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Ideology Among Mass Publics and Political Elites
Abstract
Although the characterization of the general public's level of attitudinal constraint and continuity as modest has rested in part on assumed contrasts with political elites, there are scarcely any systematic, parallel studies of the two populations. This article utilizes comparable measures from cross-sectional and panel surveys included in the National Election Studies and in the National Convention Delegate Studies. Overall, political party elites have a vastly more constrained and stable set of political preferences-in terms of the traditional liberal-conservative dimension-than does the mass public, a conclusion that applies whether the test is a demanding one based on opinions about policy issues or a less stringent one based on appraisals of socio-political groups and prominent political actors. Stratifying the mass public according to level of political activity generates clear, steplike differences in constraint and continuity, but ideological consistency among party elites substantially exceeds that of even the most active stratum of the mass public. These results demonstrate that, however flawed the standard survey instrument may be as a means of ascertaining ideological thinking, it performs exceedingly well in making the kind of distinctions to be expected on a priori grounds. The contrasts between the two populations have strong implications for two-way flows of communication.
... Our study contributes to the literature on the comparison of mass and elite ideologies. Beginning with the seminal work of Converse (1964), a large body of research has been dedicated to measuring and explaining the relationship between mass and elite preferences in advanced liberal democracies (Converse and Pierce 1986;Dalton 1985), especially the United States (Bond and Messing 2015;Jennings 1992;M. K. Miller 2014). ...
A popular view of nondemocratic regimes is that they draw followers mainly from those with an illiberal, authoritarian mind-set. We challenge this view by arguing that there exist a different class of autocracies that rule with a relatively enlightened base. Leveraging multiple nationally representative surveys from China over the past decade, we substantiate this claim by estimating and comparing the ideological preferences of Chinese Communist Party members and ordinary citizens. We find that party members on average hold substantially more modern and progressive views than the public on issues such as gender equality, political pluralism, and openness to international exchange. We also explore two mechanisms that may account for this party–public value gap—selection and socialization. We find that while education-based selection is the most dominant mechanism overall, socialization also plays a role, especially among older and less educated party members. Our findings caution against the simple, dichotomous characterization of political regimes and underscore an important tension between modernization and democratization in developing societies.
... Specifically, policymakers have several characteristics that promote defensiveness in response to counterattitudinal information. Policymakers' political attitudes are more stable (Granberg & Holmberg, 1996;Jennings, 1992;Lupton et al., 2015) and more extreme (Fiorina & Abrams, 2008) than those of public, and policymakers have higher levels of involvement with and knowledge about politics (Delli Carpini & Keeter, 1996;Lee et al., 2021). These factors-along with policymakers having a greater likelihood of previously encountering counter-frames due to high exposure to political information (Chong & Druckman, 2007)-suggest policymakers are more strongly motivated and better armed to counter-argue against counterattitudinal information (Carpenter, 2019;Taber & Lodge, 2006). ...
In experimental work, researchers have found that policymakers discount the opinions of constituents with whom they disagree. We build on these results with a national sample of local policymakers in the United States, exploring whether communicators can prevent policymakers from discounting their opinions by providing evidence of their own knowledge about a topic. We find that policymakers discount the opinions of hypothetical constituents with whom they disagree, but there is evidence that providing unambiguous evidence about a letter-writer’s positive traits can reduce this discounting. We conclude with a discussion of implications for theory as well as practical implications for communicating with policymakers.
... Finally, to provide greater context for the public's use of cues, we compare the use of the cues by the general public to expert cue use, evaluating judgments made by a sample of state legislators. In comparing elite and public samples, our study is similar to other work evaluating citizen competence (Jennings, 1992;Granberg and Holmberg, 1996;Lupton et al., 2015). As mentioned above, prior critiques of evaluations of cue use have argued that using judgments of the most well-informed members of a sample as a normative standard of the rationality of cue use is flawed (Kuklinski and Quirk, 2000: 155). ...
Political scientists have proposed that party cues can be used to compensate for the public's well-documented lack of substantive political knowledge, but some critics have argued that applying party cues is more difficult than assumed. We argue that this debate has proven intractable in part because scholars have used ambiguous normative criteria to evaluate judgments. We use a unique task and clear normative criteria to evaluate the use of party cues in making political judgments among two samples: a sample of state legislators and an online sample of the public. We find that the public sample performs poorly when using cues to make judgments. State legislators make much more accurate judgments on average than even the most attentive segment of the public and are more likely to place less weight on irrelevant cues when making judgments, although there is evidence that both samples performed worse with the inclusion of non-diagnostic cues. We conclude with a discussion of the relevance of the results, which we interpret as showing that party cue use is more difficult than theorized, and discuss some practical implications of the findings.
... This result highlights the responsibility held by the political elites (and also the platforms that promote their voices) towards the masses and is complimentary to the long line of work in the political sciences focused on showcasing the power and authority of political elites in shaping public opinion in times of crisis. (Hutcheson et al. 2004;Jennings 1992;Bachrach 2017). Our findings from studying the soft moderation techniques of Facebook can inform the discussion around the role of platforms in propagating problematic content besides misinformation. ...
Social media platforms have had considerable impact on the real world especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. Problematic narratives related to Covid-19 might have caused significant impact on the population specifically due to its association with dangerous beliefs such as anti-vaccination and Covid denial. In this work, we study a unique dataset of Facebook posts by users who shared and believed in such narratives before succumbing to Covid-19 often resulting in death. We aim to characterize the dominant themes and sources present in the victim's posts along with identifying the role of the platform in handling deadly narratives. Our analysis reveals the overwhelming politicization of Covid-19 through the prevalence of anti-government themes propagated by right-wing political and media ecosystem. Furthermore, we highlight the efforts of Facebook's implementation of soft moderation actions intended to warn users of misinformation. Results from this study bring insights into the responsibility of political elites in shaping public discourse and the platform's role in dampening the reach of harmful narratives.
... Elites are calculating political actors who are willing to cooperate with political rivals if doing so can help them achieve their goals (Gilens & Page, 2014). Yet, elites also have stable preferences meaning that their views toward other ethnic groups are less likely to be influenced by interacting with outgroup elites (Jennings, 1992). Given the importance of legislative committees in making decisions that can impact a large number of members of the public, assessing the impact of interethnic contact on elite outgroup views is critical. ...
Do politicians who work alongside an ethnically diverse group of political elites improve their views toward ethnic outgroups? Political elites serve critical roles as elected representatives and public figures, but we do not know whether the act of political elites working together in an ethnically diverse environment impacts how they view ethnic outgroups. I argue that political elites work in a competitive environment wherein increased ethnic diversity can promote ethnic animosity and worsen outgroup views. However, elites share interests in maximizing resource distribution, which can lead to positive interethnic contact, improving outgroup views. I test these arguments by collecting original data from municipal government committee members in India. I show that elite outgroup views shift only to a limited extent in response to either increased committee diversity or engaging in interethnic contact. While interethnic contact shows the most promise for improving outgroup views, neither diversity nor contact alone seem to be solutions to intra-elite ethnic animosity.
