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Chapter 9: Public Opinion and Political Socialization

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Flash Cards

Practice Quiz

Critical Thinking and Learning Exercises

  1. Research questions used by the Gallup and Pew polls: http://www.gallup.com/poll/politics.aspx?ref=b  and http://www.pewresearch.org/. Choose 10 questions. In addition, ask the respondents to provide demographic information such as: age, race, gender, and level of education (e.g., high school graduate, college graduate, professional school graduate, etc.). Your task is to hand out your survey to at least five individuals and ask that they complete the surveys. Second, conduct five random digit dialing surveys. To do this, look in a local telephone directory and choose a number. Do not use a business telephone number. Find a table of random numbers on the Internet. Use two digits to add to the last two numbers of the telephone number that you chose. In other words, delete the last two numbers from each telephone number listed in the telephone directory and replace them with two random digits. Compare the results between the two samples. Discuss your findings with the class. Lastly, combine all of the surveys for the convenience survey and those with the random digit dialing survey and compare the results.
  2. Find two surveys or polls that provide either a graph or descriptive statistics of public opinions on various political topics. Report the margin of error provided for each survey or poll. Please explain whether the poll is reliable.
  3. Complete the following ideology quiz: http://politicalquiz.net/. Next, have one of your closest relatives, preferably an immediate family member such as a parent or sibling, complete the quiz. Compare your results. Please explain why you think your results are as such.

Links to further Resources

The Political Compass and Spatial Representation of Ideology

http://www.politicalcompass.org/

Ideology is a consistent set of values, attitudes, and beliefs about the appropriate role of government in society. The “political compass” self-test can provide a rough measure of your own ideology to help you compare your own position with that of our political leaders. The “political compass” presents your results in a two-dimensional graphical format that is a spatial representation of the concept of ideology. Spatial representations such as these provide a useful visual representation of more abstract concepts. Building on this approach, scholars are able to develop spatial models that convey important relationships between key variables in political science. For example, Poole and Rosenthal have used spatial models of Congress to visually demonstrate the growth of ideological polarization in Congress, as seen in the video below (note how individual members “drift” ideologically over time and occasionally switch their party affiliation):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOKK79n7Y8o

Gallup.com

http://www.gallup.com/home.aspx

The Gallup organization is one of the oldest and most respected polling organizations in the United States. Gallup conducts daily surveys that capture American public opinion on a wide range of issues and events.

HuffPost Pollster (Formerly Pollster.com)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/pollster/

This website provides information on, and links to, a wide variety of current public opinion poll results. Browse the website to get a sense for current trends in American public opinion. Do you think the tremendous number of polls conducted every day are helpful to policymakers? Why or why not?

Real Clear Politics

http://www.realclearpolitics.com

One of the more well-known “poll aggregators” (a site that averages out the results of many polls in an effort to produce a more accurate measure of public opinion), Real Clear Politics provides poll results and analysis of a wide range of political issues of interest to Americans.