Public Opinion Book Review Examples

Chapter 10

In the United States of America, and our democratic form of government, public opinion is essentially how politicians are elected. Mostly during election years it is hard to go a single day while reading or listening about politics to not hear terms and phrases such as, “straw polls”, or “recent polls show”. These straw polls or other types of polls are all ultimately showing how people feel about a candidate or their politics, or their opinions about them. While politicians and their teams hire consultants to analyze these polls, it made me wonder how politicians were able to win consecutive elections without these sophisticated methods. I liked the statement in the reading that, “This might sound odd that myself and many other members of Congress that I knew, used to get a lot of ideas on how the general public felt by reading the walls in the bathrooms in towns and cities that we were in.” (p. 1126) This shows that no matter the time period public opinion has always been the reasoning for election and re-election for politicians.
While reading the chapter I had to agree with many of the statements made about gender, socio-economic status, age, and certain politics. I have to agree that many persons I talk to are split equally, according to gender, about their political viewpoints. Many politicians who favor education and diplomatic routes rather than violence are favored heavily by females. Those persons that are on the lower end of the socio-economic status scale tend to favor democrats due to their funding of welfare, food stamps, and other programs. Those persons who are higher on the socio-economic status scale or who own businesses are more likely to favor republicans due to their tax breaks and less government intrusion. When it comes to ethnicity Asians tend to favor republicans, due to most coming from those countries with highly stable economic governments, while Hispanics from Central America are more likely to favor democrats due to their countries unstable economic status.
I believe that the chapter accurately showed the difference in public opinion in almost every aspect it could give a reference to. The years in which the public opinion was viewed a big factor as displayed in the charts about the Afghanistan War (pg. 1205, 1206). The closer the time to September 11th, 2001, the more support there was for the war, while closer to the present, the public opinion on it has dramatically decreased among all parties. I was unable to dislike anything in the chapter as I feel that it was an excellent demonstration of public opinion and the many ways it is influenced.