... Arguably, conservatism and liberalism present clear stances on traditional values, social change, inequality, adherence to authority, and specific social and political issues. In the past, evidence of elite coherence along party lines has not corresponded with greater coherence along party lines for the mass public (e.g., Jennings, 1992). However, more recent research suggests that elite polarization tends to correspond with polarization in the mass public (Druckman et al., 2013). ...
Evidence suggests that politically right-leaning individuals are more likely to be closed-minded. Whether this association is inherent or subject to change has been the subject of debate, yet has not been formally tested. Through a meta-analysis, we find evidence of a changing association between conservatism and facets of closed-mindedness in the U.S. and international context using 341 unique samples, over 200,000 participants, and 920 estimates over 71 years. In the U.S., data ranging from 1948 to 2019 revealed a linear decline in the association between social conservatism (SC) and closed-mindedness, though economic conservatism (EC) did not vary in its association with closed-mindedness over time. Internationally across 18 countries, excluding the U.S., we observed a curvilinear decline in the association between SC and closed-mindedness over that same time, but no change in ECs association. We also tested variation over time for attitudinal measures of conservatism ranging between 1987 to 2018. In the U.S., we observed a linear increase in the association between right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and closed-mindedness, with a similar linear increase in the association between social dominance orientation (SDO) and closed-mindedness. Internationally, there was a curvilinear increase in the association between RWA and closed-mindedness, but no change in the association with SDO. We discuss the changes to the political landscape that might explain our findings.
... More specifically, our findings show that the anti-government theme of misinformation propagated by the right-wing political and media ecosystem was significantly more prevalent than anti-science and anti-vaccination themes, amongst the victims of Covid-19 cataloged in our datasets. This result highlights the responsibility held by the political elites (and the platforms that promote their voices) towards the masses and is complimentary to the long line of work in the political sciences focused on showcasing the power and authority of political elites in shaping public opinion in times of crisis (Hutcheson et al. 2004;Jennings 1992;Bachrach 2017). Our study also shows that Facebook largely failed to implement it's soft moderation labels completely on Covid-19 misinformation, but maintained consistency when it was applied. ...
Social media platforms have had considerable impact on the real world especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. Misinformation related to Covid-19 might have caused significant impact on the population specifically due to its association with dangerous beliefs such as anti-vaccination and Covid denial. In this work, we study a unique dataset of Facebook posts by users who shared and believed in Covid-19 misinformation before succumbing to Covid-19 often resulting in death. We aim to characterize the dominant themes and sources present in the victim's posts along with identifying the role of the platform in handling deadly narratives. Our analysis reveals the overwhelming politicization of Covid-19 through the prevalence of anti-government themes propagated by right-wing political and media ecosystem. Furthermore, we highlight the failures of Facebook's implementation and completeness of soft moderation actions intended to warn users of misinformation. Results from this study bring insights into the responsibility of political elites in shaping public discourse and the platform's role in dampening the reach of harmful misinformation.
... These findings likely relate to research on the stability of the political ideology of legislators (e.g.,Jennings, 1992;Poole and Rosenthal, 1997;Nokken and Poole, 2004;Lupton, Myers and Thornton, 2015;Jewitt and Goren, 2016;Harring and Sohlberg, 2017;Mixon, Sankaran and Upadhyaya, 2019). For example, using data on political party and roll call voting behavior in the U.S. Congress between 1795 and 1995,Nokken and Poole (2004) find significant shifts in party-switching roll-call voting behavior during periods of high ideological polarization. ...
New technological developments have heightened interest in understanding and evaluating new tools of participatory and representative engagement in the political sphere. Recent academic research in this area is mainly theoretical, and focuses on voters rather than legislators. This study addresses this gap in the literature by empirically exploring the unique case of proxy voting by members of the U.S. House of Representatives that was introduced as an emergency measure to allow the Congress to function during COVID-19. The core result from this study, given its finding that voting abstention during the prior session of Congress is positively correlated with the use of proxy voting in the current session of Congress, indicates that proxy voting in this case is connected to legislative shirking. Thus, it appears that the proxy voting mechanism introduced in 2020 via a U.S. House resolution represents a new configuration of traditional legislative shirking or vote skipping.
... 96-97). These "conflicted conservatives" choose a label that does not reflect their policy views due to the now-pejorative connotation of the label "liberal" as compared to the popularity and esteem associated with the label "conservative" among the mass public (e.g., Jennings 1992). The term liberal has indeed become increasingly correlated with support for the "undeserving poor" and those who seek to attack mainstream institutions and values (Ellis and Stimson 2012). ...
Although theories of descriptive representation often posit that citizens are drawn to individuals from groups with which they identify, and despite the fact that women remain largely politically underrepresented in the United States, female voters do not favor ingroup - female - candidates. Why is shared gender between voters and candidates such a weak attractive force compared to other group attachments? I argue that the female electorate is divided into two gender subgroup identities: feminists and non-feminists. Feminists are a homogeneous group and share a feminist gender ideology that focuses on fostering gender equality. In contrast, non-feminists are a very diverse group that includes three distinct types characterized by differing gender ideologies: 1) non-labelers, who endorse core egalitarian values and principles of feminism (i.e., feminist gender ideology) yet eschew the feminist label, because they are wary of the social stigma attached to it, 2) gender individualists, who acknowledge gender inequality but support individualism and self-determination rather than collectivism and public policies to promote gender equality and combat discrimination, and 3) gender inegalitarians, who deny the existence of gender inequality and discrimination and/or oppose both individual and collective efforts to address them. I test my hypotheses on the role played by gender subgroups by relying on both quantitative and qualitative evidence from two surveys, the 2016 American National Election Study and a survey fielded on YouGov in 2018, and two experiments, one conducted on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk in 2017 and the other conducted on CloudResearch/TurkPrime in 2019. My results demonstrate that support for gender equality, which both feminists and non-labelers share, is much more widespread than acceptance of the feminist label. The choice to self-label as a feminist vs. a non-feminist has important political implications. Among both men and women, feminist identity is largely and significantly associated with considering the election of more women to political office as important. In contrast, non-feminist identity strongly undermines support for women in political office, all else equal. In the context of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, a mayoral election, and a legislative primary, I show that feminist voters in both the Democratic and the Republican Party largely favor ingroup (feminist) candidates over outgroup (non-feminist) candidates of both genders, but they also favor non-labeler over individualist candidates. Despite their group heterogeneity, non-feminists of both parties display highly coherent preferences: they favor individualist candidates over non-labeler and, particularly, feminist candidates, regardless of candidate gender. In sum, labels related to gender subgroups divide the U.S. public much more than the actual idea of gender equality, particularly the female electorate. The divides among feminists, non-labelers, individualists, and inegalitarians are distinct from and cut across those based on gender group membership, gender identification, and political ideology. They influence how individual voters perceive and evaluate candidates, interpret the political spectrum, and decide to cast their ballot. Explicit association with the feminist label on the campaign trail thus puts feminist candidates at a severe electoral disadvantage and is likely to be riskier and costlier than touting a gender egalitarian policy agenda. The label appeals to one rather small gender subgroup, feminists, but alienates a larger and more diverse one, non-feminist voters. It is the aversive reaction to the label, rather than a rejection of the substance of their politics, that drives many women away from candidates of their own gender group.
