SUMMER 2020

POL 101: Session 14 (NHA)

PUBLIC OPINION
 PUBLIC OPINION [1]
■ Political culture and public opinion are linked but are not the same.
Political culture focuses on long-standing values, attitudes, and ideas
that people learn deeply.
■ Public opinion concerns people’s reactions to specific and immediate
policies and problems, such as sending troops overseas or voting
intentions.
■ Public opinion is not the same as individual opinion. A woman’s
opinion of her neighbor’s religion would not be part of public opinion,
but her feeling on prayer in public schools would.
■ Public opinion refers to political and social issues, not private matters.
 PUBLIC OPINION [2]
■ Public opinion does not necessarily imply that citizens have strong, clear, or
united convictions; such unity is rare.
■ Public opinion sometimes shows widespread ignorance.
■ Public opinion is important in a democracy, as elections provide only a crude
expression of the public’s will.
■ Public opinion is often led or manipulated by interest groups.
■ Bringing grievances to public attention, especially when the media watches, can
generate widespread sympathy.
■ ANY GOVERNMENT IS VULNERABLE TO PUBLIC OPINION.
■ Mahatma Gandhi, by simple dramas of nonviolent protest, used public
opinion to win independence for India.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi took the religious principle of ahimsa (doing no harm) and turned
it into a non-violent tool for mass action. He used it to fight not only colonial rule but social evils
such as racial discrimination and untouchability as well.

While leading nationwide campaigns to ease poverty, expand women's rights, build religious and
ethnic harmony and eliminate the injustices of the caste system, Gandhi supremely applied the
principles of nonviolent civil disobedience to free India from foreign domination.

On March 12, 1930, Indian independence leader Gandhi begins a defiant march to the sea
in protest of the British monopoly on salt. This was one of the civil disobediences against British
rule in India. Britain's Salt Acts prohibited Indians from collecting or selling salt. He began a
massive satyagraha campaign against that British law that forced Indians to purchase British salt
instead of producing it locally. Gandhi organized a 241 mile long protest march to the west coast
of Gujarat, where he and his followers harvested salt on the shores of the Arabian Sea. In
response, Britain imprisoned over 60,000 peaceful protesters and unconsciously generated even
more support against British rule.
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 THE SHAPE OF PUBLIC OPINION
■ Social scientists find roughly who thinks what about politics. No social category,
of course, is ever 100 percent for or against something.
■ What we look for are differences among social categories, the significance of
which can be tested by the rules of statistics.
■ Once we have found significant differences, we may be able to say something
about salience, the degree to which categories and issues affect the public
opinion of a country.
■ In Scandinavia, for example, social class is salient in structuring party preferences: The
working class tends to vote Social Democratic, and the middle class votes for more
conservative parties.
■ In the United States, religion and urban–rural differences are salient.
 SOCIAL CLASS THE SHAPE OF PUBLIC OPINION

■ Karl Marx saw social class as massively salient. Workers, he predicted, would become
socialists. Actually, only some of them did, but social class does matter, even in the relatively
classless United States.
■ Social class can be hard to measure. There are two general ways: the objective and the
subjective.
■ An OBJECTIVE determination involves asking people their annual income or judging the
quality of the neighborhood.
■ The SUBJECTIVE determination involves simply asking respondents what their social
class is, which sometimes diverges from objective criteria.
■ A majority of Americans call themselves middle class, even if they are not. Sometimes even
wealthy people, thinking of their modest origins, call themselves middle class.
■ The way a person earns a living may matter more than the amount he or she makes. Typically,
American farmers are conservative, and miners and steelworkers are not. Different political
attitudes grow up around different jobs.
 SOCIAL CLASS THE SHAPE OF PUBLIC OPINION

■ Sometimes social class works in precisely the opposite way envisioned by Marx. Highly
educated professionals make some affluent U.S. suburbs quite liberal compared with the
conservatism of poorer country dwellers.
■ Spanish researchers found an inverse relationship between social class and preferring the
left; that is, better-off persons were more leftist than poorer. In the Spanish study,
education was most salient.
■ CLASS MATTERS, especially in combination with other factors, such as region or religion.
■ In Britain, class plus region structures much of the vote; in France, it is class plus region
plus religiosity (practicing Catholic versus non-practicing); in Germany, it is class plus
region plus denomination (Catholic or Protestant).
EDUCATIO THE SHAPE OF PUBLIC OPINION

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■ Educational level is related to social class, and this contributes to the polarization. Some of
those with college degrees win big bucks in information technology and finance; those
without have to scramble.
■ The better off give their children more and better education, in effect passing on their class
position and slowing the social mobility that allowed many Americans to rise during the
postwar years.
■ Education in the United States often has a split political impact:
MAKING PEOPLE MORE LIBERAL ON NONECONOMIC ISSUES BUT
MORE CONSERVATIVE ON ECONOMIC ISSUES .
■ Survey data show that college-educated people are more tolerant, favor civil rights, and
understand different viewpoints.
EDUCATIO THE SHAPE OF PUBLIC OPINION

