HONORS GOVERNMENT CHAPTER 7 STUDY GUIDE

US “public opinion” - Refers to how people think or feel about particular things, including but
not limited to politics and government. Today, it is commonly measured by means of scientific
survey research or polls based on random samples of given populations and carefully worded
questions.
Heuristics - An informational shortcut used by voters to make a decision.
Sampling - A process used in statistical analysis in which a predetermined number of
observations are taken from a larger population.
Sampling error - The difference between the results of random samples taken at the same time.
Exit polls - Polls based on interviews conducted on Election Day with randomly selected voters.
Elites/political elites - People who have a disproportionate amount of some valued
resource/People with a disproportionate share of political power.
Factors that influence polling results - The role of emotions, political socialization, tolerance
of diversity of political views and the media.
Political socialization - Process by which background traits influence one's views.
Factors that influence public opinion - Political socialization and the family, demographics,
and partisanship and political ideology.
Impressionable years hypothesis - Argument that political experiences during the late teens and
early 20s powerfully shape attitudes for the rest of the life cycle.
Gender gap - Difference in political views between men and women.
Cleavages in public opinion - The idea of a division of voters into voting blocs. Cleavage
separates the voters into advocates and adversaries on a certain issue, or voting for a certain
party.
Social class - Refers to the idea of grouping Americans by some measure of social status,
typically economic, however it could also refer to social status or location.
Party sorting - The alignment of partisanship and issue positions so that Democrats tend to take
more liberal positions and Republicans tend to take more conservative ones.
Race as a factor in public opinion - The politics of race seeps into issues of social welfare
provision, employment, and job discrimination, residential segregation, and access to education.
Polarization - Is associated with the segregation within a society that may emerge from income
inequality, real-estate fluctuations, economic displacements etc. and result in such differentiation
that would consist of various social groups, from high-income to low-income.
Political ideology - A more or less consistent set of beliefs about what policies the government
ought to pursue.
Ideological consistency - Refers to the degree to which a person's opinions are consistent across
time, or from one issue to the next at any given point in time.
Relationship between public opinion and public policy - Generally speaking, public opinion
drives policy: When opinion changes, so does policy, especially on salient issues or when the
opinion change is especially large. But when a minority group is particularly politically
consequential (typically because they are more politically engaged on the issue), government
policy follows the minority view, rather than the majority one.
Social class and public opinion - Refers to the idea of grouping Americans by some measure of
social status, typically economic, however it could also refer to social status or location; How
people think or feel about particular things.