The Nature And Origins Of Mass Opinion
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The Nature And Origins Of Mass Opinion
''The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion'' is a 1992 non-fiction book by political scientist John Zaller that examines the processes by which individuals form and express political opinions and the implications this has for public opinion research. The book has been called "the single most important book on public opinion since V. O. Key's 1961 classic, ''Public Opinion and American Democracy''." Zaller argues that public opinion is heavily influenced by exposure to elite discourse on political matters. He attributes variation in political attitudes between individuals to individual-level differences in receptivity to this discourse, in terms of political awareness (i.e., does an individual receive political messages from elites?) and concordance with prior beliefs (i.e., do the messages received conform to an individual’s basic political values?). By rejecting the notion that voters hold single preferences (or, in fact, that individuals possess structured belief systems ...
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John Zaller
John Raymond Zaller (born 1949) is a political scientist and professor specializing in public opinion at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was an Editor of the American Political Science Review. He graduated from Saint Monica Catholic High School in Santa Monica, CA. He pursued his undergraduate studies at the University of California, Riverside. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1984. Career Zaller is best known for his 1992 book '' The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion'', in which he argues that changes in public opinion are due to the influences of political elites. Although he acknowledges the mainstream media's shortcomings, Zaller holds a positive view of "infotainment", arguing that even sensationalist and superficial media coverage of politics serves to inform and does increase awareness of political issues. Zaller teaches undergraduate classes on electoral politics and the mass media's influence on public opinion in election ...
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Cambridge University Press
Cambridge University Press is the university press of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by Henry VIII of England, King Henry VIII in 1534, it is the oldest university press A university press is an academic publishing house specializing in monographs and scholarly journals. Most are nonprofit organizations and an integral component of a large research university. They publish work that has been reviewed by schola ... in the world. It is also the King's Printer. Cambridge University Press is a department of the University of Cambridge and is both an academic and educational publisher. It became part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, following a merger with Cambridge Assessment in 2021. With a global sales presence, publishing hubs, and offices in more than 40 Country, countries, it publishes over 50,000 titles by authors from over 100 countries. Its publishing includes more than 380 academic journals, monographs, reference works, school and uni ...
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Non-fiction
Nonfiction, or non-fiction, is any document or media content that attempts, in good faith, to provide information (and sometimes opinions) grounded only in facts and real life, rather than in imagination. Nonfiction is often associated with being presented more objectively, like historical, scientific, or otherwise straightforward and accurate information, but sometimes, can be presented more subjectively, like sincerely held beliefs and thoughts on a real-world topic. One prominent usage of nonfiction is as one of the two fundamental divisions of narrative (storytelling)—often, specifically, prose writing—in contrast to narrative fiction, which is largely populated by imaginary characters and events, though sometimes ambiguous regarding its basis in reality. Some typical examples of nonfiction include diaries, biographies, news stories, documentary films, textbooks, travel books, recipes, and scientific journals. While specific claims in a nonfiction work may p ...
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Political Science
Political science is the scientific study of politics. It is a social science dealing with systems of governance and power, and the analysis of political activities, political thought, political behavior, and associated constitutions and laws. Modern political science can generally be divided into the three subdisciplines of comparative politics, international relations, and political theory. Other notable subdisciplines are public policy and administration, domestic politics and government, political economy, and political methodology. Furthermore, political science is related to, and draws upon, the fields of economics, law, sociology, history, philosophy, human geography, political anthropology, and psychology. Political science is methodologically diverse and appropriates many methods originating in psychology, social research, and political philosophy. Approaches include positivism, interpretivism, rational choice theory, behaviouralism, structuralism, post-struct ...
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Opinion Poll
An opinion poll, often simply referred to as a survey or a poll (although strictly a poll is an actual election) is a human research survey of public opinion from a particular sample. Opinion polls are usually designed to represent the opinions of a population by conducting a series of questions and then extrapolating generalities in ratio or within confidence intervals. A person who conducts polls is referred to as a pollster. History The first known example of an opinion poll was a tallies of voter preferences reported on Telegram Messenger to the 1824 presidential election, showing Andrew Jackson leading John Quincy Adams by 335 votes to 169 in the contest for the United States Presidency. Since Jackson won the popular vote in that state and the whole country, such straw votes gradually became more popular, but they remained local, usually citywide phenomena. In 1916, ''The Literary Digest'' embarked on a national survey (partly as a circulation-raising exercise) and correc ...
