Framing A Vote
From Parks and Rec. (Season 5, Episode 2)
Categories:
Run time: 0:29
Clip Description: In an effort to get Sweet-ums out of Pawnee Parks, Leslie and Ann hold a town hall meeting. Both Leslie and Ron try to frame their questions to get citizens to vote their way.
American Politics Concepts Discussed/Connected To: This clip connects the use of town hall meetings in shaping public opinion, as well as the concept of single issue voting.
Possible Uses in Classroom: This clip can be used to discuss single-issue voting and public opinion shaping the way in which the citizens vote in their town.
Discussion Questions
- Both sides in the scene write the question so that the answer follows from it. Survey researchers have measured this for decades: the same policy draws measurably different support depending on whether it is called welfare or assistance to the poor, an estate tax or a death tax. If opinion moves that much with wording, what are pollsters measuring, and is there a settled opinion underneath the wording waiting to be found?
- A town hall gives the floor to whoever shows up and is willing to speak into a microphone. What kind of person is that? Make the case that an official should weigh the thirty people in the room heavily because they are the ones who cared enough to come, and then make the case that doing so systematically misreads the town.
- Single-issue voting looks irrational on its face, since you are ignoring most of what a candidate would do in office. Name the one issue on which you would vote against a candidate you agreed with about everything else. Then either defend that as a sensible way to vote or explain why it is not.
Assignment
Find two polls from different organizations asking about the same policy within the past year with different question wording. Pew, Gallup, Marquette Law School and AP-NORC all publish their full question text and toplines, which is what makes this possible. Reproduce both questions exactly, report the gap in the results, and then write two pages separating how much of that gap is wording, how much is the sample and the survey mode, and how much is simply the date. Finish by writing the question you would ask, and say in advance which way you expect your own wording to tilt the answer.
For AP Students
AP U.S. Government and Politics
Unit 4: American Political Ideologies and Beliefs
Topics: 4.5 and 4.6, on measuring public opinion and evaluating opinion data
Skill: Data Analysis (3.A, describe the data presented; 3.C, explain patterns and trends)
Big idea: Methods of Political Analysis
Leslie and Ron each put the same question to the town in wording that makes their preferred answer the obvious one. In twenty-nine seconds the clip demonstrates question wording, which is one of the few pieces of survey methodology the course asks students to evaluate directly rather than simply recognize. It is short enough to open a class with and to run twice.
Discussion questions
- Write out both versions of the question as they are asked in the clip. For each one, name the single word or phrase doing the work.
- Polls report a margin of error, but wording effects are not inside it. Explain what the margin of error does account for, and how two honest polls on the same policy can differ by more than that margin.
- If wording moves the answer this much, does public opinion on a policy exist before someone asks the question? Answer yes or no and defend it in two sentences.
Short activity
Write the biased pair (15 minutes). Take any policy the class has already discussed. Each student writes two versions of a single survey question, one built to produce support and one built to produce opposition. Students trade with a partner, who marks the loaded words. The pair then writes a third, neutral version together and states what had to be taken out to get there. Collect a few of the neutral versions and ask the class which of them still tilts, because most of them will.
Clip hosted on Critical Commons.