... These observations have several far-reaching consequences. First, it suggests that there is less stability regarding attitudes among the less politically sophisticated -when attitudes are more strongly embedded in a web of other attitudes, the latter 'constrain' the former (Jennings, 1992). Second, elite polarisation is most likely to be reflected within those who have a high degree of political sophistication, rather than low (Lupton et al., 2015). ...
Scholars who study populism from an ‘ideational approach’ consider populism as a set of ideas based on a moralised anti-establishment thinking and a strong people-centrist view of politics. From this perspective, at a theoretical level, populist attitudes have the following two main contrasts: pluralism and elitism. In this article, we investigate the ideological consistency of the populism-pluralism-elitism set of attitudes among voters. Analysing data from Flanders (N = 1444), we make three main contributions. First, we show that there indeed exists an internally consistent relationship between populism, elitism, and pluralism among voters. Second, we demonstrate that this consistency only holds for the most politically sophisticated citizens. And third, we show that the relationship between populist and elitist attitudes is much more nuanced than often assumed. We show that it is possible to empirically distinguish between ‘expertise elitism’ and ‘anti-populist elitism’, two forms of elitism which relate differently to populist attitudes.
... Specifically with regard to the influence of public debates, the FAC Code of Judicial Conduct states that judges "shall not allow their judgments to be influenced by pressures exerted by the general public [. . .]." 4 Indeed, work on attitude change among experts and elites argues that individuals who are more sophisticated and have been exposed to more information and arguments tend to have more stable attitudes (Jennings 1992) and are less likely to be influenced by news content (Coppock, Ekins, and Kirby 2018;Zaller et al. 1992). This is in line with a recent study on the effect of criminal justice salience on crime case decisions in France (Philippe and Ouss 2018) that finds no effect of the criminal justice system being mentioned in the main French evening news on sentence lengths pronounced by judges, as opposed to jurors. ...
Immigration is a top concern among citizens across the globe. Research shows that the salience of immigration shapes voters' political behavior, but little is known about whether it influences judicial behavior. This article theorizes that variation in issue salience influences judges' behavior when there is a clear connection between the legal and a generally salient, politicized issue. I test this argument drawing on all Swiss asylum appeal decisions reached between 2007 and 2015. I find that higher asylum salience leads judges to decide otherwise similar asylum appeals less favorably. This effect is not restricted to judges affiliated with anti‐immigrant parties, unlikely to be driven by accountability pressures, and strongest for those topics known to drive anti‐immigrant sentiment in the general public. Together, these findings raise concerns that issue salience threatens the consistency of judicial decisions.
... Not all findings, however, are consistent with measurement error. For instance, some scholars find that elites exhibit much more stability than the general public (also see Converse and Pierce 1986;Jennings 1992;Hill and Kriesi 2001;Hill 2001). ...
Do voters have stable immigration views? While any account of immigration politics must make an assumption about whether underlying attitudes are stable, the literature has been ambiguous regarding the issue. To remedy this omission, we provide the first comprehensive assessment of the stability and change of immigration attitudes. Theoretically, we develop a framework to explicate the temporal assumptions in previous research and find that most studies assume attitudes are flexible. Empirically, we draw on nine panel data sets to test the stability question and use multiple approaches to account for measurement error. We find that immigration attitudes are remarkably stable over time and robust to major economic and political shocks. Overall, these findings provide more support for theories emphasizing socialization and stable predispositions rather than information or environmental factors. Consequently, scholars should exercise caution in using changing context to explain immigration attitudes or in using immigration attitudes to explain political change.
... One of Converse's (1964) key findings was that most Americans' policy positions were weakly related to any overarching ideology and barely related to one another. Levels of constraint are a function of individuals' political sophistication (Jennings, 1992;Stimson, 1975), question wording (Sullivan, Piereson, & Marcus, 1978), the consistency of elite policy messages (Levendusky, 2010), and, we hypothesize, survey mode. Mode differences might derive from a variety of mechanisms. ...
Declining response rates and increasing costs of collecting public opinion survey data have led to an increasing usage of dual-mode surveys. Revisiting foundational theories of political knowledge, issue constraint, and issue voting, we gauge the theoretical implications this methodological change has in our understanding of the public opinion and voter behavior. We see different patterns in the 2012 and 2016 American National Election Studies and observe clear mode effects in an original dual-mode survey experiment of Florida registered voters. Overall, we find that web respondents appear to be more politically knowledgeable, ideologically constrained, and have greater correspondence between issue and vote preferences compared to face-to-face or phone respondents. Survey mode matters, even with a common sampling frame. Survey research is critical to produce knowledge that can be used to evaluate the health of a democracy through the lens of public opinion and voter behavior. Lately, survey research has gone through a transformational phase. The rising costs and abysmal response rates in face-to-face and telephone surveys have heightened the popularity of web surveys in both academia and industry. Scholars who have long relied on the "gold standard" data from face-to-face interviews in the American National Election Studies (ANES) time series to construct and revise our portraits of American public opinion and political behavior now have access to other large-scale surveys based on different modes of data collection. In 2012 and 2016, ANES itself has supplemented its face-to-face interviews with web-based surveys from supplemental samples. However, this treasure trove of new data sources raises the question of whether there are significant differences in responses across survey mode, and relatedly, how much our conceptions of the American voter are shaped by the means by which we collect public opinion survey data.
We investigate the structure of political belief systems across Europe to investigate what belief systems in European societies, and those who hold them, have in common. In doing so, we answer three questions: First, are political belief system structures similar across Europe? Second, which demographic groups are likely to have similar belief systems within countries? Third, how are belief systems related to voting behaviour? Results from Correlational Class Analyses on data from 23 European countries indicate that a wide variety of belief systems exist in Europe (2–5 per country), but that these can be summarized into two diverse groups, although belief systems in one group were more similar than in the other. Unexpectedly, the groups did not differ in the strength of association between beliefs. While cultural and economic belief dimensions were not consistently found, and tended to be weak, they were positively associated in the first group and negatively associated in the second. Belief systems of the first group were more likely to be from Western European countries and its members more likely to be higher educated compared to the second group. Membership in the second group was associated with more populist far-right voting and vote abstention.
Years of collective political science research has fueled the stereotype of the uninformed or illogical American voter who ardently supports parties or candidates but lacks any cohesive ideological reasons for doing so. Prior works, however, do not tell the whole story nor fully capture the nature of public opinion in today's increasingly polarized political environment. Thus, this Element makes the case for more careful and nuanced assessments of ideological thinking in the American electorate. Using a variety of more contemporary survey and experimental data, it shows that a substantial portion of Americans do hold coherent political beliefs and that these beliefs have important consequences for the American political system. Though partisanship still plays a powerful role, the electorate as this Element presents it is much more ideological than the literature too often assumes.
