POLI SCI 1100 QUIZZES FOR EXAM 3

Which of the following interpretations of partisanship is correct?

A party might be a shorthand cue for some voters but a source of personal identity for others.

What lessons about public opinion can we draw from The Federalist Papers?

American public opinion from the beginning has been treated as a political force to alternatively be shaped, mollified, or exploited.

How did the practice of presidential elections change during the first party system in the United States?

As competing slates of delegates pledged to support specific presidential candidates, the candidates replaced individual electors as the objects of voters' decisions.

Why did the Framers have such a pervasive fear of political parties?

Historical experiences about the dangers that resulted from factional strife along with 18th century social beliefs caused the fear

Opponents have voiced numerous objections for expanding the franchise, but what has not happened as a result of reducing barriers to voting?

Incumbents continue to win reelection at very high rates

Which of the following is true about the Democratic national party convention that convened to renominate President Jackson in 1832?

It is considered to be the first national party convention

Why did property restrictions and voting restrictions exist in the colonies?

Members of the upper-class minority took for granted their right to govern and were not about to risk the existing social order by extending voting rights

The fact that some people in the United States may not have a telephone or only have a cell phone or refuse to participate in polls illustrates what about scientific polling?

No poll is completely free of the biases they introduce in drawing the sample.

What did Alexis de Tocqueville suggest about voting rights in the United States?

Once electoral rights are extended to one group, there will be demands to extend them to another group and that will lead eventually to universal suffrage

Which of the following statements about third parties is true?

Only those third parties that manage to supplant one of the two reigning parties as a viable option in voters' minds gain rather than lose support from strategic voters

How do outsider tactics differ from insider tactics?

Outsider tactics impose real pressure to push politicians to act in ways they otherwise would prefer not to

Which of the following statements about political information is true?

People are reluctant to pay the cost of acquiring information that has no practical payoff so their opinions appear to be uninformed and unstable.

Why is it logical for citizens to not vote?

The benefits are collective and they enjoy the payoff even if they have not helped to produce them by voting

Why did David Truman and other scholars argue that the American political system was particularly conducive to pluralist politics?

The decentralized structure offered numerous points of access where groups could bid for favorable policies

Why does modern politics breed professional lobbyists?

The growing scope and complexity of government requires agents who understand how institutions work

Why has the encouragement of the federal government itself been the most important of the dynamics behind the expanding interest group universe?

The growing scope of government activity has encouraged the proliferation of organizations in the nonprofit and public sectors

Which of the following statements about sampling is true?

The larger the sample the more closely the sample's answers will closely approximate the answers if the entire population could be asked.

Which of the following criticisms of interest groups is most accurate?

The power and resources possessed by lobbyists tend to reflect the power that the groups they represent have in society

Why does the Constitution create incentives for party organization?

The provision for enacting laws and electing leaders puts a huge premium on building majority alliances across institutions and electoral units

Robert Putnam's primary insight into collective social engagement is that ______.

group participation and therefore civic interaction has declined over the years

Other things being equal, the voting rates for men and women ______.

had been roughly equal for decades but women are now more likely to vote

How did politicians determine public opinion before the advent of scientific polling?

haphazardly through information supplied by editorials, pamphleteers, and local leaders

No matter how well organized, electoral alliances fail ______.

if they cannot get enough people to vote for their candidates

Universal suffrage for women was achieved ______.

in 1920 with the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment.

Spending in presidential campaigns ______.

is focused on television advertising especially in the battleground states

According to Caughey and Warshaw, dynamic responsiveness ______.

is incremental in the short run and with large shifts in policy due to changing attitudes building up over time

The effect of the McGovern-Fraser Commission was ______.

it changed the system so the party base has more influence than insiders

The experiences of George McGovern in 1972 and Jimmy Carter in 1976 under the new rules illustrated that

outsiders with tenuous links to others in the party could compete and make it harder to win and govern

Every expansion of suffrage since the adoption of the Constitution has had to do which of the following?

overcome both philosophical objections and mundane calculations of political advantage

Responsibility for nominating presidential candidates during the first party system rested with the

parties' legislative caucuses

What is the term used to describe politicians' awarding jobs, offices, government contracts, and other benefits to their supporters?

patronage

Most scholars who study public opinion believe that expressed opinions ______.

reflect underlying attitudes

The effect of the Supreme Court decision in Buckley v. Valeo (1976) was that

reporting requirements and contribution limits were constitutional, but limits on spending violated the free speech protections of the First Amendment

A republic differs from a democracy because ______.

republics delegate power to a smaller number of elected citizens and republics often have a greater number of citizens and a greater sphere of country

Elections allow ordinary citizens to, in aggregate, ______.

