How people vote and why — public opinion, polling method, partisanship, and media effects that are overstated.
11 topics · 11 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Public Opinion
Walter Lippmann · 1922
People act on the 'pictures in their heads' rather than on the environment itself, and mass media and stereotype construct that picture long before…
+2 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Pulse of Democracy: The Public-Opinion Poll and How It Works
George Gallup & Saul Forbes Rae · 1940
Argues scientific sampling can measure public opinion on any question more accurately than letters, straw votes or elected representatives claiming…
Primary sources and full treatments.
A Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare
Kenneth J. Arrow · 1950
Proves that no voting rule can aggregate individual preference orderings into a consistent social ranking while satisfying a small set of seemingly…
+6 more at this level
11 works
Walter Lippmann
People act on the 'pictures in their heads' rather than on the environment itself, and mass media and stereotype construct that picture long before any individual can verify it against reality.
about 7 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Pew Research Center
Walks through how a modern probability-based survey is actually built — sampling frame, weighting, margin of error — so a headline poll number can be read for what it does and doesn't claim.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Brennan Center for Justice
Estimates that the congressional maps used in the 2024 election gave Republicans a net advantage of roughly sixteen seats compared with maps drawn to neutral redistricting standards, most of it concentrated in a handful of states that controlled their own line-drawing.
link checked 17 Sept 2026George Gallup & Saul Forbes Rae
Argues scientific sampling can measure public opinion on any question more accurately than letters, straw votes or elected representatives claiming to speak for their constituents, and lays out the method that makes this possible.
Kenneth J. Arrow
Proves that no voting rule can aggregate individual preference orderings into a consistent social ranking while satisfying a small set of seemingly reasonable fairness conditions at once.
link checked 17 Sept 2026V. O. Key Jr.
Identifies a distinct type of election in which durable shifts in group voting alignments realign the electorate for a generation, rather than every election being either a normal continuation or a random deviation.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Philip Converse
Most voters' political opinions are not organised into a coherent ideology at all — they are loosely connected or unconnected attitudes that shift over time in ways closer to random noise than to principled change.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Sidney Verba, Kay Lehman Schlozman & Henry E. Brady
Political participation depends on three separable resources — time, money and civic skills — rather than on socioeconomic status as a single variable, which explains why some resource-poor groups still participate heavily through their institutions.
Alan S. Gerber & Donald P. Green
A randomised field experiment on 30,000 voters found face-to-face canvassing raises turnout substantially, direct mail slightly, and phone calls not at all — evidence against self-reported campaign-contact effectiveness from surveys.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Stefano DellaVigna & Ethan Kaplan
Uses the staggered rollout of Fox News across US cable markets between 1996 and 2000 to show a persuasive media outlet measurably shifted town-level Republican vote share, with a smaller effect on subsequent elections once viewers adjust.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Shanto Iyengar, Gaurav Sood & Yphtach Lelkes
Americans have not polarised much on policy positions, but they have grown to dislike and distrust the opposing party far more, which is better explained as partisanship acting like a social identity than as an ideological divide.
link checked 17 Sept 2026