New technological developments have heightened interest in understanding and evaluating new tools of participatory and representative engagement in the political sphere. Recent academic research in this area is mainly theoretical, and focuses on voters rather than legislators. This study addresses this gap in the literature by empirically exploring the unique case of proxy voting by members of the U.S. House of Representatives that was introduced as an emergency measure to allow the Congress to function during COVID-19. The core result from this study, given its finding that vote skipping during 2019 is positively correlated with the use of proxy voting during 2021, indicates that proxy voting in this case is connected to legislative shirking. Thus, it appears that the proxy voting mechanism introduced in 2020 via a U.S. House resolution represents a new configuration of traditional legislative shirking or vote skipping.
A multitude of political science research assumes that the same ideological dimension guides the interaction between citizens and elites. Public opinion research has repeatedly underlined that this assumption is unlikely to apply to the entire public. In this article, I test the expectation that the interplay between exposure to public debate information and partisan identities makes citizens align their preferences with the elite ideological dimension. I develop a joint scaling model for citizens’ and legislators' preferences that allows for heteroscedastic deviations of citizens’ policy preferences from the elite model. Applications to the Cooperative Congressional Election Study of 2008–2012 and the Senator Representation Study show that elite ideology can be a more reliable constraint on political preferences for exposed partisans, compared to unexposed non-partisans. The findings have implications for studies of party strategies, representation and political behavior that build on the assumption of shared ideological dimensions.
The Cambridge Handbook of Political Psychology provides a comprehensive review of the psychology of political behaviour from an international perspective. Its coverage spans from foundational approaches to political psychology, including the evolutionary, personality and developmental roots of political attitudes, to contemporary challenges to governance, including populism, hate speech, conspiracy beliefs, inequality, climate change and cyberterrorism. Each chapter features cutting-edge research from internationally renowned scholars who offer their unique insights into how people think, feel and act in different political contexts. By taking a distinctively international approach, this handbook highlights the nuances of political behaviour across cultures and geographical regions, as well as the truisms of political psychology that transcend context. Academics, graduate students and practitioners alike, as well as those generally interested in politics and human behaviour, will benefit from this definitive overview of how people shape – and are shaped by – their political environment in a rapidly changing twenty-first century.
In this chapter, I review current research on the relationship between personality and political preferences, with an eye to its complexities and the ways in which it is conditioned on other variables – including the contextual factors mentioned at the outset. To provide context, I briefly review research on the structure of political preferences. Next, I summarise a now-substantial body of work suggesting a relationship between rigidity in personality and right-wing political preferences, and then describe moderators of and boundary conditions to this relationship. Finally, in an effort to reconcile increasingly varied findings on political differences in cognition and motivation, I offer an integrative perspective on when the relationship between rigidity and political differences will be ideologically asymmetric and when it will be symmetric.
Since the path-breaking work of Karl Deutsch on security communities and Ernst Haas on European integration, it has been clear that international institutions may create senses of community and belonging beyond the nation state. Put differently, they can socialize. Yet the mechanisms underlying such dynamics have been unclear. This volume explores these mechanisms of international community building, from a resolutely eclectic stand point. Rationalism is thus the social theory of choice for some contributors, while others are more comfortable with social constructivism. This problem-driven perspective and the theoretical bridge building it are the cutting edge in international relations theory. By providing more fined-grained arguments on precisely how international institutions matter, such an approach sheds crucial light on the complex relationship between states and institutions, between rational choice and social constructivism, and, in our case, between Europe and the nation state.
American Gridlock brings together the country's preeminent experts on the causes, characteristics, and consequences of partisan polarization in US politics and government, with each chapter presenting original scholarship and novel data. This book is the first to combine research on all facets of polarization, among the public (both voters and activists), in our federal institutions (Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court), at the state level, and in the media. Each chapter includes a bullet-point summary of its main argument and conclusions, and is written in clear prose that highlights the substantive implications of polarization for representation and policy-making. Authors examine polarization with an array of current and historical data, including public opinion surveys, electoral and legislative and congressional data, experimental data, and content analyses of media outlets. American Gridlock's theoretical and empirical depth distinguishes it from any other volume on polarization.
American Gridlock brings together the country's preeminent experts on the causes, characteristics, and consequences of partisan polarization in US politics and government, with each chapter presenting original scholarship and novel data. This book is the first to combine research on all facets of polarization, among the public (both voters and activists), in our federal institutions (Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court), at the state level, and in the media. Each chapter includes a bullet-point summary of its main argument and conclusions, and is written in clear prose that highlights the substantive implications of polarization for representation and policy-making. Authors examine polarization with an array of current and historical data, including public opinion surveys, electoral and legislative and congressional data, experimental data, and content analyses of media outlets. American Gridlock's theoretical and empirical depth distinguishes it from any other volume on polarization.
American Gridlock brings together the country's preeminent experts on the causes, characteristics, and consequences of partisan polarization in US politics and government, with each chapter presenting original scholarship and novel data. This book is the first to combine research on all facets of polarization, among the public (both voters and activists), in our federal institutions (Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court), at the state level, and in the media. Each chapter includes a bullet-point summary of its main argument and conclusions, and is written in clear prose that highlights the substantive implications of polarization for representation and policy-making. Authors examine polarization with an array of current and historical data, including public opinion surveys, electoral and legislative and congressional data, experimental data, and content analyses of media outlets. American Gridlock's theoretical and empirical depth distinguishes it from any other volume on polarization.
American Gridlock brings together the country's preeminent experts on the causes, characteristics, and consequences of partisan polarization in US politics and government, with each chapter presenting original scholarship and novel data. This book is the first to combine research on all facets of polarization, among the public (both voters and activists), in our federal institutions (Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court), at the state level, and in the media. Each chapter includes a bullet-point summary of its main argument and conclusions, and is written in clear prose that highlights the substantive implications of polarization for representation and policy-making. Authors examine polarization with an array of current and historical data, including public opinion surveys, electoral and legislative and congressional data, experimental data, and content analyses of media outlets. American Gridlock's theoretical and empirical depth distinguishes it from any other volume on polarization.
American Gridlock brings together the country's preeminent experts on the causes, characteristics, and consequences of partisan polarization in US politics and government, with each chapter presenting original scholarship and novel data. This book is the first to combine research on all facets of polarization, among the public (both voters and activists), in our federal institutions (Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court), at the state level, and in the media. Each chapter includes a bullet-point summary of its main argument and conclusions, and is written in clear prose that highlights the substantive implications of polarization for representation and policy-making. Authors examine polarization with an array of current and historical data, including public opinion surveys, electoral and legislative and congressional data, experimental data, and content analyses of media outlets. American Gridlock's theoretical and empirical depth distinguishes it from any other volume on polarization.