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■ But on economic issues, many of them are skeptical of efforts to redistribute
income by higher taxes on the upper brackets— which happen to be them—and
welfare measures.
■ There are, to be sure, some educated people who are consistently liberal on both
economic and noneconomic questions, but in the United States the categories
sometimes diverge.
■ The same is often true of the American working class: Its members want
higher wages but can be intolerant in the areas of race, lifestyle, and
patriotism.
REGION THE SHAPE OF PUBLIC OPINION

■ Every country has a south, goes an old saw, and this is true in politics. It is uncertain,
however, whether a country’s south is more conservative or more leftist than its north.
■ France south of the Loire River and Spain south of the Tagus have for generations gone
left. The south of Italy, though, is conservative, as is Bavaria in Germany’s south. In Great
Britain, England is heavily conservative, whereas Scotland and Wales go for Labour. The
U.S. South was famous for decades as the “solid South,” which went automatically
Democratic but now is mostly Republican.
■ A country’s outlying regions usually harbor resentment against the capital, creating what
are called center–periphery tensions. Regional memories can last for centuries.
■ This is true of Quebec and Scotland and the southern parts of the United States, France,
and Italy. Some regions may feel economically disadvantaged by the central area and may
have a different language.
 RELIGION THE SHAPE OF PUBLIC OPINION

■ Religion is often the most explosive issue in politics and contributes a great deal
to the structuring of opinion. Religion can mean either denomination or
religiosity.
■ In Germany, Catholics tend to vote Christian Democrat, Protestants Social Democrat.
Here it is a question of denomination.
■ In France, where most citizens are baptized Catholic, it is a question of religiosity, as most
French are indifferent to religion. The more often a French person goes to Mass, the more
likely he or she is to vote for a conservative party. Few Communist voters are practicing
Catholics.
■ In Poland, the Roman Catholic Church encouraged Poles to oust the Communist regime
and support pro-Church parties.
■ Religion plays a major role in the United States, where Protestants tend to vote
Republican.
 RELIGION THE SHAPE OF PUBLIC OPINION

■ Religion overlaps with ethnicity.

■ Catholics, especially Polish Catholics, were once among the most loyal Democrats. In the
great immigrations of a century ago, big-city Democratic machines welcomed and helped
immigrants from Catholic countries, and their descendants stayed mostly Democratic, but
this eroded as the Democratic Party endorsed “pro-choice” positions.
■ The rise of the “religious right” in the 1980s was important to U.S. politics
■ Roughly one American in seven can be counted as religious right, and fundamentalist
groups became highly political.
■ American candidates, especially for the presidency, like to be known as churchgoers.
AGE THE SHAPE OF PUBLIC OPINION

■ There are two theories on how age affects political opinions, the LIFE CYCLE and
GENERATION THEORIES.
■ The first, widely accepted, holds that people change as they age. Thus, young people are
naturally radical and older people moderate or even conservative.
■ With few responsibilities, young people can be idealistic and rebellious, but with the burdens
of home, job, taxes, and children of their own, people tend to become conservative. In 2008,
young voters went strongly to Obama.
■ This life cycle theory does not always work because sometimes whole generations are marked
for life by the great events of their young adulthood.
■ Survivors of wars and depressions remember them for decades, and these experiences color
their views on war, economics, and politics. German sociologist Karl Mannheim called this
phenomenon political generations. Many who lived through the Vietnam War were
automatically critical of the U.S. war in Iraq.
 GENDE THE SHAPE OF PUBLIC OPINION

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Even before the women’s movement, gender made a difference in politics.
■ Traditionally, and especially in Catholic countries, women were more conservative, more
concerned with home, family, and morality.
■ But as a society modernizes, men’s and women’s views change. Women leave home to work,
become more aware of social and economic problems, and express their own political views.
■ In the United States, a gender gap appeared in the 1980s as women became several percentage
points more liberal and Democratic than men. And this was precisely because women had found
the federal government necessary to support home and family.
■ Further, many women disliked the Republican emphasis on war. In 1996, 2000, and 2008, women
were more than 10 percentage points more likely to vote Democrat for president than were men.
■ It may be that, in the modern political world, women will be the natural liberals.
 ETHNIC THE SHAPE OF PUBLIC OPINION

■
GROUP
Ethnicity is related to region and religion but sometimes plays a distinct role of
its own, especially in the multiethnic United States, where some ethnic groups
form political subcultures.
■ American politics is often described in ethnic terms, with WASPs (white Anglo- Saxon
Protestants) and other northern Europeans generally conservative and Republican, and
people of southern and eastern European origin, blacks,
Hispanics, and Asians more liberal and Democratic. This oversimplifies the complexity
of individuals and of politics, but many working politicians still use it as a guide.
■ Ethnic politics changes over the decades.
■ After the Civil War, most blacks were Republican, the party of Lincoln. With Franklin D.
Roosevelt and the New Deal, most African Americans became Democrats and stayed that
way.
 ELITE AND MASS THE SHAPE OF PUBLIC OPINION
OPINION
■ There is often a gap between elite and mass opinion

■ The mass public does not understand much about complicated issues but can
react after decision have been made.

