POLS 110 1st Edition Lecture 10 Outline of Last Lecture I. Methods of preventing voting participationII. GerrymanderingIII. Brown v. Topeka Board of EducationIV. Civil RightsV. Government’s response to Civil Rights MovementVI. Women’s Rights Outline of Current Lecture I. The nature of public opinionII. Variability III. IntensityIV. RelevanceV. LatencyVI. Political knowledgeVII. Sampling theory Current LectureI. The nature of public opiniona. Public opinion: opinions of citizens that are openly statedi. How informed is public opinion?b. Informed opinion is generally “deeper” opinionc. Lack of information creates “shallow” opinion; more likely to fluctuate over timed. Private opinion: what people REALLY think; can’t measureII. VariabilityThese notes represent a detailed interpretation of the professor’s lecture. GradeBuddy is best used as a supplement to your own notes, not as a substitute.a. Public opinion can change quickly; this is generally true of issues that are new or situations that change rapidlyi. Abortion is a low variability issueii. Low variability issues: not going to change people’s opinions iii. High variability: you can change opinions III. Intensitya. How strongly people feel about political issues. Connected to relevanceIV. Relevancea. Does the issue matter to you right now? b. Issues that aren’t clearly relevant tend to have low intensity V. Latencya. “unknown” opinion; people may not realize they have a certain opinion until a political issue brings it out in debate; often based on little information b. We develop this opinion on other things we know about that seem relevantc. Also hard to know if people are forming a latent opinion d. Politicians: before bringing an issue up, have to make sure people know the issueVI. Political knowledgea. Not the same as public opinionb. Factual knowledge about structure and processc. More political knowledge generates more fact-based opinionsVII. Sampling Theorya. The Literary Digest and George Gallupi. Gallup tried to figure out what the Literary Digest did wrong in political predictions based on pollsb. They needed:i. Random samplingii. How does a random sample work?iii. Why does a random sample work?iv. Sample size: how big is big enough?c. The Birthday
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