American Gridlock brings together the country's preeminent experts on the causes, characteristics, and consequences of partisan polarization in US politics and government, with each chapter presenting original scholarship and novel data. This book is the first to combine research on all facets of polarization, among the public (both voters and activists), in our federal institutions (Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court), at the state level, and in the media. Each chapter includes a bullet-point summary of its main argument and conclusions, and is written in clear prose that highlights the substantive implications of polarization for representation and policy-making. Authors examine polarization with an array of current and historical data, including public opinion surveys, electoral and legislative and congressional data, experimental data, and content analyses of media outlets. American Gridlock's theoretical and empirical depth distinguishes it from any other volume on polarization.
American Gridlock brings together the country's preeminent experts on the causes, characteristics, and consequences of partisan polarization in US politics and government, with each chapter presenting original scholarship and novel data. This book is the first to combine research on all facets of polarization, among the public (both voters and activists), in our federal institutions (Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court), at the state level, and in the media. Each chapter includes a bullet-point summary of its main argument and conclusions, and is written in clear prose that highlights the substantive implications of polarization for representation and policy-making. Authors examine polarization with an array of current and historical data, including public opinion surveys, electoral and legislative and congressional data, experimental data, and content analyses of media outlets. American Gridlock's theoretical and empirical depth distinguishes it from any other volume on polarization.
American Gridlock brings together the country's preeminent experts on the causes, characteristics, and consequences of partisan polarization in US politics and government, with each chapter presenting original scholarship and novel data. This book is the first to combine research on all facets of polarization, among the public (both voters and activists), in our federal institutions (Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court), at the state level, and in the media. Each chapter includes a bullet-point summary of its main argument and conclusions, and is written in clear prose that highlights the substantive implications of polarization for representation and policy-making. Authors examine polarization with an array of current and historical data, including public opinion surveys, electoral and legislative and congressional data, experimental data, and content analyses of media outlets. American Gridlock's theoretical and empirical depth distinguishes it from any other volume on polarization.
American Gridlock brings together the country's preeminent experts on the causes, characteristics, and consequences of partisan polarization in US politics and government, with each chapter presenting original scholarship and novel data. This book is the first to combine research on all facets of polarization, among the public (both voters and activists), in our federal institutions (Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court), at the state level, and in the media. Each chapter includes a bullet-point summary of its main argument and conclusions, and is written in clear prose that highlights the substantive implications of polarization for representation and policy-making. Authors examine polarization with an array of current and historical data, including public opinion surveys, electoral and legislative and congressional data, experimental data, and content analyses of media outlets. American Gridlock's theoretical and empirical depth distinguishes it from any other volume on polarization.
American Gridlock brings together the country's preeminent experts on the causes, characteristics, and consequences of partisan polarization in US politics and government, with each chapter presenting original scholarship and novel data. This book is the first to combine research on all facets of polarization, among the public (both voters and activists), in our federal institutions (Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court), at the state level, and in the media. Each chapter includes a bullet-point summary of its main argument and conclusions, and is written in clear prose that highlights the substantive implications of polarization for representation and policy-making. Authors examine polarization with an array of current and historical data, including public opinion surveys, electoral and legislative and congressional data, experimental data, and content analyses of media outlets. American Gridlock's theoretical and empirical depth distinguishes it from any other volume on polarization.
American Gridlock brings together the country's preeminent experts on the causes, characteristics, and consequences of partisan polarization in US politics and government, with each chapter presenting original scholarship and novel data. This book is the first to combine research on all facets of polarization, among the public (both voters and activists), in our federal institutions (Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court), at the state level, and in the media. Each chapter includes a bullet-point summary of its main argument and conclusions, and is written in clear prose that highlights the substantive implications of polarization for representation and policy-making. Authors examine polarization with an array of current and historical data, including public opinion surveys, electoral and legislative and congressional data, experimental data, and content analyses of media outlets. American Gridlock's theoretical and empirical depth distinguishes it from any other volume on polarization.
American Gridlock brings together the country's preeminent experts on the causes, characteristics, and consequences of partisan polarization in US politics and government, with each chapter presenting original scholarship and novel data. This book is the first to combine research on all facets of polarization, among the public (both voters and activists), in our federal institutions (Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court), at the state level, and in the media. Each chapter includes a bullet-point summary of its main argument and conclusions, and is written in clear prose that highlights the substantive implications of polarization for representation and policy-making. Authors examine polarization with an array of current and historical data, including public opinion surveys, electoral and legislative and congressional data, experimental data, and content analyses of media outlets. American Gridlock's theoretical and empirical depth distinguishes it from any other volume on polarization.
• • Party control of Congress is the strongest determinant of presidential success – majority party presidents win more roll call votes than do minority party presidents.
• • Until recently, the effects of party control were similar in both chambers. Rising party polarization in Congress affects presidential success differently in the House and Senate.
• • In the House, party polarization amplifies the effects of party control – as party polarization increases, majority party presidents win more and minority presidents win less.
• • In the Senate, party polarization suppresses success rates – majority presidents still win more on average, but as party voting increases, success rates decline for both majority and minority presidents.
• • The rise in cloture votes and the emergence of the minority party filibuster during the Bush and Obama presidencies is responsible for the changes in how party polarization conditions the effects of party control in the Senate.
• • Since cloture votes are unique to the Senate, excluding cloture votes provides a mix of Senate votes similar to the House – as party polarization increases on non-cloture votes, majority presidents win more and minority presidents win less, though the relationships are weaker than in the House.
• • On cloture votes, polarization magnifies the effects of party control, but the pattern of success is a mirror image of the House – as party polarization increases, minority presidents win more and majority presidents win less.
• • The simple arithmetic of which side of cloture the president is on explains why the relationships flip. Majority presidents usually favor invoking cloture, which requires 60 votes to win. Minority presidents usually oppose invoking cloture, which requires only 41 votes to win.
To achieve his goals, the president must persuade Congress to support his positions. Ite's a hard sell. The American system of “separated institutions sharing powers” (Neustadt 1960: 33) makes it difficult for any president to win support from Congress. Presidential success in Congress varies – some presidents win more than others – but President Obama seems to be having an especially hard time. In 2012, for example, Obama won only 15.5 percent of House roll call votes on which he expressed a position. Thate's pretty low, but not quite a record – President Bush barely holds on to this dubious distinction, winning only 15.4 percent of House roll calls in 2008.
American Gridlock brings together the country's preeminent experts on the causes, characteristics, and consequences of partisan polarization in US politics and government, with each chapter presenting original scholarship and novel data. This book is the first to combine research on all facets of polarization, among the public (both voters and activists), in our federal institutions (Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court), at the state level, and in the media. Each chapter includes a bullet-point summary of its main argument and conclusions, and is written in clear prose that highlights the substantive implications of polarization for representation and policy-making. Authors examine polarization with an array of current and historical data, including public opinion surveys, electoral and legislative and congressional data, experimental data, and content analyses of media outlets. American Gridlock's theoretical and empirical depth distinguishes it from any other volume on polarization.
