Lecture 14 Outline of Current Lecture II Defining Public Opinion III Defining Political Socializing a Political Socialization IV Age and Voting V Finding Public Opinion VI How do Polls help VII In reality Current Lecture l Public Opinion Finding the opinion of the population and recording it It s how people feel about the government and current issues Experiences from life situations and upbringing with family all affect someone s opinion POLS 206 1st Edition ll Political Socialization how people get their political affiliation opinion This process is mainly influenced by upbringing with family kids often take on their parent s political position However other factors do have an affect a School the government socializes kids into politics how good an education you received how much your school relied on government funding and how well the government responded b Media certain stations and programs have more of a political affiliation people also often watch programs that reaffirm their views c Peer Groups people most often hang out with people similar to them also reaffirms their views d Socioeconomic level this is affected by jobs also changes what policies someone will support depending on how well economically someone is doing lll Age and Voting essentially the younger crowd tend not to vote and so the government often favor the older crowd for that is where their main support is coming from Vl Finding Public Opinion found by a Random Sampling using social scientific data to find the general opinion with having to get every single person s opinion b Wording matters affects people s decisions surveys have non bias questions c Sampling Error helpful in getting a better idea of actually how accurate the data is help gives an approximation of what the number could be V How do polls help affects politicians decisions gives them a better idea what the general populations opinion is at so it is to politician s advantage to follow the polls a Exit polls the media uses in order to guess who will win elections like a foreshadow for who the winner will be b Misuse of polls push polls most used in states where the winner is a close call VI In reality most people do not know that much about politics very mis informed or have a lot of misconceptions and so just relying on public opinion can be a bad idea
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