(Questions for Norrander and Wilcox, #7, on the Back)

1. Why do the authors say that on social welfare issues the American public seems to be ideologically conservative but operationally liberal? How has American public opinion seemed to react to a government run health care system looking at the graph in Figure 4.1? How do the authors try to explain the seeming contradiction between the public’s preference for lower taxes but more government services?

2. How have white attitudes changed over the past half-century regarding minority rights, at least in the abstract? How does the white public feel about affirmative action? What interesting conclusions about the relationship between stereotyping of black Americans and attitudes toward affirmative action do Sniderman and Piazza reach? Discuss the new racism explanation for the hostility of whites toward affirmative action and the racial politics explanation. How does the Feldman and Huddy study of 2005 support both of these explanations?

3. What general conclusion about the general public’s attitudes toward foreign policy do most scholars reach? How about major foreign policy events? Has the American public been generally isolationist or internationalist since World War II? What are some recent trends in the public’s attitudes toward defense spending? Discuss recent changes in attitudes toward Russia and China. Looking at Table 4.2 what countries were viewed most favorably by Americans in 2005? Which were viewed least favorably?

4. What have been recent trends in the public’s attitudes toward law and order, women and politics, and abortion? What happened to the American public's attitude toward the death penalty between the 1930s and the 1960s? How about since then? Distinguish between the American public’s attitudes toward traumatic abortion and elective abortion. Why are pro Life advocates more politically effective than the larger group of pro Choice advocates according to the text?

5. Looking at Table 4.4, how stable has ideological self-identification been since 1976? Have liberals or conservatives been the larger group during that time?

6. Which political party has had the larger number of identifiers for nearly all of the period since the mid 1940s? What happened to the number of people who identified themselves as independents in the late 1960s? What’s happened to them since then?

7. Discuss the volatility of presidential popularity. Discuss the honeymoon effect on presidential popularity. How about the rally-round-the-flag effect? How about the economic effect? How do the authors use consumer expectations about the economy to argue for prospective, rather than retrospective, voting? Describe George W. Bush’s presidential approval record.

8. How do the authors explain most abrupt changes in public opinion? Discuss how cohort replacement may explain incremental changes in public opinion. Explain how modernization may explain these incremental effects.