Kinder - Belief Systems Today

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Belief systems today

Donald R. Kinder
a a
Department of Political Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, 48106 E-mail: Available online: 06 Mar 2008
To cite this article: Donald R. Kinder (2006): Belief systems today, Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society, 18:1-3, 197-216 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08913810608443657
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Donald R. Kinder
BELIEF SYSTEMS TODAY

ABSTRACT: My purpose is to offer an assessment of the scientific legacy of Converse's "Belief Systems" by reviewing five productive lines of research stimulated by his authoritative analysis and unsettling conclusions. First I recount the later life history of Converse's notion of "nonattitudes," and suggest that as important as nonattitudes are, we should be paying at least as much attention to their opposite: attitudes held with conviction. Second, I argue that the problem of insufficient information that resides at the center of Converse's analysis has not gone away, and that newly fashioned models of information processing offer only partial remedies. Third, I suggest that the concept of the "average voter" is a malicious fiction, as it blinds us to the enormous variation in political attention, interest, and knowledge that characterizes mass publics, in Converse's time as in our own. Fourth, I develop an affirmative aspect of Converse's analysis that has mostly been overlooked: namely, that if ideological reasoning is beyond most citizens' capacity and interest, they might fall back on a simple and reasonable alternative, which I will call "group-centrism." And fifth, I consider the possibility that while the majority of individual citizens falls short of democratic standards, the public as a whole might do rather well.
If democracy means rule by the people, then in today's world democracy is widely endorsed in principle but rarely realized in practice. At most there are, here and there, instances of indirect democCritical Review 18 (2006), nos. 1-3. ISSN 0891-3811. www.criticalreview.com. 2006 Critical Review Foundation. Donald R. Kinder, Department of Political Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48106, drkinder@umich.edu, thanks Jeffrey Friedman for excellent editorial advice.
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racy, where control over government decisions is constitutionally vested not in the people themselves but in officials chosen by the people. Under indirect democracy, citizens select those who actually govern; express judgment on the performance of government; and offer, from time to time, recommendations on what policies should be adopted next. If this attenuated form of democracy fails to measure up to the mental picture we carry around of ancient Athens or the New England town meeting, it still leaves contemporary citizens with important things to do. How well do they do them? To what extent should we expect citizens to provide wise decisions, good judgment, and sensible advice on matters of politics? For more than forty years now, the single best answer to this question has been supplied by Philip Converse's extraordinary essay, "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics." As readers of this volume know, Converse concluded that qualitative, perhaps unbridgeable differences separated the political thinking of elites from the political thinking of ordinary people. Most Americans, in Converse's judgment, were incapable of following, much less actually participating in, democratic politics. Not everyone agreed. In short order, Converse's essay set off a huge scholarly commotion.1 The most compelling line of criticism directed at "Belief Systems"or so it seemed at the timewas that Converse had ignored politics: his analysis had paid too little attention to the nature of elite discussion. According to this interpretation, the lack of sophistication displayed by citizens under Converse's microscope mirrored the unsophisticated public debate to which the public was treated at the time. Provide Americans with a more thoughtful and high-minded politics, so ran the argument, and they would be perfectly capable of responding in kind. On this point, the critics appeared to have time on their side. Surely Converse's conclusions reflected, in part, the comparatively tranquil Eisenhower years, a period of political recovery from the intense ideological debates of the New Deal and from the collective trauma of economic depression and world war. Surely his original claim must be modified, given the events that had shattered national tranquility in the intervening years. Not really, as I read the evidence. Over time, Converse's claim of ideological naivete stands up wellboth to transformations in politics, and to a broad array of challenging analysis. After all the boisterous events and ideological debates visited upon American politics
