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Chapter 15
Political Psychology
Public Opinion and Voting
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Public opinion surveys can be used to
predict the outcome of most presidential
elections within 1-2 percentage points
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Most voters’ preferences are predictable
before the beginning of the campaign, even
though some say they have not decided
Campaigns matter for conveying information
Since campaigns are professionally run, for the
most part they offset each other. But if a
candidate did not campaign, he or she would
probably lose.
Public Opinion and Voting
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Today’s dominant theory of voting
was published in The American Voter
(1960).
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Party Identification = a “standing
decision” to favor one party
By the process of cognitive consistency,
party identification shapes attitudes
towards candidates and issues.
Public Opinion and Voting
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Pocketbook voting is based on selfinterest.
Sociotropic voting is based on beliefs
about what is good for the national
welfare as a whole.
Public Opinion and Voting
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Research suggests that self-interested
voting is in fact rare.
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Plays a role in some issues: smoking regulations, gun
control, taxes
But does not play a role with regard to attitudes on
welfare, health care, crime, energy shortage, or war
Why?
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Because the effects of government policies on
individuals are usually not large, direct, or clear
Because people attribute responsibility for
their personal outcomes to themselves but for
the nation’s outcomes to political leaders
Public Opinion and Voting
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Do voters have unstable, inconsistent,
and non-ideological attitudes?
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Non-attitudes describes the finding that
many people seem to respond more-orless randomly to questions about policy
Relatively few voters seem to think in
ideological terms
Public Opinion and Voting
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Today there are challenges to this
view of voters
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Voters may be “rationally ignorant” by
using cognitive shortcuts to make
political decisions
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People may use “on-line” processing to adjust
their evaluations without remembering why
they did so
Public Opinion and Voting
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Some unstable attitudes reflect true
ambivalence about an issue (believing
there are good arguments on both
sides)
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This leads to apparent inconsistency
depending on which set of contradictory
beliefs are accessible at the time of
decision-making
Public Opinion and Voting
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Voters may look more consistent if
we focus on the issues that they most
care about.
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Look at the “issue public” for the issue
Look at attitudes grounded in values
Public Opinion and Voting
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Whether or not people understand it,
ideological identifications are playing
an increasing role in partisan politics.
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The association of Democrats with
liberal positions and Republicans with
conservative stances is much stronger
than it used to be
Political Socialization
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Party identification typically develops
before adulthood, is significantly
influenced by one’s family, and stays
fairly stable.
Parental influence is greatest on
issues about which they communicate
clearly and repeatedly
Political Socialization
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Political events such as presidential
primaries are times when adolescents’
party identification strengthens,
especially if they talk about the
campaign to family & friends
Political Socialization
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Do early acquired predispositions
indeed last through life?
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Three hypotheses contrasted
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Persistence
Impressionable years (teens & early
adulthood as key)
Lifelong openness
The data support the “impressionable
years” view
Political Socialization
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Newcomb (1943) studied the attitudes of
students attending Bennington College.
Students attending the school came from
conservative Republican families, but the
faculty and the norms of the college were
very liberal.
Students gradually changed their views
during their college years to become more
liberal, and these changes persisted for
the next 50 years.
Political Socialization
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Collective memories are memories
that are broadly shared about events
of the past.
The evidence shows that events that
occur during late adolescence and
early adulthood leave the most lasting
impact.
Group Conflict
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Social class
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In most democracies, middle- and upper-class
voters usually support conservative parties,
while the working-class support parties that
favor the redistribution of wealth downward.
It’s not so simple in the U.S. today, though
there have been times in the past when politics
here divided along class lines.
Group Conflict
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There are strong racial divides in
American politics.
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Blacks are very strongly Democratic.
Whites’ racial attitudes play a role in
their policy preferences on many issues
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Not just voting for African-American
candidates or for clearly race-related issues,
but also for issues such as taxes and
government spending that are not clearly
race-related.
Group Conflict
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There is an increasing gender gap in voting
patterns.
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Women are consistently more likely to vote
Democrat.
Why?
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Women are more caring about others’ wellbeing
Women’s increasing role in the work-force has
sensitized them to gender inequality
Group Conflict
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Women now vote at the same rate men do,
but there is still a gender gap in their
political influence. Women tend to be
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less likely to vote consistently with their issue
preferences
less active in political participation
less informed about political issues
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Those who are more informed also tend to be more
active and to vote more consistently with their issue
preferences; for these women, the gender gap
disappears.
Group Conflict
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Religion
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Traditionally, the split has been between
Protestants voting Republican and Jews
and Catholics voting Democratic.
Today, the big split among religions has
to do with fundamentalism: religious
fundamentalists tend to vote Republican,
while secularists and religious liberals
vote Democratic.
