POLS 43001 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Elitism, Role Model
17 Nov 2016
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11/2/16
● Takeaways:
○ Join the party
○ Interest groups are your friends
● Political parties
● Interest groups
○ much more policy focused
○ What do interest groups do?
■ they can mobilized voters who strongly support a certain issue, but don’t
have much party affiliation
■ especially in local elections — don’t necessarily know the name of
candidate
■ Provide resources
■ provide validity
■ information is probably the most important thing that interest groups
provide to candidates
■ advertising
■ endorsements
■ money
■ media/ outreach
● pluralism
○ no group wins or loses
○ people belong to many groups
○ interest groups are the link between citizens and government
○ everybody competes
● Elitism
○ power is not divided evenly
○ most interest groups rife supporting people at the top
○ elites work together to maintain bias
○ work together to fix elections
○ this process is not necessarily compatible with capitalism
● Applied to campaigns
○ if pluralism, need to compete broadly for money, balance interest of different
groups, and rely on interest groups to learn about the public
○ if elitism, need to deplete narrowly for the right money, listen more to your closest
allies, and rely on interest groups to evade the public
11/7/16
● Public Opinion Polls — How to Interpret them
● Takeaways:
○ Polls are planning tools; not just predictors
○ The election may be over, but the campaign never is
● Problems of Representativeness
○ sampling error
■ Not representative of the american public as a whole
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