CAS PO 141 Lecture Notes - Lecture 24: Selection Bias, Keystone Pipeline, School Prayer

• School: Boston University
• Department: Political Science
• Course: CAS PO 141
• Professor: Kate Krimmel

Document Summary

Attitudes: thoughts/feelings about people, groups, social issues, or events. Ex: attitudes about increasing funding for charter schools, building. Keystone xl pipeline, etc: organized set of political attitudes. Ex: liberal, conservative: important predictor of political behavior, changes over time. James stimson: public mood ; driving force is policy. Partisanship: disposition toward parties; identify to party as they would to racial, ethnic, religious group, differing theories on where it comes from, how susceptible to change. People tend to become more conservative as they get older. Practical or psychological: people filter information through their party id. 85% of self-identified republicans thought bush won fairly. Responsible pollsters will report numbers and confidence intervals. Potential problems with polls: sampling error, selection bias. Can correct some of this with weights, but polls still aren"t perfect: measurement error. Question wording matters ex: support for welfare" vs assistance to the poor". Voter knowledge: low voter knowledge public opinion not meaningful, delli, carpini, and keeter 1996.