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Administrative
- Change in
date of Midterm examination
- Now
scheduled for Monday, April 24
- That
conflict with both Easter Sunday and
Passover
- So
the date will be changed to Monday, May
1
- Go to
the web page for last year's exam and sample
answers
- Be
alert for the identifications:
- explain
the meaning
- discuss
the relevance to American government and
politics
Nature
of Public Opinion
- What's the
state of public opinion on the income tax, due
today?
- Most
American think that the taxes are "too
high"
- Compared
with what?
- Taxes
in the US are lower than in almost every other
country
- Taxes
in the US today are lower than they have been in
the past.
- Thanks to
survey research techniques, we now know a good deal about
public opinion.
- Your text
talks about the shape and stability of public
opinion
- Shape
- Normal
- Symmetrical
and unimodal--"Bell-shaped"
- Skewed
- Asymmetrical
and unimodal
- Bimodal
- Stability
of distribution
- Stable
distribution: Your text shows that the public in
1964 and in 1996 had a similar unimodal
distribution of ideological
orientations.
- Changing
distribution: Attitudes toward integrated
schools.
- Trend:
Increase in opposition toward the Vietnam War over
time
Studying
public opinion: using the CROSSTABS program
- This is a
program for analyzing public opinion and congressional
voting.
- It can
analyze public opinions by cross-classifying one
variable by another.
- Consider
attitude toward abortion, religion, and
religiosity
- The 1999
beta version of CROSSTABS is available at
http://www.hmco.com/college/xtabs
- Username:
data
- Password:
analysis
- The tables
below are for the 1992 election data:
Public
opinion and American politics
- The
majoritarian model says that government should do what a
majority of the people want.
- There are
many examples of the errorful nature of public
opinion:
- How
much the national government spends on foreign
aid.
- Among
western countries, which one has the lowest tax
rate.
- Among
western countries, which has the most unequal
distribution of income.
- Among
western countries, which is the most religious.
- My point
is not to make the American public look stupid, but to
raise questions about the driving basis of the
majoritarian model of democracy.
- Public
opinion is susceptible to simplistic solutions to complex
problems, and politicians can often take advantage of the
public's incomplete understanding of the
situation.
Political
values in public opinion can be usefully analyzed according
to social groups.
- Although
the political socialization process is unique to each
individual, there are commonalities among people with
similar social backgrounds.
- Responses
to questions about order (allowing a communist to teach)
and equality (redistributing wealth) analyzed in the text
for a national sample according to education, income,
region, "old" ethnicity (European origin), "new"
ethnicity (race), and religion (both type of faith and
religiosity):
- People
with HIGH EDUCATION choose freedom over both order and
equality more often than those with low
education.
- People
with HIGH INCOME are more opposed to government
policies of income redistribution than those of low
income.
- REGIONAL
differences, once quite important in American
politics, have declined in importance on thse
issues.
- Old
ethnicity (EUROPEAN ORIGIN) has also declined as a
determinant of public opinion.
- RACE
has emerged as a more critical variable,
distinguishing whites from blacks, Hispanics and
Asians, especially on redistribution of wealth to
promote equality.
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