Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 1994, Vol 39(2), 225. Reviews the book, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion by John Zaller (1992). The author's commendable effort to specify a model of mass opinion formation offers readers an introduction to the prevailing vi

The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion.

Scholars typically argue that elite polarization has only negative consequences for American politics. I challenge this view by demonstrating that elite polarization, by clarifying where the parties stand on the issues of the day, causes ordinary voters to adopt more consistent attitudes. Scholars have made such claims in the past, but because only observational data has been available, demonstrating a cause-and-effect relationship has proven to be difficult. I use original experiments to verify that there is a small but significant causal link between elite polarization and voter consistency. These findings have important normative implications for our understanding of the consequences of elite polarization, the role of political parties in a modern democracy, and the standards scholars use to assess citizen competence and participation.

Clearer Cues, More Consistent Voters: A Benefit of Elite Polarization

The spatial model of elections identifies factors that motivate party elites to shift their policy positions, including changes in voters' policy preferences, rival parties' policy shifts, past election results, and changes in party elites' valence images with respect to dimensions of evaluation such as competence and integrity. I review empirical studies on multiparty elections, i.e., elections involving three or more major parties, that evaluate party elites' policy responses to these factors, along with empirical studies on the electoral consequences of parties' policy shifts. This review reveals a paradox: on the one hand, empirical studies conclude that parties systematically shift their policy positions in response to the factors that spatial modelers have identified. On the other hand, there is only weak and inconsistent empirical evidence that voters actually perceive parties' policy shifts, and/or that these shifts have significant electoral consequences. Thus the predictions of spatial theory ar...

https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev-polisci-031710-101450

Causes and Electoral Consequences of Party Policy Shifts in Multiparty Elections: Theoretical Results and Empirical Evidence

Although extensive research analyzes the factors that motivate European parties to shift their policy positions, there is little cross-national research that analyzes how voters respond to parties' policy shifts. We report pooled, time-series analyses of election survey data from several European polities, which suggest that voters do not systematically adjust their perceptions of parties' positions in response to shifts in parties' policy statements during election campaigns. We also find no evidence that voters adjust their Left-Right positions or their partisan loyalties in response to shifts in parties' campaign-based policy statements. By contrast, we find that voters do respond to their subjective perceptions of the parties' positions. Our findings have important implications for party policy strategies and for political representation. ©2011, Midwest Political Science Association.

Is Anybody Listening? Evidence That Voters Do Not Respond to European Parties’ Policy Statements During Elections

You Cannot be Serious: The Impact of Accuracy Incentives on Partisan Bias in Reports of Economic Perceptions

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The familiar image of rational electoral choice has voters weighing the competing candidates strengths and weaknesses, calculating comparative distances in issue space, and assessing the presidents management of foreign a¤airs and the national economy. Indeed, once or twice in a lifetime, a national or personal crisis does induce political thought. But most of the time, the voters adopt issue positions, adjust their candidate perceptions, and invent facts to rationalize decisions they have already made. The implications of this distinction between genuine thinking and its daytoday counterfeit strike at the roots of both positive and normative theories of electoral democracy. The primary use of party is to create public opinion.  Philip C. Friese (1856, 7) Cognitive Consistency, Partisan Inference, and Issue Perceptions1 The rise of scholarly interest in issue votingin the 1960s and 70s prompted concern about the implications of partisan inference for statistical analyses of the relationship between issue positions and vote choices. The spatial theory of voting (Downs 1957; Enelow and Hinich 1984) cast issue proximityas both the primary determinant of voterschoices and the primary focus of candidatescampaign strategies. The proliferation of issue scales in the Michigan (later, National Election Study) surveys provided ample raw material for naive regressions of vote choices on issue proximities calculated by comparing respondents own positions on these issue scales with the positions they attributed to the competing candidates or parties. The ambiguity inherent in empirical relationships of this sort was clear to scholars of voting behavior by the early 1970s. Brody and Page (1972) outlined three distinct interpretations of the positive correlation between issue proximityand vote choice. The rst, Policy Oriented Evaluation,corresponds to the conventional interpretation of issue voting prospective voters observe the candidatespolicy positions, compare them to their own policy preferences, and choose a candidate accordingly. The second, Persuasion, involves prospective voters altering their own issue positions to bring them into conformity with the issue positions of the candidate or party they favor. The third, Projection, involves prospective voters convincing themselves that the candidate or party they favor has issue positions similar to their We wish to thank the Department of Politics and the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University for research support. Colleagues in the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics, both faculty and students, provided helpful advice and criticism. Markus Prior let us see some of his unpublished ndings from experiments. We also thank Toby Cook and Dorothy McMurtery for helping us think about how personal life histories a¤ect political views.

Christopher H. Achen

Papers

It Feels Like We're Thinking: The Rationalizing Voter and Electoral Democracy