Chapter 5: Public Opinion and Political Socialization

Synopsis The history of capital punishment in the United States demonstrates several characteristics of public opinion: (1) The public's attitudes toward a given government policy vary over time. (2) Public opinion places boundaries on allowable types of public policy. (3) Citizens are willing to register opinions on matters outside their expertise. (4) Governments tend to react to public opinion. (5) The government sometimes does not do what the people want. If the government does not do what the people want, can it properly be called a democracy? The majoritarian and pluralist models of democracy introduced in Chapter 2 are compared for their assumptions about public opinion. This chapter examines the validity of those assumptions.

Before the development of opinion polling, there was no reliable way to know what the people wanted. Sampling theory combined with computer technology enabled researchers to study public opinion much more accurately. Two important characteristics of the distribution of public opinion are its shape (bell-shaped, skewed, or bimodal) and its stability over time.

The process of political socialization‹how people acquire their values through the interplay of cultural factors, knowledge, and ideology‹underlies the formation of public opinion. The family, peers, schools, and the community are early agents of political socialization. Later influences include neighbors, fellow workers, club members, the mass media, and the voting experience. Political values, the foundation of public opinion, are shaped differently for each individual through the political socialization process. Still, people with similar social backgrounds tend to share similar political opinions. Income, region, ethnicity, religion, religiosity, race, and education are all factors that affect values. Of these, the latter three produce greater opinion divergence today on issues that compromise freedom for either order or equality.

Most people will classify themselves along a liberal-conservative continuum, but few will reflect true ideological thinking in public opinion surveys. A two-dimensional framework for assessing the values of order and equality. yields four ideological categories of comparable size. Liberals favor equality but not order. Conservatives want government to enforce order but not equality. Communitarians want more government action to promote both order and equality. Libertarians oppose government actions for either purpose. Liberals and conservatives had less difficulty placing themselves on a traditional liberal-conservative scale than communitarians or libertarians.

People who lack a consistent set of political attitudes and beliefs rely on four factors to form political opinion: self-interest, information, political leadership, and belief schemas or pre-existing knowledge and opinions that are applied to specific issues. Despite the complexities of individual opinion formation, strong correlations have been found between people's social background, general values, and specific opinions,

In some instances public opinion appears to be stable and well defined and thus in conformance with the majoritarian model of government decision making. More often, public opinion is sharply divided, inconsistent, and based on relatively superficial knowledge. Politically powerful groups frequently are at odds over what policies government should adopt. Division and disagreement among influential, competing interests allow leeway for political decision makers to rely less on disparate public opinion and more on bargaining and compromise, a pattern more characteristic of the pluralist model. Public opinion is viewed as a force that rarely casts the decisive vote but one that helps set broad parameters for government policy.