Agents of Socialization Family Schools (Most important agent) Number of times a week American families say that they eat together Schools teach an idealized view of the nation’s slogans and symbols

7. Agents of Socialization Media More than two-thirds of Americans report that they receive “all or most” of their news from television • Religion • Those raised in religious households tend to be socialized to contribute to society and to get involved in their communities

8. Public Opinion and Public Policy “What I want is to get done what the people desire to be done, and the question for me is how to find that out exactly.” - Abraham Lincoln

9. Awareness and Interest Knowledge Levels Politics is not the major interest of most Americans and as a result, knowledge about the political system is limited

10. Participation: Translating Opinions into Action

11. How Citizens Participate

12. Electoral/Nonelectoral Political Participation Among Anglo Whites, African Americans, and Latinos Adapted from Sidney Verba, Kay Lehman Scholzman, Henry Brady, and Norman H. Nie, Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).

13. Participation: Translating Opinions into Action • There is about 25% of the public that is actually interested in politics most of the time • attentive public – those citizens who follow public affairs carefully • vote in most elections, read a daily newspaper, and talk politics w/ family and friends

14. Participation: Translating Opinions into Action • at opposite end of spectrum are nonvoters • people who are rarely interested in politics or public affairs and seldom vote • 40% of Americans are part-time citizens – participate selectively in elections, voting in pres. elections but usually not in others

15. Voting: Registration In an effort to make registration easier, states have made registration forms available at motor vehicle stations (part of applying for driver’s license), schools, and even highway tollbooths

16. Expanding the Franchise • 15th Amendment (1870): African Americans given suffrage • 19th Amendment (1920): Women given suffrage • 26th Amendment (1971): 18-year-olds given suffrage

17. Turnout Voter Turnout in Presidential and Congressional Elections

18. Voter Turnout in Western Democracies Average Turnout 1991-2000

19. Registration and Voting in the World’s Parliamentary Elections

20. Why People Don’t Vote

21. The Politics of Voter Turnout

22. Predictors of Participation • More schooling = Higher voting rate • Involvement in social organizations = Higher voting rate • such involvement develops the skills associated with political participation • Higher SES = Higher voting rate • African American and Hispanic participation is lower than that of whites overall • Men and women vote at about the same rate

23. How Serious is Nonvoting? A huge army of nonvoters, “hangs over the democratic process like a bomb ready to explode and change the course of history.” -Arthur Hadley “I’m not going to shed any crocodile tears if people don’t care enough to vote….I’d be extremely happy if nobody in the United States voted except for the people who thought about the issues and made up their own minds and wanted to vote.” - the late Senator Sam Ervin

24. Voting on the Basis of Party • In the absence of reasons to vote otherwise, people depend on party identification to simplify their voting choices. • split ticket – a vote for some of one party’s candidates and some of another party’s • straight ticket – a vote for all of one party’s candidates Party Identification An informal and subjective affiliation with a political party that most people acquire in childhood

25. Voting on the Basis of Candidates Candidate Appeal How voters feel about a candidate’s background, personality, leadership ability, and other personal qualities • 1980s mark a critical threshold in the emergence of a candidate-centered era • Increasingly, campaigns focus on the negative elements of candidates’ history and personality

26. Voting on the Basis of Issues Prospective Issue Voting Voting based on what a candidate pledges to do in the future about an issue if elected Retrospective Issue Voting Holding incumbents responsible for past performance on issues