TY  - BOOK
AU  - Alvarez,R.Michael
AU  - Brehm,John
TI  - Hard Choices, Easy Answers: Values, Information, and American Public Opinion 
SN  - 9780691220192
U1  - 303.3/8/0973 23
PY  - 2020///]
CY  - Princeton, NJ : 
PB  - Princeton University Press, 
KW  - Political culture
KW  - United States
KW  - Political psychology
KW  - Public opinion
KW  - Values
KW  - POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Process / Campaigns & Elections
KW  - bisacsh
KW  - Affirmative action
KW  - Anti-Semitism
KW  - Attitude
KW  - Authoritarianism
KW  - Beliefs
KW  - Black
KW  - Brehm, John
KW  - Casualties
KW  - Catholic
KW  - Converse, Philip
KW  - Donnelly Marketing Service
KW  - Downs, Anthony
KW  - Ecological inference
KW  - Egalitarianism
KW  - Elite
KW  - Equivocation
KW  - Euthanasia
KW  - Feldman, Stanley
KW  - Foreign policy
KW  - Gay rights
KW  - General Social Survey (GSS)
KW  - Heterogenity
KW  - Heteroskedastic choice
KW  - Humanitarianism
KW  - Ideology
KW  - Individualism: economic
KW  - Internal Revenue Service
KW  - Jackson, John E
KW  - Kinder, Donald R
KW  - Lazarfeld, Paul
KW  - Media
KW  - Michigan school
KW  - National Election Studies (NES)
KW  - Operation Rescue
KW  - Piazza, Thomas
KW  - Predispositions
KW  - Racial policy
N1  - Frontmatter --; Contents --; List of Figures --; List of Tables --; Acknowledgments --; CHAPTER 1. A Fickle Public? --; Part 1. THEORY AND METHODS --; CHAPTER 2. Predispositions --; CHAPTER 3. Why Does Political Information Matter? --; CHAPTER 4. Ambivalence, Uncertainty, and Equivocation --; Part 2. MASS PUBLIC OPINION --; CHAPTER 5. Ambivalent Attitudes: Abortion and Euthanasia --; CHAPTER 6. Uncertainty and Racial Attitudes --; CHAPTER 7. Equivocation --; Part 3. MASSES AND ELITES --; CHAPTER 8. Mass Opinion and Representation --; CHAPTER 9. Do Elites Experience Ambivalence Where Masses Do Not? --; CHAPTER 10. Politics, Psychology, and the Survey Response --; Notes --; Index; restricted access
N2  - Those who seek to accurately gauge public opinion must first ask themselves: Why are certain opinions highly volatile while others are relatively fixed? Why are some surveys affected by question wording or communicative medium (e.g., telephone) while others seem immune? In Hard Choices, Easy Answers, R. Michael Alvarez and John Brehm develop a new theory of response variability that, by reconciling the strengths and weaknesses of the standard approaches, will help pollsters and scholars alike better resolve such perennial problems. Working within the context of U.S. public opinion, they contend that the answers Americans give rest on a variegated structure of political predispositions--diverse but widely shared values, beliefs, expectations, and evaluations. Alvarez and Brehm argue that respondents deploy what they know about politics (often little) to think in terms of what they value and believe. Working with sophisticated statistical models, they offer a unique analysis of not just what a respondent is likely to choose, but also how variable those choices would be under differing circumstances. American public opinion can be characterized in one of three forms of variability, conclude the authors: ambivalence, equivocation, and uncertainty. Respondents are sometimes ambivalent, as in attitudes toward abortion or euthanasia. They are often equivocal, as in views about the scope of government. But most often, they are uncertain, sure of what they value, but unsure how to use those values in political choices
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691220192?locatt=mode:legacy
UR  - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9780691220192
UR  - https://www.degruyter.com/cover/covers/9780691220192.jpg
ER  -