Assessing Public Opinion and its Role in Democracy

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Assessing Public Opinion and its Role in Democracy
Public Opinion and Political Participation

• February 14

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Genuine Attitudes?

• Public opinion polling typically presumes people
  have genuine attitudes about the topics in the
  poll
• How safe is that assumption?

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Genuine Attitudes?

• Information levels among the public low
• Can genuine attitudes exist based on low
  information levels?
• Do people have coherent preferences and an
  underlying basis for them?

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Political Attitudes?

• Core Values and Political Attitudes
• William G. Jacoby
• Interested in the impact of values on political
  attitudes
• Both terms, but especially values, lack
  consistent definitions among public opinion
  scholars

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Defining Values

• Jacoby defines values as each individuals
  abstract, general conceptions about the desirable
  and undesirable end states of human life. As
  such values provide criteria for evaluating
  external stimuli and interacting with other
  elements of the social environment. They
  effectively define what is good and bad in
  the world.

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Defining Values

• Values differ from
• Norms
• Beliefs
• Ideology
• Culture
• Values influence attitudes

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Hierarchy of Values?

• Jacobys research questions
• Do people possess fully ordered value
  hierarchies?
• Can people rank order their feelings about
  specific values into a complete hierarchy?

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Values Hierarchy

• If people possess a complete value hierarchy,
  then choices between pairs of values should be
  transitive.
• If value A is chosen over value B and value B is
  chosen over value C, then value A should be
  chosen over value C

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Hierarchy of Values?

• 1994 Multi-Investigator Study
• Phone interviews
• 1464 respondents

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Hierarchy of Values?

• Now lets talk about things that are important
  for our society such as liberty, equality,
  economic security, and social order. Before we
  get to the questions, let me first explain what
  we mean by these ideas.
• By LIBERTY we mean a guarantee of the widest
  freedom possible for everyone to act and think as
  they consider most appropriate.
• By EQUALITY we mean narrowing the gap in wealth
  and power between the rich and the poor.
• By ECONOMIC SECURITY we mean the guarantee of a
  steady job and a decent income.
• By SOCIAL ORDER we mean being able to live in an
  orderly and peaceful society where the laws are
  respected and enforced.
• All four of these ideas are important, but
  sometimes we have to choose between what is more
  important and what is less important. In your
  opinion, as things stand right now, which is more
  important for our country liberty or equality?
• How about economic security or social order? As
  things now stand, which do you feel is more
  important for our country?
• How about liberty or economic security?
• How about equality or social order?
• How about liberty or social order?
• How about equality or economic security?

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Hierarchy of Values?

• 78.6 of respondents gave fully transitive
  choices
• Social order appears less important than the
  other choices to most people

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Jacobys Contributions

• Shows
• people possess meaningful value hierarchies
• value ambivalence is not very widespread
• considerable variability exists from one person
  to the next in their rankings of value importance
• value choices affect attitudes on issues

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Evaluating Polls

• Poll Topics
• Is the survey measuring genuine attitudes or
  nonattitudes?
• Have the researchers made any effort to screen
  out respondents who lack genuine attitudes on the
  topic?

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Evaluating Polls

• The Questions
• Are the questions biased, loaded, or leading?
• Do the questions accurately reflect the topic
  under study?
• Are there multiple questions on the same topic
  within the same survey? What nuances in public
  opinion do they reveal?
• Could the ordering of questions influence answers?

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Evaluating Polls

• Sampling Procedure
• Is the poll scientific?
• How was the sample obtained?
• Does each member of the population of interest
  have an equal chance of being surveyed?
• What is the sampling error?

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Evaluating Polls

• Interviewing Procedures
• What was the method of interviewing?
• How might that affect answers given or response
  rates?

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Evaluating Polls

• Interpreting Results
• Are claims made about subsets of the sample? Is
  the larger sampling error for these results
  reported?
• Do the poll sponsors have a vested claim in the
  outcome?
• Do the conclusions follow from the data?
• Are there alternative ways to interpret the same
  results?

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Polling and Democracy

• The by the people view.
• Responsiveness requires information.
• What does the public want?
• Polling, if conducted properly can provide this
  information.
• The for the people view
• some people argue that politicians should NOT be
  responsive to polls

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Polling and Democracy

• A mixed record
• Public opinion polling practices
• Public attitudes
• Government responsiveness

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Midterm

• Two main components
• Identification of terms or short explanatory
  answers
• Explain what they mean (examples are helpful) and
  why they are important or significant
• Critical thinking and application of knowledge.
  This might take some of the following forms
• Interpret results
• Identify what information is missing that would
  be needed to identify whether or how much the
  results can be trusted

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Midterm Review

• 1/12
• Terms
• straw polls
• FRUGing
• Push polls
• Also be prepared to discuss
• polling pitfalls
• Polling and democracy

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Midterm Review

• 1/17
• Framing
• Priming
• Question wording effects Biased questions know
  different types
• Response choice effects
• Question order effects

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Midterm Review

• 1/19
• random sampling
• Cluster sampling
• sampling error
• RDD and related issues
• Weighting and related issues
• A few pros and cons for each interviewing type
  how interviewing type may affect responses

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Midterm Review

• 1/24
• Nonattitudes
• Ways of dealing with nonattitudes
• Public Affairs Act experiment
• Ways of dealing with nonattitudes

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Midterm Review

• 1/26
• What information is needed to judge the accuracy
  or credibility of poll results? (material from
  other dates also relevant)

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Midterm Review

• 1/31
• attitudes and their components
• descriptive statistics and statistical terms
  (know well enough to be able to interpret a
  figure or table like one in the articles assigned
  and discussed in class)

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Midterm Review

• More details Thursday.