American Gridlock brings together the country's preeminent experts on the causes, characteristics, and consequences of partisan polarization in US politics and government, with each chapter presenting original scholarship and novel data. This book is the first to combine research on all facets of polarization, among the public (both voters and activists), in our federal institutions (Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court), at the state level, and in the media. Each chapter includes a bullet-point summary of its main argument and conclusions, and is written in clear prose that highlights the substantive implications of polarization for representation and policy-making. Authors examine polarization with an array of current and historical data, including public opinion surveys, electoral and legislative and congressional data, experimental data, and content analyses of media outlets. American Gridlock's theoretical and empirical depth distinguishes it from any other volume on polarization.
American Gridlock brings together the country's preeminent experts on the causes, characteristics, and consequences of partisan polarization in US politics and government, with each chapter presenting original scholarship and novel data. This book is the first to combine research on all facets of polarization, among the public (both voters and activists), in our federal institutions (Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court), at the state level, and in the media. Each chapter includes a bullet-point summary of its main argument and conclusions, and is written in clear prose that highlights the substantive implications of polarization for representation and policy-making. Authors examine polarization with an array of current and historical data, including public opinion surveys, electoral and legislative and congressional data, experimental data, and content analyses of media outlets. American Gridlock's theoretical and empirical depth distinguishes it from any other volume on polarization.
This paper examines attitudes toward taxes on the rich and middle class in the United States with emphasis on the impacts of political ideology and party identification. Using the 2016 General Social Survey, we estimate bivariate ordered probit models for a full cross-sectional sample, and subsamples stratified by party. Results suggest that proposals to reduce income and wealth inequalities and/or fund large federal expenditure increases by raising taxes on the rich will have difficulty in gaining the political traction necessary for success. Any proposal to raise taxes on both the rich and middle class has almost no chance of passage. Findings also indicate that party affiliation moderates ideological impacts on opinions of taxes on the rich and middle class, in some cases substantially.
Polarization and participation are often connected in the political science literature, though sometimes the causality runs participation to polarization and sometimes the causality runs in the reverse direction. In some accounts there is an expectation that increasing participation and increasing polarization generate an ongoing spiral effect. In this paper we evaluate the over-time relationships between polarization and participation by assessing evidence in existing panel and aggregate data. We find that people with more extreme attitudes are more likely to participate in politics. However, only one particular form of participation—persuading others—appears to predict later levels of polarization. Therefore, only persuasion has the necessary correlation and temporal ordering for a feedback loop with more extreme ideology. The implication is that the discipline should pay more attention to interpersonal persuasion as a form of participation in American politics.
The legislative bill is a critical factor in assessing whether a representative democracy is functioning well, and the politicians’ ideologies have a significant impact on legislative activities. By investigating complete legislative bills in Korea’s parliament from 2004 to 2016, classified using machine-learning techniques, and politicians’ ideology, measured by the W-NOMINATE method, this study systematically examines the relationship between lawmakers’ ideology and legislation. The results reveal that politicians with a strong conservative ideology propose more bills in general and a higher ratio of bills with an economic focus. The passing and processing rate of welfare-related bills sponsored by conservative lawmakers decrease, while the processing period lengthens. These results are aligned with common beliefs regarding the scope of the legislative agenda according to ideology. As ideological discrepancy increases between individuals and their party increases, the number of bill proposals decreases, and bills are less likely to be processed, reducing legislative productivity and efficiency. This study finds that lawmakers’ ideology has a notable influence on legislative productivity and efficiency. It also suggests that these effects are closely related to both the absolute intensity of a lawmakers’ political ideology and its relative position with respect to the affiliated party.
Several extremely influential theories, including the multiple streams approach and punctuated equilibrium theory, predict that dramatic policy change occurs when problems are reframed. However, there is little direct evidence of how framing messages influence policymaker attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors. In an online survey of local policymakers in Illinois, we find that different media frames of the opiate epidemic influence policymaker attitudes and attributions of responsibility. We conclude with some implications for framing theory and its role in theories of policymaking.
Over the past four decades, there has been a proliferation of interest in the causes, consequences, and dynamics of contestation over collective memories across a variety of fields. Unfortunately, collective memories—particularly those of traumatic experiences of violence such as wars and revolutions—have been largely absent from party politics research. Using data collected in an expert survey on the policy positions and ideological orientations of all relevant political parties, as well as an extensive survey of more than ten thousand voters in the six post-conflict countries of Southeast Europe, we demonstrate that collective memories of war are not only subjects of historiographical contestation but are also significant sources of ideological and policy differentiation among political parties, as well as one of the strongest determinants of voter choice. Our analysis shows that collective memories are politically contested and that party politics research would benefit from taking them seriously.
В статье обозначены важнейшие проблемы и элементы рассогласованности в современной теории политических элит, которые нуждаются не только в самостоятельном осмыслении, но и в использовании их для корректировки и переработки самих элитологических исследований. Авторы фиксируют состояние исследований элит, основную проблематику в актуальной научной периодике и выделяют три аномалии в теоретическом знании об элитах. Первая серьезная аномалия связана с применением бинарной логики при анализе сложных общественно-политических процессов, сопровождающих принятие политических решений. Дихотомия “элиты–не-элиты” соответствует уровню и концептуальной сетке механистической научной картины мира, что становится проблемой при анализе современных межэлитных и внутристрановых политических взаимодействий. Вторая аномалия заключается в заметной переоценке роли и содержания консенсуса элит по поводу главных контуров политической организации в государствах. Подобные формы коммуникации в рамках политической элиты, безусловно, присутствуют, однако сама конфигурация элиты может способствовать формированию сравнительно хрупких и недолговечных форм консенсуса. Более того, в общей структуре межэлитных взаимодействий обозначенный консенсус проявляется не столь часто, в отличие от иных практик, формируемых политическими институтами, идентичностью и так далее. Наконец, третья аномалия связана с распространенным тезисом о наличии неких идейно-когнитивных отличий элиты от остальной части населения – эти отличия обусловлены особенностями воспитания, профессионального становления, внешних факторов развития элит. Авторы приходят к выводу, что современные исследования в данном направлении не только не обнаруживают подтверждений наличия подобных идейно-когнитивных отличий, но и находят эмпирические данные, которые противоречат этому тезису. В заключение аргументируются необходимость преодоления таких аномалий за счет теоретического синтеза между исследованиями элит и исследованиями принятия политических решений и политического процесса.
Political actors often cite public opinion to provide support for public policy decisions. This process is made more challenging with diverse demands and perspectives of the public. How then do political actors decide which opinion gets heard? In this article, we go beyond the assumption that the practice of political representation is indistinguishable across various levels of political actors and ask, why do political actors value public opinion and how does it then influence the way in which they apply this information? Developing a multi-level approach, we employ semi-structured interviews with a wide range of political actors, including politicians, pollsters, and community activists. We find that motivations for defining and applying public opinion differs according to the hierarchy of political actors, demonstrating that the relationship between public and political actors is more nuanced and complex than what is often depicted. In particular, we find that minority views play just an important view in policymaking.