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intermittently over the last 40 years, and after all the oftenunfriendly scholarly attention "Belief Systems" attracted, the original claim survives largely intact. Just as Converse would have it, when it comes to politics, most citizens are ideologically innocent: indifferent to standard ideological concepts, lacking a consistent outlook on public policy, in possession of genuine opinions on only a few issues, and knowing damn little.2 Does this mean that there is nothing more to say; that the question of whether citizens are up to shouldering the demands of democracy is settled? No. To the contrary, one measure of forward momentum in scientific disciplines is programmatic investigation of old questions formulated in new and ever-finer ways, and something resembling this has been taking place on the subject of democratic competence or so, at least, I will try to show here. Attitudes, Weak and Strong Converse claimed that on any particular issue of broad political importance, the public could be partitioned into one of two groups: the first made up of citizens who possess genuine opinions and hold onto them tenaciously; the second and much larger group composed of citizens who are quite indifferent to the issue in question and who, when pressed, either confess their ignorance outright or, out of embarrassment or misplaced civic obligation, invent an attitude on the spotnot a real attitude, but a "nonattitude." Converse ([1964] 2006, 51) concluded that sizable fractions of the public "do not have meaningful beliefs, even on issues that have formed the basis for intense political controversy among elites for substantial periods of time." Nonattitudes are embarrassing for advocates of democracy. Their presence implies that people don't know what they want from government. If Converse is right about nonattitudes then, as Christopher Achen (1975, 1227) once put it, "Democratic theory loses its starting point." For two reasons at least, the case for nonattitudes seems even stronger now than when Converse introduced the idea. First of all, surveys have continued to show that, from one interview to the next, citizens in impressively large numbers wander from one side of a policy question to the other (e.g., Converse and Markus 1979).3 The
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second reason comes from evidence on the stability of elite opinion. Converse launched his inquiry with an interest in whether political leaders and publics were equipped to talk intelligibly to one another. His answer was no, but he actually provided rather little evidence on elites, and no evidence at all on the temporal stability (as opposed to the inter-issue consistency at any given time) of their views. Now, however, we know that political elites hold onto their political beliefs much more resolutely than do common citizens (Converse and Pierce 1986; Jennings 1992; Putnam 1979). This suggests that nonattitudes primarily reflect the low information and casual attention that citizens ordinarily bring to politics, much as Converse originally suggested. Does this mean that people who express nonattitudes have nothing to say? Not necessarily. John Zaller and Stanley Feldman (1992) argue that nonattitudes reflect not so much ignorance as confusion. They take as their point of departure the premise that the American political mind is teeming with potentially relevant considerations. Citizens do not know what to think, Zaller and Feldman suggest, because they cannot adjudicate among the various competing considerations that come to mind. In a clever study, they show that many Americans can generate justifications both for favoring and for opposing prominent government policies, and that such ambivalence is associated with instability in their opinions (cf. Hill and Kriesi 2001). Suppose Zaller and Feldman are correct. Suppose nonattitudes are real, but not deeply considered; real, but unstable. What are government officials to make of advice composed disproportionately of such fragile attitudes? Does the Zaller and Feldman interpretation of nonattitudes make less trouble for democratic theory than did Converse's original view? Perhaps. If in fact Americans have lots of things in mind out of which they might construct opinions, then whether or not they actually succeed in doing so might depend on whatever help they receive from others about how issues should be defined and understoodor in the contemporary idiom, about how issues are "framed." Political elites are constantly engaged in efforts to define issues their way. At the heart of such rhetorical efforts is a frame"a central organizing idea or story line that provides meaning to an unfolding strip of events, weaving a connection among them. The frame suggests what the controversy is about, the essence of the issue" (Gamson and Modigliani, 1987, 143). In effect, frames operate as
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"opinion recipes": advice from elites about what ingredients, in what proportions, should be combined to form a good opinion. Insofar as elites provide useful frames, citizens should be more likely to develop real opinions. And, in fact, they seem to do so. In a series of experimental demonstrations across a variety of issues, citizens are more likely to express an opinion when they are provided with helpful frames. Moreover, in the presence of such frames, opinions are more stable over time and better anchored in the material interests and political commitments that the frames appear to highlight (e.g., Kinder and Nelson 2005; Kinder and Sanders 1996; Sniderman and Theriault 2004) .4 The nature, prevalence, and improvability of non-attitudes are important to democratic politics, but so too are real attitudeswhich I will call, borrowing from Robert Abelson (1988), attitudes held with "conviction." Conviction distinguishes between opinions we truly own and those we merely borrow. As Converse's original analysis suggested, conviction is not very common, but when citizens really own their beliefs, when they think clearly and care deeply about an issue, they are much more likely to take part in politics. The effects are substantial and surprisingly general. Having conviction energizes a broad repertoire of political action, from persuading others to vote for a favorite candidate, to joining an organization, to working in a political campaign (Burns and Kinder 2005).5 Conviction is importantreal attitudes are importantbecause action is important. Participation in matters of government and politics is the lifeblood of a democratic society, and those who take an active part in politics are more likely to influence what government chooses to do than are those who sit on the sidelines. Which issues appear on the agenda (and which do not), and how those issues speak to people (or fail to), have consequences for whose opinions are ultimately heard in the halls of power. Insufficient Information For critics of democracy, the claim that common citizens don't know enough has been a persistent and powerful weapon. Those opposed to the spread of democratic practice at the time of the American Revolution argued that the ordinary person simply lacked the infor-
