Exam 9: Public Opinion

Tony is a pollster. He has a list of 300 people from which he can draw a sample to survey. Tony wants to use the method of random selection to choose his sample. He decides that he will survey every third person on his list, for a sample size of 100 respondents. Has Tony accomplished his goal of using random selection to choose respondents?

People can engage in what Anthony Downs called "________ ignorance" about politics by free riding off people who happen to like politics or need to know about politics for their jobs.

When considering Social Security policy preferences by income group, scholars have found that _____________.

The relationship between the public and the government can be viewed as a special kind of ________, because the president works for all the people because they have hired him or her through their ballots and can fire the president at the next election.

To help predict the outcome of an upcoming Republican primary election, a polling firm randomly surveys 1,000 people from a list of all registered Republican voters in the state of Texas. In this case, the set of all registered Republican voters in Texas is the ________.

Voters are being asked to decide whether to build a new county jail. Showing them photos of prisoners accompanying a news story about the proposal might cue a negative connotation in voters' minds. However, showing them contented prison workers from another county might cue voters to consciously or subconsciously think more positively about building the jail. Both types of photos are examples of ________.

Voters are being asked to decide whether to build a new county jail. The public could be cued by politicians, pundits, other public figures, and television ads to consider the proposal in terms of its potential to raise their taxes on the one hand, or as a way to increase the number of jobs available to potential guards, cooks, and social workers on the other. These two types of cues are ________.

Choosing the best available options given one's interests and information is ________.

What is rationality? How does an individual's rational consideration of his or her interests influence his or her attitudes toward public policies or public figures? How might a person's rational consideration of his or her own self-interest lead him or her to become less informed or less involved regarding important political questions?

Voters appear to separate their opinions about the entire legislative body from their evaluations of their own representatives. They often give ________ evaluations of Congress as a whole, while giving a more ________ evaluation of their individual representatives or senators.

The process of developing attitudes, opinions, and preferences through contact with family and friends is called ________.

Students studying at a university library on Saturday night are probably a ________ sample of the population of college students.

Literary Digest mailed out millions of sample ballots to its readers months before a presidential election and then recorded responses from those completed and returned. From 1920 through 1932, these ________ predicted election results quite accurately, including the margins of victory.

________ are casual surveys or polls that are not designed to be statistically accurate.

What is an ideology? What are the major features of liberal and conservative ideologies in modern American politics? What is the relationship, if any, between ideology and partisan identification?

The proportion of Americans identifying themselves as Democrats has been consistently ________ than the proportion identifying themselves as Republicans since ________.

Although Clarence knows little about politics and does not have many strongly held views on political issues, he responds to a variety of telephone survey questions about current political events to be polite to the interviewer. Clarence's survey responses are likely ________.

The theory of affective intelligence distinguishes between people's dispositions to act in normal situations and how those dispositions can be interrupted when ________ come(s) into play.

Brian is often hopeful about the prospects of new policies to improve social conditions, and he supports the redistribution of wealth and resources. It is most likely that Brian identifies himself as ideologically ________.

Which is a coherent, organized set of ideas and principles that functions as a core from which individuals draw when forming attitudes about public affairs?