Ideal point models have become a powerful tool for defining and measuring the ideology of many kinds of political actors, including legislators, judges, campaign donors, and members of the general public. We extend the application of ideal point models to the public using a novel data source: real-time reactions to statements by candidates in the 2012 presidential debates. Using these reactions as inputs to an ideal point model, we estimate individual-level ideology and evaluate the quality of the measure. Debate reaction ideal points provide a method for estimating a continuous, individual-level measure of ideology that avoids survey response biases, provides better estimates for moderates and the politically unengaged, and reflects the content of salient political discourse relevant to viewers’ attitudes and vote choices. As expected, we find that debate reaction ideal points are more extreme among respondents who strongly identify with a political party, but retain substantial within-party variation. Ideal points are also more extreme among respondents who are more politically interested. Using topical subsets of the debate statements, we find that ideal points in the sample are more moderate for foreign policy than for economic or domestic policy.
We investigate the degree of affective polarization in presidential election years toward the two major parties and their nominees. Notwithstanding studies which show that individuating information about an out-group member can generate a person-positivity bias, we demonstrate a person-negativity bias directed at out-party candidates at least for some. We motivate and test two hypotheses: first, we expect more sophisticated partisans to display a greater difference in their feelings towards specific candidates compared to evaluations of the parties themselves; second, we anticipate sophisticated partisans will exhibit a person-negativity bias toward out-party candidates and a person-positivity bias toward in-party candidates. The results accentuate the conditional nature of the person-positivity bias and shed light on how political sophistication is linked to affective polarization.
It has long been assumed that foreign-policy attitudes of the mass public are random, disorganized, and unconstrained if they exist at all. Further, foreign-policy thinking has not been found to be structured along standard ideological (liberal-conservative) lines, partisan lines, or class lines. We attempt to move the discussion from a question of whether foreign-policy attitudes are structured to a question of how they are structured. We propose and estimate (using a LISREL model) a hierarchically organized foreign-policy belief structure in which specific policy preferences are derived from postures (broad, abstract beliefs regarding appropriate general governmental strategies). These postures, in turn, are assumed to be constrained by a set of core values about the international community.
Between 1956 and 1960, the first long-term panel study of the American electorate was carried out at the University of Michigan. Among other findings from this original panel were sharp contrasts between the high individual-level stability of party identification and more labile individual preferences on major political issues of the day. Since 1960, several changes in the nature of the American electoral response have caught the attention of scholars, including an erosion of party loyalties on one hand and an increasing crystallization of issue attitudes on the other. Completion of a new panel segment, 1972-76, makes it possible to review the original 1956-60 findings in the light of these intervening changes. We discovered that the contrasts in individual-level continuity of party and issue positions remain nearly identical to those estimated for 1956-60. The theoretical significance of these counter-intuitive results is discussed.
This article points out the deficiencies of the most common method of measuring belief system structuredness, outlines the logic on which a better measure of belief consistency can be calculated for individuals, and applies the new measure to data comparing elites and nonelites, and different elite groups.
Conducted 4 studies with 218 undergraduates in an attempt to integrate hypotheses about the effects of thought and schema complexity on attitude polarization proposed by P. W. Linville (see record
1982-25791-001) and the 2nd author and C. Leone (see record
1978-09847-001). Linville's work showed that more extreme attitudes were associated with simpler cognitive schemas for construing the attitude object. The 2nd author and Leone demonstrated that thought with a complex schema resulted in greater attitude polarization than thought with a simple schema. Study 1 validated the present author's schema complexity manipulation. Study 2 tested and found support for the hypothesis that 1 moderating variable was motivational: The 2nd author and Leone's effect was obtained in the presence of commitment to an initial evaluation, and there was a tendency toward the Linville effect in the absence of commitment to an initial evaluation. Study 3 tested and found support for the hypothesis that another moderating variable was structural: The Linville effect was obtained when there was little correlation among the dimensions of the cognitive schema, and the 2nd author and Leone's effect was obtained when there was substantial correlation among the dimensions; thought tended to increase the correlation among dimensions. Study 4 tested and found support for the hypothesis that commitment affects cognitive structures in a way that could account for its moderating effect on attitude polarization. (23 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Studied the relationships between how information about stimuli is organized in memory and the extremity of evaluative judgments of those stimuli. It was hypothesized that the number of attribute dimensions used to discriminate among stimuli in a domain and the average correlation between dimensions are 2 structural variables that should interactively affect judgmental extremity. The 1st study, with 176 undergraduates, manipulated these 2 variables experimentally. When dimensions were orthogonal, evaluative judgments became less extreme as the number of dimensions increased. This effect disappeared, however, and in fact slightly reversed when dimensions were correlated. The 2nd study, with 29 undergraduates, was a correlational study measuring the characteristics of actual knowledge structures and relating them to judgmental extremity. For the domains sampled, attribute dimensions were typically highly intercorrelated. The relationship between the structural variables depended on the domain. Findings indicate that there is no simple relationship between the "complexity" of knowledge structures and judgmental extremity. Rather, the structural variables must be looked at separately and interactively to understand their effects. (17 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The vast, discordant literature on political sophistication, still divided over the variable's distribution in mass publics, is correspondingly divided over measurement. This paper, focusing on measurement, weighs the merits in these disputes. I first review the variable we all claim to be measuring, then the measures the literature affords. In the process I sketch several measures of my own and compare their empirical performance. Then, finally, I examine the distributional implications and offer some thoughts on future directions for sophistication research.
How stable are elite survey responses over time? Scattered previous research casts doubt on the standard assumption that elite political attitudes are significantly more stable than mass attitudes. After a discussion of problems of interpreting and measuring attitude stability, this study presents evidence from a six-year panel survey of Italian regional political elites. The respondents are full-time, highly successful, professional politicians. Their ideological commitments, their orientations to social and political conflict, their attitudes toward democratic institutions, their political style, and some aspects of their attitudes toward Italian regionalism are shown to be remarkably stable over this period. Some methodological lessons for elite survey research are drawn from these analyses, including (most basically) the comforting conclusion that the fundamental beliefs of elites can be measured with a high degree of reliability.
There is little agreement about the degree to which the American electorate structures its beliefs about salient aspects of the political scene. Disagreement arises in large part from the use of differing concepts of belief structuring. Some researchers look for evidence of consistency, simplicity, and power in belief systems and do not find it in large measure. Others look for complexity and multidimensionality and do find it. Both believe they are measuring belief sophistication. Both schools expect to find greatest evidence of sophistication among the educated and well informed and least among the uneducated and uniformed. The 1972 electorate is stratified by education and political information, and operational indicators of both "constraint" and "complexity" notions of belief structure are examined.
The focus of this paper is on the processes by which change occurs in the structure and membership of policy subsystem coalitions. Employing longitudinal data derived from content analysis of congressional hearings, we examine expressed policy beliefs of organizational elites in the highly charged policy debate waged over outer continental shelf energy leasing from 1969 to 1987. Using the stated policy positions of representatives of organizations that are regular participants in the subsystem, we analyze differences in the level of constraint evident on the expression of policy positions by representatives of purposive and material groups. We then analyze the content and stability of advocacy coalitions within the policy subsystem, assessing the membership of coalitions and tracking defections to and from coalitions over the 1969-87 time period. Finally, we employ interrupted time series regression models, corrected for autocorrelation, to analyze the origins of defection from and to advocacy coalitions by the U.S. Department of Interior. Overall, our intent is to explain the internal workings of subsystems--and their responsiveness to exogenous events--in a highly polarized policy dispute in a manner that helps integrate our understanding of subsystem dynamics with theories of group representation and principal-agent behavior.
