POS 3204 Exam 2 Review Chapter 5 Ideology An interrelated set of attitudes and values about the proper goals of society and how they should be achieved Converse s findings about Ideology o Converse found that most people do not have a belief system a configuration of ideas and attitudes which are bound together by some form of constraint or functional interdependence Converse s 5 categories of ideology share of the population Do not tie their like or dislike of a candidate to any sort of o No Issue Content positions that they take Likes Bush because of his sincerity He surrounds himself with good people and he is well connected Tend to judge leaders based largely on personal conditions Dislikes Bush because every time a Republican is in office I m in the o Nature of the Times like the pocketbook voters unemployment line Is this unsophisticated o Group Interest ethnic or other group Equate elected officials with the interest of one s particular age Likes Gore because his healthcare reforms so no senior citizens will have out of pocket medical expenses has vague understanding of the liberal conservative divide Dislikes Democrats because they are too liberal with little to no People who organize their thoughts based on the traditional liberal o Near Ideologue between the parties elaboration o Ideologues conservative spectrum Likes Bush because he is for limited government He wants to cut taxes and reduce the deficit Attitude Constraint Some dimension not only a liberal conservative dimension that governs and controls multiple attitudes o Tests the proposition that the beliefs of the public are constrained along other dimensions than liberal conservative ideology Consistency in beliefs towards welfare Consistency in beliefs towards foreign engagement Criticisms of Converse o A Product of the Times o Many argue that the Party differences have grown Public Perception of Party o Scholars have found that the correlation between issue positions has increased over Differences the decades o Group Ideology Converse considers this to be a lower level of sophistication but some scholars argue that organizing thoughts around group interest is perfectly rational Ideological Sorting see Fiorina Abramowitz article for more discussion o Fiorina s claim of party sorting explains the distance between party affiliations based on their ideologies which argue that the divide is between conservatives and liberals where the sorting takes place among political parties Measurement Error o No method of measuring public opinion in this class will provide perfect measurement of opinion Error is inherent in every measurement technique Any deviation from what we are trying to measure is measurement error Effects of double sided vs single sided questions think about in class experiment o Double sided questions Are considered to be better measures of attitudes generally Provide a counterargument to the statement Considered more reliable measures of people s actual opinion Very important when studying ideological thinking since they are better assessments of whether people issue opinions Correspond to the liberal conservative continuum attitude constraint expected to be higher o Single sided questions Promotes agreement with the single states position because it does not provide respondents with other choices Positions of Fiorina and Abramowitz on polarization o Polarization o Abramowitz argues that polarization in America is happening currently and will a presumption that refers to an individual s position on a given issue and or policy is defined by their identification of a particular political party She argues that Abramowitz is simply describing sorting rather than polarization continue to happen if things continue as is He argues that Americans are moving further away from the moderate political ideologies and closer to the more extreme ends of their party i e liberal or conservative argues that Americans are no more polarized now than they were thirty years ago but more sorted on a basis of party affiliation and ideology She argues that Abramowitz is simply describing sorting rather than polarization o Fiorina Low Information Rationality People may not assess every potentiality when expressing an attitude but make due with what they have available o May allow people to express consistent beliefs in the absence of ideology o What many people actually do Satisficing Most people do not make the optimal choice but instead do the bare minimum amount to make an adequate choice o Three Ways to Satisfice The tendency for people to search in the easiest places Drunkards Search Gresham s Law rather than the ones that are the most likely to yield results more relevant information out of people s minds Pseudo Certainty Effect and undervalue inconsistent info Personal information about candidates and issues can drive The tendency to overvalue consistent information Heuristics A shortcut to ideological consistency o The way in which people satisfice is often to utilize heuristics o Allow people to look like ideologues without the prerequisite knowledge o Generally require much less effort and time than fully thinking something out 5 Types of Heuristics o Party Identification PID o Representativeness Assessment o Likeability Heuristic People have implicit ideas about what a good Increase the association in the mind of the respondent leader looks like in terms of background and demographic characteristics between two things that they think are good or bad support a politician or policy to determine one s own support of beliefs Using information on whether or not important interest groups Using a single event or conception to encapsulate a broader spectrum o Group Cues o Symbolism Likert Question A type of item appearing on an opinion poll whereby a statement is presented to respondents who are asked whether they agree or disagree with the statement Kinder 5 Factors that Influence Opinion o Personality stable personal characteristics that influence a wide variety of political Chapter 6 opinions o Self Interest o Values o Historical Events o Group Attitudes Authoritarian Personality Key events in childhood linked to adulthood intolerance Parental Causes of Authoritarian Personality o Origins of Authoritarianism for Parental Practices Affection only as a reward for good behavior Clearly defined family roles with strong father and weak mother Can also be genetically inherited to some extent Policy Positions of Authoritarians