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mational wherewithal to offer any useful advice about national policy. As Converse (1990, 369) put it, Good decision making requires good information. And while the common citizen might be expected to be a fair judge of matters close to his or her ken, such as how a minister's pay was best raised or how much repair must be done on the local bridge, good information about national and international affairs was exacdy what most citizens, preoccupied by their daily subsistence rounds, conspicuously lacked. Compared to their Revolutionary-era predecessors, today's common citizens are affluent, well educated, and virtually bombarded by news of the wider world. Good decisions still require good information, however, and good information, according to Converse, thins out very rapidly in mass publics. His skepticism about the limited reasoning powers citizens typically apply to politics follows in a direct and immediate way from how modestly citizens invest in politics and, as a consequence, how little they know. And how little do they know? Consider this example. Shortly after taking office, and then again in 2003, President Bush proposed and Congress passed two of the largest tax cuts in U.S. history. The 2001 legislation alone will likely cost the federal treasury a staggering $2 trillion through 2010, with more than a third of the reduction going to the richest 1 percent of Americans. And yet surveys taken during this period revealed that most Americans admitted that they had never heard anything about the elimination of taxes on corporate dividends, a central provision of the president's 2003 tax proposal; roughly half of the American public believed that "most families" pay federal inheritance taxes (the correct answer is less than 2 percent); and when offered the opportunity, many Americansa near majorityconfessed that they really hadn't thought enough about the president's trillion-dollar tax proposals to develop an opinion (Bartels 2005; Kinder, Burns, and Vieregge 2005). There is nothing unusual about this example. Across time, space, and domain, "levels of information about public affairs are, from the point of view of the informed observer, astonishingly low" (Converse 1975, 79; Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996; Price and Zaller I993)-6 This conclusion, however, may not be as democratically disheartening as it first appears. One reason to think so is supplied by Milton
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Lodge and his colleagues, who argue that citizens know more than they can tell. Not to worry if citizens often cannot summon up basic facts about candidates when asked to do so, Lodge says; such demonstrations do not prove that citizens are staggering around in the dark. This conclusion follows as an implication from Lodge's principal project, which is to specify "the main architectural and procedural features of a psychologically realistic model of the candidate-evaluation process" (Lodge 1995, in). In this pursuit, Lodge takes inspiration from the informationprocessing approach to human cognition, drawing heavily on a model developed by Reid Hastie in particular (Hastie and Park 1986; Hastie and Pennington 1989). Lodge's central point is that over the course of a campaign, citizens develop their impressions of the candidates "online": not, that is to say, by consulting the Internet, but by integrating new information into an ongoing overall impression. Campaigns deliver messages; citizens sometimes notice them; as they do, they rapidly draw out the political implications of the messages, if any; they thereupon integrate these implications into their summary evaluations of the candidates; commit their now-updated overall evaluations to long-term memory; and then (here is the crucial point for present purposes) quickly forget the details that prompted the updating in the first place. An implication of the on-line model is that citizens should be judged not by the information they can recalla test most citizens flunkbut by the kinds of information they entertain, and how ably they integrate such information into their ongoing evaluations. The on-line model is psychologically realistic, it accounts for patterns of evidence in judgment and memory that alternative models cannot, and its application to candidates and campaigns is supported by a series of well-designed experiments (e.g., Lodge and Steenbergen 1995). In many respects, this is an exemplary case of publicopinion research putting to excellent use basic models and concepts developed in cognitive psychology. Lodge intends his model to apply only to a particular settingnamely, voters developing evaluations of competing candidates as a campaign unfoldsbut it is an important setting. All this is very much to the good. The implications of the on-line model for the problem we are wrestling with here are not altogether clear, however. First of all, notice that the model is agnostic on what kinds of information voters take into account. Are they paying attention to the candidate's posi-