reward or punish elected officials for their performance in office

The 2018 midterm election ______.

saw Democrats take control of the House, while the Senate remained in Republican hands

Voters who coalesce around causes such as gun control or gun rights are ______.

single-issue voters

The fact that interest groups vary widely in wealth and how readily they can be organized for action combined with policy gridlock and political paralysis raises concerns that

successful lobbying subverts the basic principles of democratic equality and majority rule

The system of proportional representation ______.

tends to produce more legislative parties, but it has never been tried in the United States on any significant scale

What were two of the more important reforms of the Progressive Era?

the Australian ballot and primary elections

The experiences of Michael Dukakis in 1988 or Mitt Romney in 2012 illustrate that

the actions of candidates can convey a message subverting the one intended

The patterns of public opinion with regard to the National Anthem controversy illustrate that ______.

the opinions most people hold on political issues rely heavily on cues and signals the leaders of their preferred party send on the issues

Which of the following is an example of a policy or idea promoted by a third party that ended up in one of the platforms of the major parties?

the regulatory innovations sought by the Populist Party in the 1890s

What affects the margin of error in a poll?

the size of the sample

Duverger's law explains ______.

why in a system in which a single winner is chosen by plurality voting, serious competitors will be reduced to two

What factors have the strongest influence on voting?

What factors have the strongest influence on voting?

Turnout for the 2016 presidential election was about ______.

60%

Which of the following is a simple definition of public opinion proposed by the political scientist V. O. Key Jr.?

"those opinions held by private persons which governments find it prudent to heed"

The Sons of Liberty and the English Bill of Rights Society were early examples of

public interest lobbies

Which of the following is true about voting in the United States prior to the American Revolution?

Every colony imposed a property qualification for voting

What is one of the major consequences of V. O. Key Jr.'s definition of public opinion?

Every government, democratic or otherwise, has to pay attention to public opinion in some fashion.

How did party competition affect the spoils system?

It provided a private reward to party activists who helped overcome the free-rider problem, which would have left the parties stillborn

Which president started the trend of having an in-house pollster taking regular readings of the public pulse?

Jimmy Carter

What lessons can we draw from President Obama's 2008 and 2012 campaigns about voter turnout?

Massive and effective turnout efforts by candidates and parties can get potentially free-riding supporters to the polls

What is one of the major concerns for specialized interest groups working in an issue area?

Similar groups appeal to the same supporters and this makes the formation of coalitions tricky

What does the fight over financial reform legislation tell us about the role of interest groups in the United States?

They may be omnipresent in American politics, but they are not omnipotent

What party found its only presidential success by nominating a popular military hero without known political coloration and obscuring party divisions by not writing a party platform?

Whig Party

Which state enfranchised women first?

Wyoming

Although most Americans consistently say they prefer that control of government be divided between the parties, ______.

a large majority of voters identify themselves as Republicans or Democrats and loyally vote for their party's candidate

In An Economic Theory of Democracy, Anthony Downs defined a political party as

a team of men seeking to control the governing apparatus by gaining office in a duly constituted election

The decision of representative democracies to hold regular, free, and competitive elections represents

an imperfect solution to the problem of delegation

Political alliances ______.

are coalitions that need sustained political efforts to hold together because individuals cooperate only as it serves their purposes

The attitudes of Americans toward politicians ______.

are increasingly negative because public distrust of government has deepened markedly as Americans believe that public officials are corrupt and government wastes taxpayers' money

The terms liberal and conservative ______.

are the ideological labels commonly used in American politics

How does Krehbiel conceive of significant party behavior?

behavior and objectives that are independent of personal preferences

Individual opinions sometimes may be badly informed and unstable, ______.

but aggregate public opinion is both stable and coherent

How do scholars measure partisanship?

by asking respondents a series of questions that place them on a 7-point scale

By and large, Americans seem to support a wide range of economic and social policies that are commonly classified as ______.

liberal

The party brand ______.

may impose conformity costs on politicians because they may need to subordinate their views and ambitions to the party's welfare and reputation

For James Madison, factions were by definition ______

pernicious because they pursue selfish aims contrary to the rights of others or the public interest

What have scholars discovered about voting based on a number of different field experiments?

personal visits combined with a message about the closeness of the election increased turnout the most

Candidates and parties trying to win elections have no choice but to ______.

piece together coalitions out of the major social groups that constitute the raw material of politics

Lowering the voting age to 18 in 1971 reflected ______.

political needs provoked by the Vietnam War as youth argued if they were old enough to die, they were old enough to vote

What type of election allows the party's voters to nominate candidates?

primary

The term straw poll, an analogy for finding out what public opinion is, refers to ______.

tossing straws in the air to see which way the wind is blowing