Group Conflict
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Despite increasing political tolerance
as educational levels increase, people
are most likely to support freedom of
expression for those with whom they
agree.
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Younger and better-educated people
tend to be more tolerant.
But when hostilities run high, tolerance
decreases across the board.
The Mass Media
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The 1940s idea of selective exposure
suggests that people may listen only
to those candidates they already
support, leading to a minimal effects
model of the influence of the media.
The Mass Media
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One obstacle to media influence is
reaching the people they want to
influence
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Fewer people are exposed to political
news today than formerly
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Newspaper subscriptions are down
Few people watch TV news, and those who do
tend not to watch it carefully
The Mass Media
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A second obstacle to media influence is
changing attitudes once the message has
been heard
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Those who are most likely to hear the message
are those who are most likely to resist it
Media influence is biggest when the attitude is
about a person or issue that is unfamiliar, and in
primary and nonpartisan elections when party
identification is not an issue.
The Mass Media
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Sometimes, however, truly massive
public exposure to political events
does occur and can produce major
attitude changes
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E.g., JFK assassination; September 11th
The Mass Media
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Important attitude change may result
from long-term exposure
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If political elites agree, those who
receive more exposure will be driven to
support a common position (mainstream
effect)
If political elites disagree, those who
receive more exposure will tend to
polarize around their basic stances
The Mass Media
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However, long-term exposure does
not guarantee persuasion
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E.g., the Monica Lewinsky scandal did not
discredit Clinton
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Public decided it was a private, not public,
issue
Intense media coverage merely polarized
people around their party identifications
The Mass Media
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Thus, massive media exposure is more
likely to polarize people around their
existing predispositions than it is to
persuade them. The media thus often
have only a modest persuasive impact.
The Mass Media
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The media does a good job of
providing information.
However, the audience for “hard
news” is shrinking, and the content of
hard news has gotten softer.
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Less focus on policy issues, more on
human interest, crime, disaster,
sensationalism, and, for political
campaigns, the “horse race”
The Mass Media
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Theorists have posited that the
media is engaged in agenda setting:
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They influence not what the public
thinks, but what it thinks about.
The Mass Media
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Experiments testing this idea show that
the media can set the agenda, but they
cannot tell us whether the media does
normally set it.
In general, politicians, media and the public
seem to go together
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Politicians try to please voters
Media covers the politicians and what it thinks
will interest the public
The Mass Media
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Media coverage of an issue affects
which attitudes come to a voter’s
mind and thus which attitudes most
influence political choices
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This is an example of priming
Example: the Willie Horton ads
The Mass Media
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Issue ownership refers to the idea
that each party “owns” different
issues
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Democrats “own” compassion issues
(health care, education, welfare)
Republicans “own” issues of taxes, crime,
and the military
Each party tries to have the issues it
owns dominate the political agenda
The Mass Media
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Framing makes some aspects of an issue
especially salient in order to promote a
particular interpretation of it
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Works by invoking metaphors & symbols
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E.g., “Vietnam” or “Hitler” as a dominant analogy
during the Gulf War.
Originally, generations differed in which metaphor
was dominant, but with Bush’s focus on the Hitler
analogy, it became dominant for all ages, and support
for the war rose with it.
The Mass Media
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Republicans tend to favor framings
that discuss the abstract issue of
smaller central government, an issue
they “own”
Democrats favor framings that favor
discussion of specific service
proposals, since they “own” many of
these specific issues
International Conflict
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Enemy images
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Group serving biases
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We make favorable attributions for our own country’s
actions but unfavorable attributions for other
country’s actions
Mirror image
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Generally perceived as immoral
Each side comes to believe that it is peaceful and its
enemy aggressive
Blacktop illusion
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People also tend to perceive the enemy’s government
as evil but the people as good
International Conflict
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“Those who cannot remember the
past are condemned to repeat it.”
George Santayana
Is this true?
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History can provide useful lesson,s but
there are dangers of misapplying lessons
from the past inappropriately
International Conflict
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A psychological perspecitive suggests
that leaders rely on bounded
rationality in making decisions:
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They are rational within limits and make
decisions that are “good enough” rather
than perfect
International Conflict
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How do political leaders deal with
crises?
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Stress can reduce the complexity of
information processing and lead to
defensive avoidance and wishful thinking
Groupthink may distort the decisions of
small policy-making elites
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Specific tactics can reduce this tendency
International Conflict
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The psychological perspective in politics,
which tends to focus on factors that
foster irrationality contrasts with the
rational-choice theory of economics, which
views people as motivated by the pursuit of
self-interest
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The difference reflects the complexity of the
human species
Each approach has its own strengths &
weaknesses