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.

Despite widespread feeling that public opinion in the United States has become dramatically polarized along political lines, empirical support for such a pattern is surprisingly elusive. Reporting ...

Pluralistic Collapse: The “Oil Spill” Model of Mass Opinion Polarization:

Americans are more sorted into distinct partisan camps than ever before. Affective polarization is growing, with Democrats and Republican becoming increasingly disdainful of one another. Democrats and Republicans appear to be moving toward opposing ideological poles as well—Pew data, for example, demonstrate that the gap between the median self-reported ideology of Democrats and the median self-reported ideology among Republicans is growing larger over time. What can this mean for Philip Converse’s infamous argument that Americans are largely innocent of ideology (“The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” Critical Review, 18(1–3), 1964)? Surely partisan-ideological sorting among the American public runs contrary to Converse’s claim that constraint in the belief systems of the citizenry does not mirror constraint among idea-elements visible at an elite level. If Americans are increasingly taking cues from an ever-polarizing party system, are they at least forming coherent ideological belief systems? Donald Kinder and Nathan Kalmoe begin Neither Liberal nor Conservative with an exceptionally thorough review of Converse’s classic work; indeed it is one that should be assigned alongside the original work itself in any course on American politics. It is, though, much more than merely a review of Converse’s seminal work; it is an important intervention in the ongoing debate regarding the extent to which polarization pervades American public opinion. The greatest feat the authors achieve in this book is the vigor with which they tackle the paradox of ideological innocence in an age of polarization. Americans might appear to be divided along ideological lines, but they are by no means ideological. With respect to partisanship, the authors argue, we are polarizing indeed; but ideologically we remain largely innocent, as Converse claimed. First of all, the majority of us (literally over half) identify as moderate, and the authors take the relatively controversial position (one that I will return to) that “moderate” should not be considered an ideological category at all. In an Appendix devoted to this very issue, Kinder and Kalmoe calculate the ideological consistency of policy preferences among voters, and they find that moderates indeed commit to an incoherent mélange of viewpoints. The correlation between policy references among moderates is a starkly low 0.11. If Americans are not particularly ideological now, however, the authors consider whether they are perhaps nevertheless becoming more ideological over time. Yet going back through 40 years of survey data, they find just a gentle but steady decrease in the proportion of Americans who call themselves moderate: 55% in 1972 versus 47% in 2012. Ideological extremists, on the other hand, have crept up from 3% in 1972 to 6% in 2012. This movement, the authors contend, is glacially slow and by no means indicative of a populace polarizing toward the extreme ends of the ideological spectrum. The authors then demonstrate that self-identified liberals and conservatives do not disagree with each other when it comes to policy matters any more now than they did while Converse was writing his original work. If issue disagreement is illustrative of polarization, there is again nothing to see with respect to liberals and conservatives in America. Nor do liberals and conservatives appear to hold in-group/out-group biases against one another, as we do see with Democrats and Republicans. Again, going back 40 years, Kinder and Kalmoe find no consistent evidence that the two ideological camps are becoming less enamored with one another over time. So why then have we sorted? Why are liberals more likely to identify as Democrats and conservatives more likely to be Republicans? The authors argue that this is, in fact, only true among the well informed. Just as Converse argued decades ago, there is indeed a small segment of the electorate who are knowledgeable and engaged and, it seems, they are largely responsible for the partisan– ideological sorting that is evidently occurring among the American people. Thanks to the polarization of Washington elites, informed Americans now choose the ideological label that best matches their preexisting partisan identity, but most Americans remain innocently “moderate” despite forming strong in-group biases with respect to their partisanship. Kinder and Kalmoe anticipate some pushback, notably from scholars like Paul Sniderman, John Jost, and James Stimson who argue, respectively, that ideology and partisanship are locked together, that ideology exists and matters, and that Americans may hold views that align with one end of the ideological spectrum while personally identifying with the other. The authors defend their own views against these alternative arguments largely by pointing to the majority of Americans who identify as partisan yet claim to be ideologically moderate, which—in their view—signifies that they are not ideological at all. Given the massive literature that underscores what we know and think about ideology, there are other views that I would be interested in hearing Kinder and Kalmoe address—particularly when it comes to moderates. For example, Shawn Treier and Sunshine Hillygus (“The Nature of Political Ideology in the Contemporary

Neither Liberal nor Conservative: Ideological Innocence in the American Public. By Donald R. Kinder and Nathan P. Kalmoe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. 224p. $78.00 cloth, $26.00 paper.

A theory of political belief system dynamics should incorporate causal connections between elements of the belief system and the possibility that belief systems are influenced by exogenous factors. These necessary components can be satisfied by conceptualizing an individual's belief system as a network of causally connected attitudes and identities which, via the interactions between the elements and the push of exogenous influences, produces the disparate phenomena in the belief systems literature. We implement this belief systems as networks theory in a dynamic Ising model and demonstrate that the theory can integrate at least six otherwise unrelated phenomenon in the political belief systems literature, including work on attitude consistency, cross-pressures, spillover effects, partisan cues, and ideological differences in attitude consensus. Our findings suggest that belief systems are not just one thing, but emerge from the interactions between the attitudes and identities in the belief system. All code is available: https://osf.io/aswy8/?view_only=99aff77909094bddabb5d382f6db2622.

/pdf/evaluating-belief-system-networks-as-a-theory-of-political-ykq2jms288.pdf

Evaluating Belief System Networks as a Theory of Political Belief System Dynamics.

Refutation texts, rhetorical tools designed to reduce misconceptions, have garnered attention across four decades and many studies. Yet, the ability of a refutation text to change a learner’s mind ...

A critical review of the refutation text literature: Methodological confounds, theoretical problems, and possible solutions

Models of population-wide cultural change tend to invoke one of two broad models of individual change. One approach theorizes people actively updating their beliefs and behaviors in the face of new...

/pdf/measuring-stability-and-change-in-personal-culture-using-5f8w2pqc15.pdf

Measuring Stability and Change in Personal Culture Using Panel Data

Recent work argues that changes in people's responses to the same question over time should be thought of as reflecting a fixed baseline subject to temporary local influences, rather than durable changes in response to new information. Distinguishing between these two individual-level process—a settled dispositions model and an active updating model—is important because these individual-level processes underlie different theories of population-level social change. This article introduces an alternative method for adjudicating between these two models based on structural equation modeling. This model provides a close fit to the theoretical models outlined in previous work. Applying this method to more than 500 questions in the General Social Survey's three-wave panels, we find even stronger evidence than previous work that most survey responses reflect settled dispositions developed prior to adulthood.

https://sociologicalscience.com/download/vol-8/march/SocSci_v8_83to95.pdf

Kevin Kiley

Papers

Measuring Stability and Change in Personal Culture Using Panel Data

A Model-Based Method for Detecting Persistent Cultural Change Using Panel Data