The Duality of Attitude Structure: A Test of Kerlinger's Criterial Referents Theory within Samples of Swedish and American Youth

Expertise, Evaluative Motivation, and the Structure of Citizens’ Ideological Commitments

“…At the simplest level, they reinforce and extend earlier findings on the relationship between political expertise and the evaluative structure of citizens’ ideological commitments. Consistent with this earlier work (e.g., Sidanius & Duffy, 1988), the results presented here indicated that expertise was negatively related to deviations from ideological bipolarity in two different datasets, even after a variety of other factors were taken into account. Moreover, the results also suggest that expertise is negatively related not just to deviations from ideological bipolarity, but also to deviations from bipolarity in evaluations of objects closely linked to ideology—namely, attitudes toward presidential candidates and political parties.…”

“…This suggests that political experts may be less likely to deviate from evaluative bipolarity in their ideological commitments, while novices may be more likely to do so. Consistent with this, multigroup confirmatory factor analyses conducted by Sidanius and Duffy (1988) found that the bipolar model fit better among Swedish and American students who were high in expertise. Conversely, while their results indicated that the bivariate model fit poorly at all expertise levels, they also suggested that its fit was especially poor among those high in expertise.…”

“…These perspectives have been applied in a variety of other literatures (e.g., persuasion; see Cacioppo et al., 1996; see also Kruglanski, 1996), but they have only recently been extended to analyses of how individuals structure their broader political commitments, such as those related to ideology. In general, work in this area has focused largely on the role of ability‐related factors like expertise (Sidanius & Duffy, 1988; see also Judd & Krosnick, 1989). Moreover, in the present context, they have usually assumed that individuals with the expertise needed to understand the bipolar structuring of ideology in elite discourse are also motivated to make use of this expertise in organizing their own commitments.…”

“…A related issue has to do with the present study's relatively novel methodological approach to the assessment of deviations from ideological bipolarity. Most studies in this area of inquiry have relied on factor‐analytic methods where correlations between latent dimensions corresponding to conservatism and liberalism were examined at the sample or subsample level (Kerlinger, 1972, 1984; Sidanius & Duffy, 1988). However, the analyses reported here have attempted to measure the structure of ideological commitments at the individual level.…”

“…However, factor‐analytic studies using different model specifications have qualified these results (Green, 1988; Sidanius & Duffy, 1988). For example, after correcting for nonrandom error introduced by the use of a common response format, Green (1988) found that latent variables corresponding to evaluations of liberals and conservatives were in fact highly negatively correlated, suggesting a bipolar pattern.…”