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tion on the national debt, his vivacious wife, his excellent posture, his pale skinwhat? We need to know more about what kinds of information voters are picking up and integrating into their evaluations. Moreover, even if voters were paying attention to high-grade information, and even if they were perfectly responsive to such information, the on-line model would leave them with nothing to say. Their preferences would be informed, but their amnesia about the information that led them to their preferences would disqualify them from participating in political debate. If democracy is, at least in part, government by discussion (Guttmann and Thompson 1996), and politics an arena "where public goals and policies are debated and political choices must be publicly justified" (Stoker 1992, 370), the on-line model cannot supply an altogether satisfying solution to the normative problem posed by insufficient information. Another line of attack on the problem of insufficient information, which has gathered steam in recent years, concedes widespread public ignorance of politics but concludes that many citizens may nevertheless muddle through. How? By relying on a variety of cognitive shortcuts, or "heuristics." Heuristics are "strategies of simplification that reduce the complexity of judgment tasks, to make them tractable for the kind of mind that people happen to have" (Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky 1982, xii). They are, as Richard Nisbett and Lee Ross (1980, 18) put it, "an inevitable feature of the cognitive apparatus of any organism that must make as many judgments, inferences, and decisions as humans have to do." One such heuristic is to take cues from well-informed or at least better-informed sources. A terrific demonstration of this point is provided by Arthur Lupia (1994), who showed that California voters who knew little about the details of various complicated proposals to reform the automobile insurance industry in their state nevertheless made choices that were indistinguishable from those made by well-informed voters. All the generally ill-informed voters really needed to know was which proposals were backed by which interest groups. For example, when Californians knew that the insurance industry itself was behind a particular proposal, they knew enough to vote against it. More generally, by taking cues from expert sourcesparty elites (Brody 1991), news organizations (Iyengar and Kinder 1987), opinion leaders (Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955), interest groups (Lupia 1994)citizens can "be knowledgeable in their reasoning about political choices without nee-
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essarily possessing a large body of knowledge about politics" (Sniderman, Brody and Tetlock 1991,19). If, as contemporary cognitive psychology insists, heuristic processing is "inevitable," then it would be foolish to pretend that heuristics play no part in everyday judgment and choice about politics in particular. Surely they do. Whether this is an altogether good thing is another matter. First of all, although citizens may be quite willing to rely on the views expressed by better-informed elites, we should not assume that it is always easy for citizens to learn what elites think. In the case of automobile-insurance reform in California, for example (Lupia 1994), the insurance industry and the trial lawyers understood perfectly well their reputational problem, so in the millions of dollars' worth of advertisements they purchased, they disguised their identity as much as the law would allow. We should also keep in mind that heuristics are shortcuts, and that when we take shortcuts, we sometimes end up in the right placebut sometimes get lost. In taking cues from elites we can get lost because the elites themselves may be mistaken (as in interpreting the Tet offensive in 1968 as a catastrophic defeat for U.S. forces), or because elites knowingly send erroneous cues (as in the Kennedy campaign's charge in i960 that the United States had fallen behind the Soviet Union in the production of offensive nuclear missiles). Thus, heuristic processing can lead to erroneous conclusions (Kuklinski and Quirk 2000; Lau & Redlawsk 2001). This is perfectly obvious to anyone acquainted with the original work on heuristics in psychology. In a series of brilliantly conceived and highly influential experiments, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky showed that in response to information overload, people use arbitrary starting points to anchor their judgments; rely on the subjective accessibility of memories to estimate the frequency and importance of past events; depend on surface resemblances to place particular instances in general categories; ignore statistical information; and over-weight vivid cases of dubious typicality (Abelson 1976; Tversky and Kahneman 1974, 1981; Kahneman and Knetsch 1992; Kahneman, Ritov, and Schkade 2000; Kahneman and Tversky 1979). In this literature, heuristics are described as biases and shortcomings; they generate systematic departures from normative models of judgment and choice; they can "lead to severe and systematic errors" (Tversky and Kahneman 1974,