■ Elites, educated and influential people, usually have more complex and
sophisticated perspectives.
 ALMOND’S THREE PUBLICS
■ In his 1950 The American People and Foreign Policy, political scientist Gabriel Almond
proposed that there were three American public opinions, not just one:
1. A GENERAL PUBLIC of a majority that does not know or care about much beyond their
immediate concerns. For example, they show little interest in foreign policy unless the country
is in a war or international crisis.
2. AN ATTENTIVE PUBLIC of a minority who are among the better educated and who
follow more abstract political concerns, such as foreign policy. They are the audience the elite
plays to; in turn, this attentive public passes on views that mobilize the general public.
3. A POLICY AND OPINION ELITE of a few highly influential people who are involved
in politics, often professionally. These members of Congress, appointed officials, and top
journalists devise foreign and domestic policies and articulate them to the attentive and
general publics.
 PUBLIC OPINIONS POLLS
■ Many ways exist to measure the public opinion. Members of Congress measure public opinion
daily based on the phone calls they receive. More recently, they count the “tweets” of social
media to measure mass (especially youthful) response.
■ Public opinion polls or surveys are designed to measure opinions so that we can say the results
are reflective of a broader population. Published surveys, particularly in election years, are
carefully watched.
■ Almost daily we see statistics and percentages on what Americans think of war,
unemployment, health care, and candidates. This is useful for policymakers and candidates.
■ But debate has developed over some of their political side effects. For example, do the polls
give undue attention and influence to uncertain opinions? Do journalists create self-fulfilling
prophecies by treating the polls as authoritative verdicts? Should public-opinion surveys be
treated as a fair and democratic method of deciding public policies? Are polls reliable enough
to determine policy? Who uses surveys, what purpose do they serve, and can we trust them?
 PUBLIC OPINIONS POLLS
■ Do the opinions people express really reflect how they feel about
issues?
■ Most people pay little attention to politics most of the time. They have weak interest in
issues that do not directly touch them and acquire no information about most issues.
■ Can surveys reflect an accurate picture of what people are thinking?
■ So while a well-designed public-opinion poll is the best way to measure the public’s
opinion, do not blindly follow poll data. There are limits to what you can learn from
them. Policymakers must balance what they learn from polls with their own knowledge
about the issues.
SELECTING THE SAMPLE POLLING TECHNIQUES

In deciding whom to sample, the pollster has two major approaches.

1. One, THE STRATIFIED QUOTA SAMPLING, tries to include a proportionally representative cross section of
the society. This is very difficult to carry out because interviewers must question precisely x number of
blue-collar workers, y number of older women, and z number of Republicans. If they query too many or too few
of various groups, they lose proportionality.
2. The second major approach is A RANDOM SAMPLE with no picking and choosing among dozens of
categories. In a truly random sample, the number of blue collar workers (or any other category) interviewed will
be very close to their percentage of the population. Randomization, done now by computers, produces more
dependable results than the quota system.
3. The most reliable method, “AREA SAMPLING,” has 100 to 200 regular interviewers in different areas around
the country who each interview 15 to 20 persons in a designated locality. The sample, which is both random and
highly representative, involves selecting which geographic districts to sample, their population characteristics,
and random selection of which people to question from various categories. The resulting sample is quite close to
that which a completely random selection would obtain and is considerably less expensive.
REACHING THE SAMPLE POLLING TECHNIQUES

■ Polling is expensive, and pollsters try to economize. Unfortunately, the least expensive methods
tend to be the least accurate.
■ The cheapest is to MAIL OUT BALLOTS TO A SAMPLE, but people who are involved
enough to reply will not be representative.
■ TELEPHONE POLLING tries to avoid this problem, but it rarely establishes rapport to obtain
candid replies. For telephone surveys, a computer may dial the numbers nationwide at random,
even unlisted ones. There are at least two problems with phone surveys:
(1) Many people ignore telephone solicitations; and
(2) women, the elderly, and unemployed people are the most likely to be home, making the
sample nonrandom.
■ The most dependable method is still the costly FACE-TO-FACE INTERVIEW, which requires
interviewers to be carefully selected and trained.
ASKING THE QUESTIONS POLLING TECHNIQUES

■ The unbiased wording of questions to avoid slanting responses is also important.

■ In 1999, for example, a Washington Post /ABC poll asked half its sample whether
President Clinton should resign if impeached or “fight the charges in the Senate.”
Fifty-nine percent said resign rather than fight.
■ The other half was asked essentially the same question but worded with the alternative
of resign or “remain in office and face trial in the Senate.” To this, only 43 percent said
resign.
■ A SLIGHT DIFFERENCE IN WORDING—“FIGHT” SOUNDS NASTIER THAN
“FACE TRIAL”—GREATLY SHIFTED RESPONSES.
REFERENCES:

Roskin, M. G., Cord, R. L., Medeiros, J. A., & Jones, W. S.

(2014). Political Science: An Introduction (14th Edition).
Upper Saddle River: Pearson (Chapter 7).

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/people/refere
nce/mahatma-gandhi-changed-political-protest/