Silent Voices
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A01=Adam J. Berinsky
Absentee ballot
Abstention
Activism
Affirmative action
Ambivalence
Author_Adam J. Berinsky
Benjamin Ginsberg (political scientist)
Big government
Brown v. Board of Education
Calculation
Category=JPWA
Civil disobedience
Cognitive bias
Desegregation
Distrust
Dummy variable (statistics)
Elite
Embarrassment
Employment discrimination
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Equal opportunity
Equal Rights Amendment
Equality of outcome
Error term
Estimation
Exclusion
Extraversion and introversion
Freedom of speech
Ideology
Indication (medicine)
Individualism
Inference
Interviewer effect
Issue voting
Liberalism
Limited government
Missing data
One-Tailed Test
Opinion poll
Ordinary least squares
Point estimation
Political campaign
Political climate
Political philosophy
Politician
Probit
Public Agenda
Public opinion
Public sphere
Questionnaire
Racial integration
Racism
Respondent
Rhetoric
Sampling (statistics)
Selection bias
Self-image
Skepticism
Social desirability bias
Social issue
Social stigma
State of affairs (sociology)
Statistical significance
Tax
The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion
Value pluralism
Voter turnout
Voting
Voting behavior
War effort
Weighting
Welfare
Welfare state
Product details
- ISBN 9780691123783
- Weight: 340g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 08 Jan 2006
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Over the past century, opinion polls have come to pervade American politics. Despite their shortcomings, the notion prevails that polls broadly represent public sentiment. But do they? In Silent Voices, Adam Berinsky presents a provocative argument that the very process of collecting information on public preferences through surveys may bias our picture of those preferences. In particular, he focuses on the many respondents who say they "don't know" when asked for their views on the political issues of the day. Using opinion poll data collected over the past forty years, Berinsky takes an increasingly technical area of research--public opinion--and synthesizes recent findings in a coherent and accessible manner while building on this with his own findings. He moves from an in-depth treatment of how citizens approach the survey interview, to a discussion of how individuals come to form and then to express opinions on political matters in the context of such an interview, to an examination of public opinion in three broad policy areas--race, social welfare, and war.
He concludes that "don't know" responses are often the result of a systematic process that serves to exclude particular interests from the realm of recognized public opinion. Thus surveys may then echo the inegalitarian shortcomings of other forms of political participation and even introduce new problems altogether.
Adam J. Berinsky is Associate Professor of Political Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
