Political science
Essay questions:
- What are the nature of the American political system and the importance of political participation?
- What is the importance of public opinion in politics and the various ways political opinions are developed.
- What are the branches of the United States government and what are their significance and importance.
Political participation
Political participation is a very crucial aspect of the American political system. It involves how citizens get to influence policy formulation their implementations, as well as selection of their political leaders. It is attributed to the fact that the people have the freedom of speech and expression, and they can take part in public affairs, register as voters and they can get elected and even hold government offices. This political participation is not limited to individuals and can include parties, the media and also nongovernmental organisations. Political participation is one nature that is clear in the American political system. It majorly involves taking part in political affairs for which costs money as well as time. However, it bears benefits such as more popularity, chances of more votes during an election and a politician gets to find out more about what the people want rather than what are written agendas, plans, programs and manifestos. Political leaders get to find out root problems facing the people they represent (Losco, Joseph and Baker 245).
However, political participation is more of a cost benefit agenda, and there are some political leaders more advantaged than others depending on certain factors. These factors include affluence, ethnicity, gender, etc. These factors influence political participation by either increasing or reducing resources necessary for taking part in political activities such as time and money. Participation also involves mobilizing people to take part in activities. This involves what is referred to as political engagement that makes people get a tendency to take part in the activities. What is fundamental to make people politically engage in political activities, is the influences one has. These influences enable one to draw out people and get them involved and make it easier for the mobilization process. It may be through direct contact with citizens, urging them to participate or indirectly, through networks of other people: friends or family that help mobilize people on one’s behalf (Losco, Joseph and Baker 288).
However, mobilization is affected by several factors such as costs of political action that requires mobilization of people. If the cost is too high then mobilization might be ineffective and bear little to no benefits. The nature of the people the politicians are also targeting greatly matters. They have to be positive in terms of attitudes and mindset for a political action to be effective, otherwise a negative target group may hinder the action as a loss with no viable benefits e.g. rejection, criticism and even fewer votes. Another factor is the ultimate reason or rather the political action that called for the mobilisation (Losco, Joseph and Baker 255).
Participation is also in the form of voting. It is a form of participation that is very important with crucial implications even though it happens after a long time. It is usually influenced by various factors such as age, where majority of voters are the young and the middle age while few old people vote. Wealth and status of employment is another factor that influences voting where the employed and affluent tend to vote more. However, there has been low voter turnout in the United States due to various factors. They include the fact that politics in the United States is very uncompetitive because of the two party systems. Another factor is the hard registration process that requires a lot of details. This discourages many people from taking part in the voting process (Losco, Joseph and Baker 297).
It has also been seen that affluence greatly influences political participation, where the wealthy get to participate more than the poor in political activities and interactions with political leaders. This factor is so because of the aim of protecting their interest and getting benefits from the political activities such as protection from authorities, access to government contracts and other lucrative deals that are associated with the government. However, influence of affluence in politics has been seen to negatively affect voting by the less affluence because of what has been termed as chequebook democracy where the rich get what they want by influencing bills and policies that only favour them. However, this has not stopped the less affluent from participating in politics. They do so mainly through activism. Activism is, as a result, of power as a mass where they exercise their power as consumers. The less affluent form the biggest markets for most consumer goods, therefore, a move to boycott consumption of a certain product may be drastic and have negative consequences for which they get the necessary respect in politics (Losco, Joseph and Baker 262).
There is also another important way of political participation that has been very instrumental over the years. This participation is through formation of certain interest groups in certain fields: from professional, trade, education, labour that oversees their interests catered fro by the government and politicians. These interest groups represent their members by influencing the passing of policies and laws that favour their interests. One of the major ways an interests group exerts their influence is through lobbying. This is very instrumental in getting politicians in line. Former government officials are the best lobbyist because they are very well knowledgeable about the process of politics and how to get the attention of the political leaders (Losco, Joseph and Baker 304).
Importance of public opinion in politics
Political opinion is a very important factor in the whole political system in the United States. It is so because it is a reflection of how peoples’ individualism, opportunities, liberty, freedom and property is respected as values for them as well as how the government tries to play a major role of meeting everyone’s needs. People are very important, since they decide who to vote for, therefore opinions about politicians by the people is very important, and that is why surveys, reports from magazines and newspapers are very important to politicians as they get to know how they are being perceived by the population. This trend has been seen throughout history with the establishment of various opinion polls. These polls are mostly based on surveys and market researches. These opinions end up making politicians improve conduct, improve the policies they make and influence political activities and attitudes. Public opinion develops in people through the attitudes, beliefs together with values they form during political participation and interaction with politicians where they get to see how they perform their duties, shape up policies and the changes they make either positive or negative. These factors help shape up public opinions (Losco, Joseph and Baker 211). Opinions are influenced by values developed over the years. These values start developing early in a person’s life. However, as a person ages, behaviours change, as a result, of the values. The behaviours also change as result of change in generations and this high influences the opinions people have with old people having different opinions from young people. There are various ways or rather channels through which people get to acquire these values that shape their opinions. They include the media, education, family and friends, religious institutions among others (Losco, Joseph and Baker 223).
Political opinions vary depending on various factors. These factors include geography where people from different geographical locations have different political opinions, race especially in the United States where race and cultures are very different and diverse and these influence people’s values and end up also influencing their opinions. Another factor is gender where a big difference usually exists between the different genders, and this creates a gap in terms of reference as well as behaviour and outlook. This is mainly because of the different values that the opposite genders have and because of this women are seen to advocate for certain aspects such as democracy, policies that do not involve force as well as programs that mostly protect social wellbeing as opposed to men who mostly support aggression and force and other factors that are different from women’s values. These differences accrue, as a result, of the different ways men and women socialize during development and growth as age passes (Losco, Joseph and Baker 213).
Political polls as explained earlier are one of the ways of measuring people’s political opinions. They help by giving information about how much people know about certain issues in politics through the remarks and reviews they make. They help show people’s direction as far as certain political issues are concerned. They also help show political leaders how important certain political activities, events, as well as issues are to people, and also how strong certain opinions and values are to the people. Political polling majorly involves carrying out surveys and market researches as their main ways of gathering and acquiring information about people’s political opinions, and they take different formats. These formats include getting information and opinions about a certain candidate; they may also as preference questions in terms of whom they actually prefer. Another way is by giving out negative information about a particular candidate, then afterwards asks questions about that particular candidate and this is referred to as push polls (Losco, Joseph and Baker 221).
However, polling surveys use sampling methods where they use a certain portion of the population to represent the population as a whole and as much this method does not use opinions from everybody, it still has its difficulties in terms of accuracy that increases the sampling error and access to as many people as possible but the positive thing to note is the advancement in technology that has developed the polling activities in various ways such as increased accessibility to cheap internet that facilitate polling via the internet. Public opinion is greatly affected by level of education and a person’s knowledge as this influences the values one has. Because of this and the people tend to know more about institutions than individuals because institutions have more information than individuals, and this influences their opinions more. Another key thing to note is that is that public opinions are greatly influenced by changes in policies whereby the changes in the two always go hand in hand (Losco, Joseph and Baker 207).
Work cited
Losco, Joseph and Ralph Baker (2014) Am Gov 2013-2014. McGraw Hill