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Public Opinion
Public opinion is the collective opinion on a specific topic or voting intention relevant to a society. It is the people's views on matters affecting them. Etymology The term "public opinion" was derived from the French ', which was first used in 1588 by Michel de Montaigne in the second edition of his ''Essays'' (ch. XXII). The French term also appears in the 1761 work ''Julie, or the New Heloise'' by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Precursors of the phrase in English include William Temple's "general opinion" (appearing in his 1672 work ''On the Original and Nature of Government'') and John Locke's "law of opinion" (appearing in his 1689 work ''An Essay Concerning Human Understanding''). History The emergence of public opinion as a significant force in the political realm dates to the late 17th century, but opinion had been regarded as having singular importance much earlier. Medieval ''fama publica'' or ''vox et fama communis'' had great legal and social importance from the 12 ...
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Discourse
Discourse is a generalization of the notion of a conversation to any form of communication. Discourse is a major topic in social theory, with work spanning fields such as sociology, anthropology, continental philosophy, and discourse analysis. Following pioneering work by Michel Foucault, these fields view discourse as a system of thought, knowledge, or communication that constructs our experience of the world. Since control of discourse amounts to control of how the world is perceived, social theory often studies discourse as a window into power. Within theoretical linguistics, discourse is understood more narrowly as linguistic information exchange and was one of the major motivations for the framework of dynamic semantics, in which expressions' denotations are equated with their ability to update a discourse context. Social theory In the humanities and social sciences, discourse describes a formal way of thinking that can be expressed through language. Discourse is a soci ...
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Preference
In psychology, economics and philosophy, preference is a technical term usually used in relation to choosing between alternatives. For example, someone prefers A over B if they would rather choose A than B. Preferences are central to decision theory because of this relation to behavior. Some methods such as Ordinal Priority Approach use preference relation for decision-making. As connative states, they are closely related to desires. The difference between the two is that desires are directed at one object while preferences concern a comparison between two alternatives, of which one is preferred to the other. In insolvency, the term is used to determine which outstanding obligation the insolvent party has to settle first. Psychology In psychology, preferences refer to an individual's attitude towards a set of objects, typically reflected in an explicit decision-making process (Lichtenstein & Slovic, 2006). The term is also used to mean evaluative judgment in the sense of liking ...
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Validity (statistics)
Validity is the main extent to which a concept, conclusion or measurement is well-founded and likely corresponds accurately to the real world. The word "valid" is derived from the Latin validus, meaning strong. The validity of a measurement tool (for example, a test in education) is the degree to which the tool measures what it claims to measure. Validity is based on the strength of a collection of different types of evidence (e.g. face validity, construct validity, etc.) described in greater detail below. In psychometrics, validity has a particular application known as test validity: "the degree to which evidence and theory support the interpretations of test scores" ("as entailed by proposed uses of tests"). It is generally accepted that the concept of scientific validity addresses the nature of reality in terms of statistical measures and as such is an epistemological and philosophical issue as well as a question of measurement. The use of the term in logic is narrower, relati ...
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Cambridge
Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge became an important trading centre during the Roman and Viking ages, and there is archaeological evidence of settlement in the area as early as the Bronze Age. The first town charters were granted in the 12th century, although modern city status was not officially conferred until 1951. The city is most famous as the home of the University of Cambridge, which was founded in 1209 and consistently ranks among the best universities in the world. The buildings of the university include King's College Chapel, Cavendish Laboratory, and the Cambridge University Library, one of the largest legal deposit libraries in the world. The city's skyline is dominated by several college buildings, along with the spire of the Our Lady and the English Martyrs ...
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Framing (social Sciences)
In the social sciences, framing comprises a set of concepts and theoretical perspectives on how individuals, groups, and societies organize, perceive, and communicate about reality. Framing can manifest in thought or interpersonal communication. ''Frames in thought'' consist of the mental representations, interpretations, and simplifications of reality. ''Frames in communication'' consist of the communication of frames between different actors. Framing is a key component of sociology, the study of social interaction among humans. Framing is an integral part of conveying and processing data on a daily basis. Successful framing techniques can be used to reduce the ambiguity of intangible topics by contextualizing the information in such a way that recipients can connect to what they already know. In social theory, framing is a schema of interpretation, a collection of anecdotes and stereotypes, that individuals rely on to understand and respond to events. Goffman, E. (1974). ...
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Left–right Political Spectrum
The left–right political spectrum is a system of classifying political positions characteristic of left-right politics, ideologies and parties with emphasis placed upon issues of social equality and social hierarchy. In addition to positions on the left and on the right, there are centrists or moderates who are not strongly aligned with either end of the spectrum. On this type of political spectrum, left-wing politics and right-wing politics are often presented as opposed, although a particular individual or group may take a left-wing stance on one matter and a right-wing stance on another; and some stances may overlap and be considered either left-wing or right-wing depending on the ideology. In France, where the terms originated, the left has been called "the party of movement" and the right "the party of order". Ambrose Bierce's 1911 Devil's Dictionary characterized the right/left distinction, at the same time wryly noting each side's opinion of the other, by defining a ...
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