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For some reason or another, political scientists who have taken up the claim of heuristics have overlooked this basic point. Heuristics are simply embraced as a normatively appealing remedy for the problem of insufficient information. But as Richard Lau and David Redlawsk (2001) put it, this is merely a "verbal solution." In the end, the problem for democracy is not just that citizens don't know enough, or that they cannot justify to others what they know. It is that they know thingsor think they know thingsthat are incorrect: that the crime rate is rising (when in fact it is declining), or that a huge fraction of the national treasury is being spent on foreign aid (when it is not), or that weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq (when they have not been). Such errors of fact can be quite consequential for the opinions people hold, and they are not always easy to correct (Gilens 2001; Kuklinski, Quirk, Jerit, Schweider, and Rich 2000). Finally, neither the claim that citizens know more than they can tell, nor the assertion that under certain specified conditions, poorly informed citizens can mimic the decisions made by the better informed, has anything to say, really, about the brute fact of information inequality: most people know so little about politics, while others know so much.
We Are Not the Same

Politics is a difficult subject, and not everyone cares to study it. Large numbers of Americans know little about political life, but a handfulthe activists and the fanatics who live and breathe politics (the sort of person who might pick up an issue of Critical Review)appear to know practically everything. Mass publics are characterized by huge inequalities in political information. Huge inequalities. Converse referred to the variation in the command of political information displayed by members of the general public as "staggering" and "astronomical," and his analysis of belief systems turns on this point. Some people think about politics in sophisticated ways, traffic easily in abstraction, and place current events in context. They are the well-informed few, and they pick up new information easily and retain it readily. Some people spend very little time on politics, abstract political concepts fly over their heads, and when they think about politics at all, they take up events one at a
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time, seeing little or no connection among them. They are the knownothings, they exist in far larger numbers than we imagine, and for them, news about politics is next to incomprehensible. In between these two extremes are the rest, who get by, paying intermittent attention, alert enough to notice temporal associations between the party in power and conditions in the country or in their own lives, say; or sensible enough to support policies that bestow favors on social groups they find deserving (more on the logic of group-centrism below). In short, citizens vary enormously in the information about politics they have at their command. So Converse claimed in his 1964 essay, and so it still seems to be (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996). Phrases like "the general public" or "the average citizen" obscure this fundamental difference. We are not all the same. Moreover, since Converse's essay, we have learned that the well informed differ from the poorly informed in all kinds of consequential ways. They are more likely to express opinions in the first place. They are more likely to possess stable opinionsreal opinions, opinions held with conviction. They are more likely to use ideological concepts correctly, to cite evidence in political discussions, and to process information sensitively. They are better at retaining new information. They are more adept in the deployment of heuristics. They vote more consistently with their political interests. And they are much more likely to take an active part in politics (e.g., Bartels 1988; Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996; Fiske, Lau, and Smith 1990; Fiske and Kinder 1981; Gilens 2001; Iyengar 1990; Lau and Redlawsk 2001; Mondak 2001; Price and Zaller 1993; Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995; Zaller 1990, 1992). Information matters. Perhaps the single most important application of this principle since Converse's essay can be found in John Zaller's influential work on the dynamics of public opinion, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (1992) .7 The prime mover in Zaller's account of public opinion is, broadly speaking, news about the wider world. To explain how the flow of news affects opinion, Zaller draws on theoretical models and empirical results from cognitive psychology. He abandons the traditional conception of political "attitudes" as fixed preferences; instead, he views attitudes as constructions, sturdy or rickety, but in any case built on the fly. When asked for their opinions, citizens draw on mental "considerations" that happen to be most accessible at that mo-
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mentconsiderations, as Shelley Taylor and Susan Fiske (1978) once put it, that are at the "top of the head." Taking center stage in ZaUer's model is the proposition that people differ enormously in the care and attention they invest in politics, with this difference manifested by differences in political knowledge. Zaller proposes that differential political knowledge has complicated, offsetting effects on opinion change. On the one hand, people are more likely to "receive" a message as a direct function of their level of general information about politics; but on the other, they are more likely to resist messages that are inconsistent with their political predispositions. Zaller's model turns out to fit a wide array of empirical cases. Shifts in opinion on school desegregation and on the Vietnam War; the dynamics of presidential primary election campaigns; the electoral advantages enjoyed by Congressional incumbentsall these (and more) can be accommodated within a common theoretical vocabulary (Zaller 1992). Information (one last time) matters.
