Peffley
POLITICAL
BEHAVIOR
Lecture
Outline No. 1
Empirical
Bases of Political Behavior
I. Explanatory
Frameworks
1. Dependent and Independent Variables
2. Headaches, migraines and
indeterminacies:
a. We define behavior quite broadly
b. Many
different factors (independent variables) may partially explain the same
behavior
c. No single explanation is the best for all
circumstances and individuals
3. Pol Beh = f(Internal Predisp's, Percept's of
External Situation)
4. A more complete mapping of factors that
influence behavior:
Distant Social Forces
(History,
culture, economic forces, institutions, norms)
Immediate Social
Environment for development of individual predispositions
(Political
socialization, Group membership, Mass media)
Individual
predispositions
(Personality,
General Values and Beliefs, Specific Attitudes, etc.)
Immediate Situation
Political Behavior
II. Political Attitudes: the building blocks of
political behavior.
1. Definition: An attitude is
a predisposition to
respond to a particular stimulus (i.e., object) in a
particular manner. Political attitudes
are those directed toward political
objects, such as political candidates,
political issues, political parties, and political
institutions.
2. Consequences:
mediate perceptions, guide political behavior.
3. Characteristics: inferred, internal; relatively consistent over time and across
situations.
4. Components
of an attitude:
a. Affective (feelings, evaluations giving
direction, intensity)
b. Cognitive (beliefs, ideas)
c. Conative (behavioral tendencies)
III. PUBLIC
OPINION: Aggregate of political attitudes.
Useful Definitions: Pollster is someone who goes from door to
door asking people what they think they think of issues they
haven't thought about. Good Citizen
is someone who knows enough about his own weaknesses to understand that even
honest politicians have to be watched closely.
Bigot is someone who hates different people than I do. Alienation is the belief that
the paranoids in power are out to get you.
A. CHARACTERISTICS
1. Direction.
2. Intensity.
3. Informational content.
4. Stability over time. "Non-attitudes"
5. Strength: Strong (i.e., salient, important,
accessible) attitudes are more likely to guide behavior, especially when the
situation is "weak" (e.g., ambiguous, new, etc.)
6. Organization/Structure of attitude or
opinion clusters.
Horizontal
Structure: attitudes at the same level
of abstraction (e.g., attiudes toward different specific issues, such as
favoring an increase in government services and increasing taxes.
Vertical
Structure More general beliefs and
values shape more specific attitudes via psycho-logic, not syllogistic
reasoning. E.g., attitudes toward
welfare and value of individualism.
B. Beliefs: propositions that we regard as true
and real about the world.
Empirical
(the way the world is)
Normative
(the way the world ought to be)
C. Values:
the ends (not means) people feel are most important in their life. Social
values include a commitment to freedom, equality, humanitarianism, the morality
of warfare, etc.
IV.
Methods for Studying Public opnion:
Survey Research
1. Drawing a Sample: Selecting indiv's in pop.
to interview
2. Types of Samples:
a. Probability
sample: variation on random sample,
which yields a representative microcosm of the population and allows the
analyst to generalize results from sample to population, with a ceratin degree
of sampling error, which is affected more by the size of the sample than the
size of the population.
b. Non-probability or haphazard samples.
c. Systematically
biased, unrepresentative samples:
(e.g., Literary Digest poll of
1936 and various "straw" polls)
3. Question
wording: examples of "loaded" questions and other types of bias in
question wording.
4.
Analyzing survey data: covariation between two variables: Do variables X (e.g.,
watching violence on TV) and variable Y (e.g., aggressive behavior) go together
or vary together?
5. Surveys
have various advantages (naturalness of the design, generalizability of results
to population) and disadvantages (inability to disentangle cause-and-effect
relationships, expense). The weaknesses
of surveys may be offset by also relying on different methods, such as
experiments, which have their own strengths (ability to identify
cause-and-effect relationships) and weaknesses (e.g., problems with
generalizing results beyond the artificial laboratory and to the wider
population).
6. See survey checklist