MATTHEW LESENYIE

The purpose of this course is to explore issues related to public opinion, including what opinions are and how they are formed, what factors do and do not influence opinion development and change, and what implications these psychological processes have for the role of public opinions in democratic government.

This course has four objectives.

1. We’ll learn the organizing structures behind political beliefs: ideology, identity, personality and ambivalence.

2. Second, we’ll explore psychological processes of political judgment and evaluation: cognitive ability, informational cues, unconscious response, and emotion.

3. Third, we’ll examine how forces outside the individual work to persuade opinions, specifically how framing and media shape opinions.

4. Fourth, we will learn how polling is conducted and scrutinize a lot of polling data.

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This course will develop the following student skills: The student will be able to articulate how public opinion polling is conducted. The student will be able to critically evaluate polling data by its methodology and findings. The student will be able to write a critical evaluation of arguments for and against multiple public policy proposals by leveraging polling information. The student will be able to interpret opinion change as a function of external influences like media and rhetorical framing.