Group-Centrism Converse's essay is best remembered as a relentless and forceful attack on the fanciful idea that citizens in modern mass societies think about politics in ideologically sophisticated ways. The essay is that in part, but it is not only that. About midway through, Converse offered an affirmative statement. If ideological reasoning is beyond most people's capacity and interest, how might they organize their thinking about politics? Converse began to formulate his answer through a thought experiment. He invited the reader to imagine policies formulated so as to emphasize a highly visible and familiar social groupin his example, using the vernacular of the times, "Negroes"whose fortunes appear to be advanced or impaired by each of the policies. As in: "Negroes should be kept out of professional athletics," or "The government should see to it that Negroes get fair treatment in jobs and housing," or "Even though it may hurt the position of the Negro in the South, state governments should be able to decide who can vote and who cannot." Converse suggested that for most Americans, it is the social group itself that looms large in these various policy proposals, not abstract arguments over states' rights or the proper role of the federal government. Because abstractions "take on meaning only with a good
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deal of political information and understanding, the attitude items given would tend to boil down for many respondents to the same single question: 'Are you sympathetic to Negroes as a group, are you indifferent to them, or do you dislike them?'" (Converse [1964] 2006, 39). In this exercise, Converse was using race to make a general point about the potential of sentiments toward social groups to organize political beliefs. The "advantage" of race is that the markers for group membership are highly visible"in the skin," so to speak. But Converse mentioned religion, social class, and nationality as well as race, and offered the role of John F. Kennedy's Catholicism in the i960 presidential campaign as a case in point. If the evidence in support of group-centrism was fragmentary some 40 years ago, it is now abundant. Across a variety of domains, public opinion is shaped in powerful ways by the feelings citizens harbor toward the social groups that are visibly entangled in the issues and events of the moment (e.g., Citrin, Reingold, and Green 1990; Dawson 1994; Gilens 1995; Kinder and Sanders 1996; Kinder and Winter 2001; Nelson and Kinder 1996; Price and Hsu 1992; Sears, Hensler, and Speer 1979; Sniderman, Brody, and Kuklinski 1984). Group sentiment is not the only factor in public opinion, but it is almost always present, and of all the diverse opinion ingredients, it is often the most potent. Notice that group-centrism requires that citizens see a connection between some political dispute, on the one hand, and some visible social group, on the other. That is, to get group-centrism up and running, citizens must, as Converse put it, "be endowed with some cognitions of the group as an entity and with some interstitial 'linking' information indicating why a given party or policy is relevant to the group. Neither of these forms of information can be taken for granted" (Converse [1964] 2006, 41). Thus group-centrism depends upon information, and can be short-circuited by the kinds of informational shortcomings that show up routinely in public opinion research. These gaps in public understanding are partly a product of the limited attention and modest skills that citizens typically bring to politics. But the extent to which citizens are in possession of information linking a particular group with a particular proposal may also depend on what is happening in politics: on the nature of the issues that
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happen to be momentarily salient, and on how such issues are framed (Kinder and Sanders 1996; Nelson and Kinder 1996). Smart Publics?
