Public Opinion and Polling
These polls survey people as they leave polling places on Election Day to predict election results before all votes are counted.
This is the most common form of political participation in America.
What is voting?
The United States has this many major political parties.
What is two?
Someone who believes in limited government role in the economy and traditional social values typically identifies as this.
What is conservative?
This persistent gap shows that women have voted at higher rates than men since 1980 and tend to be more liberal on social safety net issues.
What is the gender gap?
The bigger this number when polling, the more accurate results will typically be.
What is sample size?
This type of voting behavior means looking at an incumbent's past performance.
What is retrospective voting?
This term describes when someone votes for all candidates from the same party in an election.
What is party-line voting (or straight-ticket voting)?
This third ideology wants limited government in BOTH economic AND social spheres. "Socially liberal, Economically conservative."
What is libertarian?
This is generally considered the most important agent of how people develop their political beliefs/values.
What is family?
This should be the margin of error for a good poll?
What is 3%?
This constitutional amendment banned poll taxes in federal elections, removing a barrier that had been used to prevent African Americans from voting.
What is the 24th amendment?
This is a long-term process where the coalitions supporting each party fundamentally change, often triggered by a critical election.
What is party realignment?
This ideology supports government regulation of the economy but opposes government regulation of social/personal behavior.
What is Liberal?
This is the process by which people develop their political beliefs and values.
What is political socialization?
This type of poll is designed to spread negative information about a candidate while pretending to be a survey.
What is a "Push Poll"?
This is the belief that your vote matters and that you can influence government.
What is political efficacy?
This occurs when a third party candidate takes votes away from a major party candidate who is ideologically similar, potentially causing them to lose.
What is the spoiler effect?
Despite political polarization among elites, when you average all Americans together, public opinion clusters near this position on the ideological spectrum.
What is moderate?
This effect explains how major historical events like the Great Depression, Vietnam War, or 9/11 shape the political views of an entire generation that experiences them during young adulthood.
What is the Generational effect?
This occurs when a poll only surveys people who have landlines, excluding younger cell-phone-only users, making it unrepresentative.
What is sampling bias?
These two demographic factors make someone MORE likely to vote in the United States.
What are: Higher education, Higher income, older age, and higher SES?
This electoral system where each district elects one representative and whoever gets the most votes wins perpetuates the two-party system.
What is the single-member plurality system?
This trend since the shows that Democrats have become more uniformly liberal and Republicans more uniformly conservative, with fewer moderates in each party.
This pattern shows that as people age, they tend to become slightly more conservative, though the effect is smaller than commonly believed and varies by issue.
What is the life-cycle effect?