Town Hall Protests and Public Opinion on Healthcare Reform

Here's a recent article by Anthony DiMaggio, an ISU alum and Ph.D. student at the University of Illinois, Chicago who currently teaches various courses in the Politics and Government Department. In it, he discusses the factors that may be influencing current, rapid shifts in public opinion about healthcare reform in the United States, including especially the Town Hall protests and media coverage of them and the issue more generally.

He also touches on the role of public opinion polls themselves play in "limiting debate" about healthcare reform through their choice of which policy options to include in their questionnaires -- a point closely related to one Jimmy raised in his presentation about public opinion on same sex marriage in class today.

What Explains the Age Gap in Support for Same-Sex Marriage?

In a recent post on the "Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science" blog, Columbia University Professor Andrew Gelman discusses some analysis he's done with public opinion data from the Annenberg Public Policy Center on support for same-sex marriage (among other things) across different age groups.

One of his more surprising findings is that although young adults are considerably more supportive of state laws that would allow same-sex marriage than middle-aged ones, they're not more likely to report knowing someone who's gay, which suggests that a commonly asserted explanation for young adults' relative support for same-sex marriage -- that they're more likely to know, and therefore sympathize with, people who are most directly affected by same-sex marriage legislation -- is probably not as useful as it seems at first glance.

You can read the full post for more information about the wording of the questions that were used to elicit the data for Dr. Gelman's analysis and what he plans to do next to try to get a better handle on what explains the age gap in support for state laws allowing same-sex marriage. The reader comments at the bottom of the page also raise some interesting possibilities about why the data look the way they do and what underlying explanations might be driving them.

Misleading Charts and Graphs

As I mentioned in class today, ISU's own Professor Gary Klass maintains a website of misleading charts and graphs. You can view them all, along with his comments about why they're "bad charts" and what might have been done to make them more informative here. His site also has some tips for using Microsoft Excel to generate charts here.

Welcome to POL 312!

POL 312, Public Opinion, is an upper-level political science course that has the overarching objective of helping you become a more sophisticated consumer of research and reporting on the American public's attitudes and beliefs about public policy and political discourse, personalities, and events.

I'll be using this blog to provide access to Internet materials introduced in class, let you know about other resources that might come in handy for your issue blogs and portfolio materials, and occasionally comment on public-opinion-related current events.

I'm looking forward to meeting you all in class tomorrow (Tuesday, August 18) at 11 AM in 207 Schroeder Hall. In the meantime, feel free to check out the syllabus (pdf) and/or email me at sgelbman@ilstu.edu if you have any questions or concerns.