This is a complete summary of all the required articles for the course Political Psychology. It includes articles of Kinder, Broockman, van Bavel, Skitka, Eagly, Enos, Bakker, Wood, Rand, Hanges, Todorov, Broockman, Gadarian, Bond, Nickerson, Van Beest, Dubois, Rucker, Balliet, and Rotter. Highly r...
LECTURE 2
Kinder, D. R. & Kalmoe, N. P. (2017). Converse’s claim. Chapter in Neither liberal nor
conservative: Ideological innocence in the American Public (pp 11-21). University of
Chicago Press.
According to Converse, Americans are innocent of ideology. Ideology is a very vague term, but it
is defined as ‘those ideas drawn from competing political philosophies designated to inspire
political loyalties and motivate political action’. Ideologies are ‘social romances, but realistic’.
Ideology ‘replaces religion, provides aesthetic criteria, rules over scientific research and
philosophic thought and regulates sexual and family life’. Critics said Converse underestimated
the presence of ideology among American electorate.
Some characteristics:
- Ideology is a form of cognition. It refers to the belief or the configuration of beliefs and it
exists in the mind.
- The subject of ideology is society, economics and politics. It expresses what people take
to be right and proper.
- The various ideas that comprise an ideology form an organized structure; change in one
idea requires change in another idea.
- Ideological structures are shared. It ‘organizes politics for many, not just for one’.
- Ideologies are deployed with the aim of justifying, contesting, or changing the social and
political arrangements and processes of the political community.
- Ideology supplies citizens with a stable foundation for understanding and action. People
with an ideology come to politics with an advantage: new political events have more
meaning. People would see the world more clearly, understand it well, form opinions
and make decisions that reflect their core beliefs.
Do Americans approach the world of politics with an ideology in mind? According to Converse:
NO. Converse regarded Americans to be in possession of an ideological point of view if they
justified their political attachments by invoking ideological concepts. People in his experiment
who showed to have an ideological point of view expressed special interests in politics and were
comparatively well educated.
Barely one in ten Americans comes to politics with an ideology in mind on their own. These
people don’t refer to ideologies, but more to group interest.
The next question is what proportion of the American public can be said to understand
ideological categories. Respondents were asked whether they thought one of the parties was
more conservative or more liberal than the other, then which party was the more conservative,
and finally what they had in mind when they said that one party was more conservative than the
other.
More Americans appear to understand ideological categories than make use of them on their
own. About one in six Americans appear capable of following discussions carried out at an
ideological level.
Converse wanted to look for evidence of ideological organization. He did so by examining the
structure of opinions on issues within each of two populations; the general public and smaller
group of candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives. They were asked about domestic and
foreign policy issues.
Converse found that the correlations between the issues were very different. Candidates’ views
were liberal or conservative, but always consistent. But, there was no structure found for the
general public and they were unpredictable. No structure, no ideology.
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Converse admitted that there could be some structure in the answers of the public, but that the
only logical structure is the one from conservative to liberal. He then concluded that ideological
beliefs are beliefs held with conviction.
Converse’s black and white model of opinion proposes that on any particular issue, the public
can be partitioned into one of just two discontinuous classed: the first made up of citizens who
possess genuine opinions and hold onto them tenaciously; the second composed of citizens who
are unacquainted with the issue and, when pressed, either confess their ignorance outright or,
out of embarrassment of misplaced civic obligation, invent an attitude on the spot – not a real
attitude, but a ‘non-attitude’. Members of the first class never change their opinion; members of
the second class either admit they have no opinion or generate an opinion randomly. The black-
and-white model implies that less than 20 percent of the American electorate held real opinions
on government control. More than 80 percent, either admitted to having no opinion or
expressed ‘hastily fabricated’ opinions indistinguishable from random ones.
Americans with real and stable opinions on an issue constitute what Converse calls an issue
public. Issue publics are miniature publics; their numbers are modest compared to the public as
a whole. Converse prefers ‘belief system’ over ‘ideology’, because the term ‘ideology’ is
thoroughly muddied in use. When Converse refers to political belief system, we can take him to
mean ideology. He explains that “the policy is the end. And the party is the means, and ends are
conceived to be more stable and central in belief systems than means”. Things, however, are
actually the other way around: “The party and the affect toward it are more central within the
political belief systems of the mass public than are the policy ends that the parties are designed
to pursue”.
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Broockman, D. E., & Butler, D. M. (2017). The causal effects of elite position-taking on
voter attitudes: Field experiments with elite communication. American Journal of Political
Science, 61, 208-221.
On the one hand, classic theoretical accounts characterize opinion leadership as reflecting elite
persuasion. Elites shape public opinion primarily by highlighting how their policy proposals are
consistent with citizens preexisting values or by arguing they will accomplish shared goals. If
citizens reliably demand that politicians persuasively justify their positions, politicians will
eschew taking positions they do not believe they can persuasively defend.
However, a different theoretical perspective suggests that, at least some of the time, opinion
leadership is better characterized as a process of position adoption. Citizens are not expected to
reliably evaluate their representatives more negatively when learning their representatives
support policies they oppose, and they may even adopt their representatives’ positions as their
own – even in the absence of persuasive justifications. Across a wide range of policy matters,
citizens appear willing to follow their leaders.
On the one hand, democratic theory suggests citizens may believe elites have superior policy
information, expertise, or judgment. Likewise, psychological studies suggest citizens may tend to
defer to authority figures on even significant personal matters.
How do voters react when politicians support policies they oppose?
The traditional view of democracy conceives of citizens as issue voters. In its strictest form, it
suggests that citizens hold politicians in less esteem when politicians support policies citizens
oppose, and that politicians cannot meaningfully influence citizens’ policy preferences.
The elite persuasion perspective would offer the same predictions if politicians did not offer
persuasive arguments justifying their positions; however, if politicians can argue that their
positions are consistent with citizens’ values and predispositions or frame them as such, they
might successfully shape public opinion and avoid paying electoral costs for taking positions
citizens once opposed.
Finally, the position adoption perspective predicts that, as citizens often defer to legislators’
policy judgments, citizens will not react negatively when political leaders take positions they
oppose and may even adopt their positions, regardless of whether politicians justify them.
Studies about these perspectives have different limitations, like the external validity. For
example, citizens aware they are being studied may feel compelled to misrepresent their true
policy opinions and evaluations of politicians.
Both study 1 and 2 followed the same basic protocol:
1. Identification of issues
2. Baseline surveys
3. Exclusions
4. Randomized treatment assignment
a. Whether legislators took an issue position or not (study 1) and how it was
justified (study 2).
b. On which issue the legislator took a position
5. Treatment delivery
6. Follow-up surveys
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