Public Opinion, Voting and Elections

Units

1. 1

   How opinions form

   3 lessons

   1. Political socializationExplain how family, school, peers and the events of a generation's youth shape party identification, using The American Voter and the cohort evidence, and say what socialization cannot explain.
   2. Information and nonattitudesExplain Converse's 1964 claim that many citizens hold nonattitudes, trace how Zaller's receive-accept-sample model produces survey answers, and say how heuristics let voters do without full information.
   3. Framing and elite cuesDefine framing and priming, show with Tversky and Kahneman's and Iyengar's experiments how presentation moves opinion, and explain how followers take their positions from party elites, with Lenz's evidence.
2. 2

   Polling and sampling

   3 lessons

   1. Probability sampling and the margin of errorExplain why a random sample of about 1,000 can describe a country, compute and read a margin of error of about three points, and say what the margin does not cover.
   2. The Literary Digest and GallupExplain why the Literary Digest's 1936 poll of 2.4 million respondents called the wrong winner while Gallup's far smaller random sample did not, naming sampling frame bias and nonresponse bias, and say what 1948 added.
   3. Modern polling problemsExplain why response rates have collapsed, how weighting tries to repair a skewed sample, and why state polls missed in 2016 and again in 2020, naming the leading explanations and what they leave unproven.
3. 3

   Partisanship and polarization

   3 lessons

   1. Party identificationExplain the Michigan model of party identification, place a voter on the seven-point scale, and judge how stable the attachment is against Fiorina's running tally and Green, Palmquist and Schickler's social identity view.
   2. Elite and mass polarizationMeasure elite polarization with DW-NOMINATE party medians, measure mass polarization with the Pew overlap chart, and explain the debate between Fiorina's sorting without polarization and Abramowitz's view that the public has polarized.
   3. Affective polarizationDistinguish affective from ideological polarization, read the feeling thermometer trend and the marriage and hiring evidence of Iyengar and coauthors, and explain Mason's account of social sorting and negative partisanship.
4. 4

   Turnout

   3 lessons

   1. The calculus of votingState Downs's paradox of voting, apply Riker and Ordeshook's R = PB - C + D to a decision to vote, explain expressive and duty-based voting, and read US turnout as the puzzle the model leaves.
   2. Who votesState the resource model of participation of Verba, Schlozman and Brady, read turnout by age and education, describe mobilisation by parties and groups, and explain why the electorate differs from the population.
   3. Rules and turnoutExplain how registration, voter ID, early voting and compulsory voting change the cost of voting, read US presidential turnout over time, and compare turnout across democracies.
5. 5

   Vote choice and the spatial model

   3 lessons

   1. Retrospective and group votingState Fiorina's retrospective voting, read the relation of economic growth to the incumbent party's vote with a scatter, weigh Achen and Bartels's critique that voters respond to events unrelated to government, and explain voting by social group.
   2. The median voterState Downs's spatial model of electoral competition, prove with a left-right line that two candidates converge on the median voter, state Black's median voter theorem, and list its assumptions.
   3. Limits of the modelExplain why valence issues, several policy dimensions, primaries and abstention keep candidates from converging, and read a two-dimensional policy map with voters and candidates.
6. 6

   Campaigns and money

   3 lessons

   1. Campaign effectsTrace the minimal-effects tradition from Lazarsfeld's Erie County study of 1940 to Kalla and Broockman's 2018 meta-analysis, state what campaigns do change, priming, learning and mobilisation, and read evidence that persuasion effects in general elections are near zero.
   2. Campaign finance lawTrace campaign finance law from FECA (1971) and its 1974 amendments through Buckley v. Valeo (1976), BCRA (2002) and Citizens United (2010), distinguish contributions from independent expenditures, and read the growth in spending.
   3. Does money buy votes?State Jacobson's finding that challenger spending matters more than incumbent spending, explain the endogeneity problem in reading spending and votes, describe the pattern of donor giving, and weigh the evidence that money buys influence rather than votes.
7. 7

   Redistricting and election law

   3 lessons

   1. Redistricting and gerrymanderingExplain redistricting and the one person, one vote rule, define packing and cracking, compute the efficiency gap in a worked example, and state the holding of Rucho v. Common Cause (2019).
   2. The Voting Rights ActState the main provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, including Section 2 and Section 5 preclearance, explain the Gingles test (1986) for vote dilution, and trace Shelby County v. Holder (2013) and later cases.
   3. Electoral systemsCompare plurality and proportional systems, explain Duverger's law, show with an example how the same votes become different seats, and describe ranked-choice voting and how it counts.
8. 8

   Party realignments

   3 lessons

   1. Critical electionsState V. O. Key's 1955 theory of critical elections, Burnham's cycle of party systems, list the five party systems on a timeline from 1796, and weigh the critics who doubt that realignments come in regular cycles.
   2. 1896 and 1932Compare the realignments of 1896, when McKinley's Republicans beat Bryan's Democrats and began a long Republican era, and of 1932, when Franklin Roosevelt built the New Deal coalition, using electoral votes and the groups that shifted.
   3. The southern realignmentTrace the shift of the white South from the Democratic to the Republican Party from the 1960 election through Goldwater in 1964, Nixon and Wallace in 1968, Reagan's 49-state win in 1984 and the 2020 map, and weigh explanations of race, economics and religion.