Political Expertise and the Development of Attitude Consistency

Abstract

The development of consistency between political attitudes among those who are relatively expert in the political domain is presumed to follow from the fact that such individuals think about political issues frequently and do so in a relatively systematic or principled manner. We conducted a study to examine this hypothesis, varying the frequency with which subjects thought about the implications between pairs of issues. We then examined whether within-subject correlations between subsequently generated judgments of where various political candidates were located on the issue pairs increased as the pairs' implications were judged more frequently. As expected, we found that candidate inferences on issues were more predictable between issue pairs the more frequently expert subjects had thought about the implications between those issue pairs. Less-expert subjects showed no effect of frequency of thought about implications between pairs of issues. Procedural learning in making issue implication judgments was manifested by all subjects and was not related to subjects' expertise. However, procedural learning translated into larger correlations between candidate inferences only among expert subjects. This suggests that these subjects refer to underlying ideo logical knowledge about these issues in making their issue implication judgments and that this practice is responsible for larger correlations between issues on subsequently generated candidate inferences.In a recent chapter, Judd and Krosnick (1989) examined the accumulated literature from social psychology and political science concerning the determinants of consistency among political attitudes. In this literature there have been repeated arguments and empirical demonstrations that expertise in the political domain is a primary determinant of attitude consistency (

Racism, ideology, and affirmative action revisited: The antecedents and consequences of "principled objections" to affirmative action.

“…More broadly, however, it is also consistent with one of the chief findings of research on belief-system structure, namely the finding that educated, politically-knowledgeable individuals are typically more attuned to the implicational connections between different sets of beliefs (Judd & Downing, 1990;Judd & Krosnick, 1989;Lavine, Thomsen & Gonzales, 1997; see also Converse, 1964;Stimson, 1975;Zaller, 1992). If the group-dominance model's assertion that racism, conservatism, and opposition to affirmative action share a common function is true, then this reasoning implies these variables should be more strongly interrelated among educated Whites.…”

News, Talk, Opinion, Participation: The Part Played by Conversation in Deliberative Democracy

“…Jennings's conclusion is that "any standard survey instrument can distinguish" the differences in constraint "between mass publics and political party elites" (1992, p. 419). Many other studies concur (e.g., Hagner & Pierce, 1983;Judd & Downing, 1990;Judd & Milburn, 1980;Nie & Anderson, 1974). Other attempts to measure various aspects of consistency in opinions and attitudes include Hunter, Danes, and Cohen (1984) and Kiesler, Collins, and Miller (1969).…”

“…When we constructed consistency scales, as did Converse (1964) and some of his followers (Hagner & Pierce, 1983;Judd & Downing, 1990;Judd & Milburn, 1980;Miller, Hesli, & Reisinger, 1995), we found the scales to be positively associated with amount of news-media use and political conversation. In other words, higher correlation coefficients among the items-Medicare support, party identity, ideology, and support for "decent standard of living"-were detected among those who use news media more, talk politics more, and have higher education.…”

“…However, we believed it necessary to conceptualize opinion consistency at the individual level because comparing strength of correlations across different groups may produce misleading results (Barton & Parsons, 1977;Judd & Downing, 1990).…”

Political Expertise and Issue Voting in Presidential Elections

“…According to an emerging body of research, what you know and how deeply you think about politics strongly affect political thought and behavior. To take some examples, expertise leads to higher levels of policy attitude holding (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996;Jacoby 1995;Krosnick and Milburn 1990), attitude structure and stability (Converse 1964;Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996;Feldman 1989;Judd and Downing 1990;Norpoth and Lodge 1985;Stimson 1975), ideological reasoning (Converse 1964;Hamill, Lodge, and Blake 1985;Sniderman, Brody, and Tetlock 1991;Stimson 1975), and information processing efficiency (Fiske, Kinder, and Larter 1983;Lodge and Hamill 1986;McGraw, Lodge, and Stroh 1990). This body of work demonstrates that political expertise influences the political choices citizens make.…”