Public Opinion
Polls can be biased when the survey questions include complicated language. This type of bias is often referred to as...
Measurement error
This voting reform changed the nature of political competition. The reform made it much more difficult for parties to exchange favors for votes because it left no legal way for the parties to know if voters kept their side of the bargain.
Australian ballot
These compel government leaders to take the public’s opinion into account if they want to keep their jobs
Elections
When the National Rifle Association wants to prevent new restrictions on firearms, its members shower Congress with letters, e-mails, faxes, and phone calls.
Grassroots
President Franklin Roosevelt used radio to give these addresses to calm Americans during the Great Depression and World War II
Fireside chats
V.O. Key describes this as "“those opinions held by private persons which governments find it prudent to heed”"
Public opinion
The most important factors that influence whether people vote
Age and education
Assume a state has six representatives in the House. If so, that state has this many electoral votes in the Electoral College.
8
An interest group advocating parental rights in education provides stickers and a magazine to those who pay its membership fee. These stickers and magazines are examples of this type of incentive.
Selective
The equal access provision of this policy required stations to provide equal time to candidates for office
The Fairness Doctrine
The process of acquiring political attitudes
Political socialization
This law explains why in a system in which a single winner is chosen by plurality voting, serious competitors will be reduced to two
Duverger's Law
Their pro-British leanings put this political party on the wrong side of the War of 1812
The Federalists
A member of Congress receives three-thousand letters with the exact same text, supposedly signed by different people, all advocating she vote for a piece of legislation.
Astroturf
A headline in a newspaper from 1891 reads “Scandal in Bangor! Mayor Caught Taking Bribes for Bridge Project while Mistress Profits as Well”.
Yellow journalism
This identity shapes opinions and organizes other political attitudes most consistently for most Americans
Political party
According to Anthony Downs’s calculus of voting, an individual’s decision whether or not to vote is based on the following formula: R = BP – C. These letters represent...
R - Expected utility from voting,
B - Utility from preferred candidate’s victory,
P - Probability of casting the deciding vote,
C - Cost of voting
This led to the unraveling of the New Deal coalition of Democrats
The Civil Rights Movement
Appeals from citizens and groups to legislators for favorable policies and decisions
Lobbying
The adaptation of what technology "democratized" newspaper printing by allowing them to increase their reading audience?
The penny press (or steam power)
This term is used to describe elaborately organized sets of political attitudes
Ideologies
The D term was added to the calculus of voting formula to explain how, in some cases, voting is rational. The D term stands for this in the updated formula, R = BP – C + D.
Expressive benefit of voting
Political needs provoked by the Vietnam War as youth argued if they were old enough to die, they were old enough to vote led to this amendment.
26th Amendment
“I know it was silly to spend an entire day volunteering to hand out flyers to get the public to support the American Medical Association’s efforts to make flu vaccines free nationwide, but it was a good cause and I’m happy I did it.” With this sentence, the speaker is extolling this incentive of interest group participation.
Moral
Organizations that base the majority of their content on the work of trained reporters
Legacy outlets