Week 12 — Audit a City's Polls: Who Got Asked, and How Much Can It Say? — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Introduction to Political Science Free sample edition

Traditional alternative (no AI), unpublished. In the course this is a separate assignment that ships unpublished beside the adaptive assignment: same objective, no AI. An instructor who prefers it publishes it and unpublishes or deletes the adaptive one, as the note at its top says.

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 11 of the term — work out two shares from a made-up city's polls, judge which poll can speak for the whole city, weigh a council member's choice between the delegate and the trustee view, and explain to a neighbor why a bigger pile of answers is not a better poll.

This week you learned the difference between a random and a self-selected sample, the four facts a trustworthy poll reports, the margin of error as the approximation of about one over the square root of the sample size, what the margin leaves out, and the delegate and trustee views of representation. Week 1 gave you the empirical and normative sort, and Week 11 gave you the data scaffold for reading real results; this assignment puts both to work on two polls you audit. In this assignment you work two short share problems, interpret each one, and explain to someone who has never studied polling why a bigger pile of answers is not a better poll. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Political Analysis Workshop practice the same ideas from other angles.

The task

You will audit two polls taken in a made-up city about a proposed transit line. Treat the city and every number in it as illustrative: it is not a real place, and no real person, current officeholder, or real poll belongs in it.

Work these two problems, showing how you got each percent:

A made-up city's random sample of 900 residents, drawn from the full voter list, finds that 540 favor a new transit line. What percent of the sampled residents favor it?
The same city's online click poll is answered by 3,600 residents who choose to respond, and 2,880 of them oppose the transit line. What percent of the click-poll respondents oppose it?

Beside each percent, add the interpretation that makes it political science:

Problem 1, the random sample. Use the course approximation of about one over the square root of the sample size, at the 95 percent level, to estimate the margin of error for 900 people, showing each step, and turn it into a range around your percent. Check the poll against the four facts a trustworthy poll reports (sample size, field dates, sampling method, stated margin), and name the one fact the problem does not give you. Name one source of error the margin leaves out, such as question wording or non-response, and explain how it could move the result. Finish by saying what the share shows and what it does not, including whether it shows a correlation or a cause.
Problem 2, the click poll and the council vote. Say what kind of sample the click poll is and whether any margin of error can be attached to it, and explain why its 3,600 answers do not make it more precise about the whole city than the 900-person random sample. Then imagine a council member who must vote on the transit line after seeing both polls. Defend whether that member should act as a delegate or as a trustee, with at least one premise labelled empirical and one labelled normative, state the strongest case for the view you reject as its defenders would put it, and give your reply.

Explain it to a non-expert

A neighbor tells you, "The click poll had four times as many people, so it must be the more accurate one." Write a 3–5 sentence message to that neighbor that explains, in everyday words, why the way people got into a poll matters more than how many answered, uses the two polls from this assignment as the example, and names one limit that even the random sample has. Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one good answer is possible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a cook explaining to a new kitchen helper why the soup is tasted only after stirring. Model answer: "We stir the pot before tasting, because the salt sinks and the top would taste bland. One spoonful from a stirred pot tells us about the whole pot. A whole bowl skimmed from the top would still mislead us, however big the bowl. The limit is that one spoonful can still be a little off, so we taste twice when it matters."

Use that pattern for your message to the neighbor, with your own wording and evidence.

Show how you got each percent and the margin. A reader should be able to reproduce both percents and the margin from the values above without guessing which values or steps you used.

After you finish, reread your work and revise at least one calculation, sample judgment, premise label, or explanation. Then add a short reflection (3–4 sentences) on one of two options of equal weight, your choice: (a) which calculation, sample judgment, or premise label you changed and why the new version is better; or (b) where you first trusted the bigger pile of answers or read the margin as covering more than sampling error, and how you caught it.

Deliverables

Submit a single audit file containing:

the two percents, each with the values and the operation shown;
your random-sample audit (the margin for 900 people and its range, the four-fact check with the missing fact named, one error source the margin leaves out, and what the share shows and does not show);
your click-poll audit and council vote (what kind of sample the click poll is, why its larger count adds no precision about the city, a delegate-or-trustee defense with premises labelled by kind, the strongest case for the rejected view, and your reply);
your message to the neighbor; and
your revision note with the reflection option you chose.

Choose how you show it. Present your work as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about four minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled diagram comparing the two polls with a short note. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the percents, the margin, the audit, and the writing yourself, without any AI tool. Use only the numbers the assignment gives you, bring in no real poll, and keep every example free of living politicians and current officeholders. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's audit, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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