While it is commonly assumed that people who look favorably upon the Right look unfavorably upon the Left (and vice versa), recent work has emphasized the "multidimensionality" of evaluations of political groups. Weisberg (1980) has argued that feelings about Republicans are relatively independent of feelings about Democrats. Similarly, Conover and Feldman (1981) have found that positive evaluations of liberals are only weakly associated with negative evaluations of conservatives. This paper reevaluates these results. Confirmatory factor analysis on data drawn from the 1976 and 1972 National Election Studies shows that recent findings seriously understate the degree to which positive evaluations of one partisan or ideological group are associated with negative evaluations of the opposite group. Once random and nonrandom measurement errors are taken into account, the evidence supports the hypothesis that group evaluations are largely bipolar in structure; that is, people who like Republicans dislike Democrats, and people who like conservatives dislike liberals.
Students of public opinion research have argued that voters show very little consistency and structure in their political attitudes. A model of the survey response is proposed which takes account of the vagueness in opinion survey questions and in response categories. When estimates are made of this vagueness or “measurement error” and the estimates applied to the principal previous study, nearly all the inconsistency is shown to be the result of the vagueness of the questions rather than of any failure by the respondents.
This article shows that citizens can estimate what politically strategic groups--liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, and blacks and whites--stand for on major issues. These attitude attributions follow from a simple calculus, a likability heuristic. This heuristic is rooted in people's likes and dislikes of political groups. Thanks to this affective calculus, many in the mass public are able to estimate who stands for what politically, notwithstanding shortfalls in information and information processing.
While candidates regularly spend much time and effort campaigning on foreign and defense policies, the thrust of prevailing scholarly opinion is that voters possess little information and weak attitudes on these issues, which therefore have negligible impact on their voting behavior. We resolve this anomaly by arguing that public attitudes on foreign and defense policies are available and cognitively accessible, that the public has perceived clear differences between the candidates on these issues in recent elections, and that these issues have affected the public's vote choices. Data indicate that these conclusions are appropriate for foreign affairs issues and domestic issues
The debate over the extent of ideological awareness in the American electorate has been characterized as an argument over whether the “ideology glass” is half empty or half full. This characterization results from the fact that analyses to date have employed various alternative indicators of ideology in isolation from each other. This paper presents an integrated assessment of ideological thinking in the American electorate. Specifically, it examines the effects of partisanship, ideological identification and policy preferences on the presidential vote in 1980 within the “levels of conceptualization.” It concludes that when ideological sentiment is supported by the level of sophistication required to merit classification as an “ideologue” it has a substantial impact on candidate choice. Under all other conditions its impact is marginal, at best.
This paper proposes that when optimally answering a survey question would require substantial cognitive effort, some repondents simply provide a satisfactory answer instead. This behaviour, called satisficing, can take the form of either (1) incomplete or biased information retrieval and/or information integration, or (2) no information retrieval or integration at all. Satisficing may lead respondents to employ a variety of response strategies, including choosing the first response alternative that seems to constitute a reasonable answer, agreeing with an assertion made by a question, endorsing the status quo instead of endorsing social change, failing to differentiate among a set of diverse objects in ratings, saying ‘don't know’ instead of reporting an opinion, and randomly choosing among the response alternatives offered. This paper specifies a wide range of factors that are likely to encourage satisficing, and reviews relevant evidence evaluating these speculations. Many useful directions for future research are suggested.
Ideological Consensus and Constraint among Party Leaders and Followers in the 1978 Election
- Bishop
- Kathleen F A George
- Frankovic
Bishop, George F., and Kathleen A. Frankovic. 1981. "Ideological Consensus and Constraint among Party Leaders and Followers in the 1978 Election." Micropolitics 1(2):87-111.
The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass PublicsPlus ca change . . . : The New CPS Election Study Panel
- Converse
- Philip
- Gregory E B Philip
- Markus
Converse, Philip E. 1964. "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics." In Ideology and Discontent, ed. David Apter. New York: Free Press. Converse, Philip E., and Gregory B. Markus. 1979. "Plus ca change... : The New CPS Election Study Panel." American Political Science Review 73:32-49.
Political Representation in FranceData Quality in Mail, Telephone, and Face to Face at University of Birmingham Downloaded from Surveys: A Mode Comparison in the NetherlandsOn the Dimensionality of Public Sentiment toward Partisan and Ideological Groups
- Converse
- Roy E Philip
- Pierce
- Leeuw
- Edith
Converse, Philip E., and Roy Pierce. 1986. Political Representation in France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. De Leeuw, Edith D. 1991. "Data Quality in Mail, Telephone, and Face to Face at University of Birmingham on November 5, 2014 http://poq.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from Surveys: A Mode Comparison in the Netherlands." Unpublished manuscript, Vrije Universiteit. Department of Social Research Methodology, Amsterdam. Green. Donald Philip. 1988. "On the Dimensionality of Public Sentiment toward Partisan and Ideological Groups." American Journal of Political Science 32:758-80.
What's Fair: American Beliefs about Distributive JusticeHow Are Foreign Policy Attitudes Structured? A Hierarchical Model
- Hochschild
- L Jennifer
Hochschild. Jennifer L. 1981. What's Fair: American Beliefs about Distributive Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hurwitz. Jon. and Mark Peffley. 1987. "How Are Foreign Policy Attitudes Structured? A Hierarchical Model." American Political Science Review 81:1099-1120.
The New Presidential Elite
- Kirkpatrick
- Jeane
Kirkpatrick, Jeane. 1976. The New Presidential Elite. New York: Russell Sage and Twentieth Century Fund.
Without Consent: Mass-Elite Linkages in Presidential Politics
- Miller
- Warren
Miller, Warren E. 1988. Without Consent: Mass-Elite Linkages in Presidential Politics. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.
Parties in Transition: A Longitudinal Study of Party Elites and Party Supporters Attitude Stability among Italian Elites
- Miller
- M E Warren
- Jennings Kent
Miller, Warren E., and M. Kent Jennings. 1986. Parties in Transition: A Longitudinal Study of Party Elites and Party Supporters. New York: Russell Sage. Putnam, Robert D., Robert Leonardi, and Rafaella Y. Nanetti. 1979. Attitude Stability among Italian Elites. American Journal of Political Science 23:463-94.
Questions and Answers in Attitudes Surveys The Unchanging American Voter
- Schuman
- Howard
- Eric R A N Stanley
Schuman, Howard, and Stanley Presser. 1981. Questions and Answers in Attitudes Surveys. New York: Academic Press. Smith, Eric R. A. N. 1989. The Unchanging American Voter. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.