| Age-cohort tendency | Holds that a significant break in the pattern of political socialization is almost always concentrated among younger citizens.
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| Agents of socialization | Influences on socialization such as family, schools, peers, the mass media, and political leaders and events.
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| Conservatives | Those who emphasize the marketplace as the means of distributing economic benefits but look to government to uphold traditional social values.
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| Ideology | A consistent pattern of opinion on political issues that stems from a basic underlying belief or set of beliefs.
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| Liberals | Those who favor activist government as an instrument of economic security and equitable redistribution of resources but reject the notion that government should favor a particular set of social values.
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| Libertarians | Those who oppose government as an instrument of traditional values and of economic security.
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| Party identification | The personal sense of loyalty that an individual may feel toward a particular political party.
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| Political socialization | The learning process by which people acquire their political opinions, beliefs and values.
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| Population | In a public opinion poll, the term population refers to the people (for example, the citizens of a nation) whose opinions are being estimated through interviews with a sample of those people.
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| Populists | Those who favor activist government as a means of promoting both economic security and traditional values.
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| Primacy tendency | Refers to the fact that what is learned first is often lodged most firmly in one's mind.
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| Probability sample | A sample for a poll in which each individual in the population has a known probability of being selected randomly for inclusion in the sample.
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| Public opinion | Those opinions held by ordinary citizens that they express openly.
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| Public opinion poll | A device for measuring public opinion whereby a relatively small number of individuals (the sample) are interviewed for the purpose of estimating the opinions of a whole community (the population).
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| Sample | In a public opinion poll, the relatively small number of individuals who are interviewed for the purpose of estimating the opinions of an entire population.
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| Sampling error | A measure of the accuracy of a public opinion poll. The sampling error is mainly a function of sample size and is usually expressed in percentage terms.
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| Structuring tendency | Refers to the tendency of earlier learning to structure later learning.
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