In recent years opinion research has taken a turn from the individual level of analysis to the aggregate. Serious attention is now being devoted to public opinion as a whole, to collective judgment and choice. The focus is no longer exclusively on citizens and votersConverse's principal preoccupationsbut on publics and electorates as well. This shift in perspective is welcome: it is, after all, public opinion in the aggregate that shapes government. What, then, can we say about collective competence: the capacity of the public considered as whole t provide wise decisions, good judgment, and sensible advice? If, as the evidence indicates overwhelmingly, individual citizens are on average ignorant, can the public as a whole be well informed? Aristotle's answer to this question was yes: for "where there are many people, each has some share of goodness and intelligence, and when these are brought together, they become as it were one multiple man with many pairs of feet and hands and many minds" (1962, 123). To the very same question,Walter Lippmann's answer was no: in The Phantom Public, Lippmann (1925, 39) expressed exasperation with "mystical democrats" who placed their faith in the "unattainable ideal" of democracy, "the compounding of individual ignorance in masses of people." Recent analysis of aggregate public opinionof public opinion writ largesuggests that neither Aristotle nor Lippmann had the story completely right. It is complicated, as social scientists are fond of saying. Consider ideological sophistication. We have known since Converse that the typical voter is bewildered by ideological terminology. But the typical electorate is (or seems to be) ideologically discriminating. Suppose we ask a sample of American voters to place a set of nationally prominent political figures on an ideological continuum, from very liberal to very conservative. Scott Feld and Bernard Grofman (1988) have shown that, simply averaging across all voters, the electorate as a whole places candidates exactly congruent with the correct ideological ordering, despite the fact that a large fraction of the voters who constitute the electorate offer judgments that, taken
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individually, are ideologically incoherent. Converse and Roy Pierce (1986) supply a similar example from their analysis of political representation in France. The French are, on average, nearly as ignorant and confused about ideology as are their American counterparts. Yet the French public, taken as a whole, can locate the entire gamut of French political parties from left to right with near perfect accuracy. Very much the same point is made by research on the dynamics of aggregate public opinion. This work takes up a variety of subjects: change over time in the public's assessment of a president's performance (Erikson, MacKuen, and Stimson 2002); political priorities (Hibbs 1979; Iyengar and Kinder 1987); policy preferences (Page and Shapiro 1992; Stimson 2004); votes (Rosenstone 1983); and more. Time and again, public opinion in the aggregate emerges in this literature as responsive to social, economic, and political changeoften exquisitely so. Viewed from this vantage point, collective public opinion looks sensible, well informed, perhaps even, as Benjamin Page and Robert Shapiro (1992) would have it, "rational." Reconciling "rational" publics with Converse's portrayal of the average citizen is easier than it might at first seem. Publics are smarter than citizens, on average, because the errors and confusions of individuals cancel out in the calculation of the public's opinion. This is the "miracle of aggregation," the law of large numbers applied to public opinion. Averaging the views of large numbers of individuals, clear signals can emerge from what is largely a "sea of noise" (Converse 1990, 382). These signals may be determined disproportionately by the relatively small number of citizens who are paying close attention to politics. James Stimson (1991, 125) suggests that alterations in the American public's preference for more or less government are "driven largely by the leadership elements in the public. Where the inattentive and uninformed behave unpredictably, and therefore cancel out one another, the systematic behavior arises from those responding to the events of the real world." Converse (1990, 382) makes the same point, writing that "it is quite possible, thanks to the hidden power of aggregation, to arrive at a highly rational system performance on the backs of voters most of whom are remarkably ill informed much of the time." 8 The miracle of aggregation is reliable. It does not require special institutional design or particular cultural values; it can always be counted on (Converse 1990). Smart publics, one could say, are inevitable.9 Well, not quite inevitable, and here is where Lippmann's skepticism
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has its place. What if the error and confusion of ordinary citizens is systematic rather than random, structured by deliberate programs of misinformation, cynical television advertisements, appeals to racism, and the like? Indeed, Page and Shapiro (1992) provide several compelling casessuch as the fabricated "missile gap" that helped carry Kennedy into the White Housein which the public was led off in the wrong direction. Furthermore, there is now strong suggestive evidence that the judgment of the public as a whole deviates sizably and systematically from the judgment the public would have rendered had it been well informed. For example, Larry Bartels (1996) has shown that in recent American presidential elections, poorly informed voters make decisions differently than do well-informed voters: they draw on different considerations, in different proportions. Moreover, when Bartels imputes "fully informed" choices to all voters (that is, the choices voters would have made had they been well informed), he discovers substantial differences between the electorate's actual choice and its hypothetical fully informed choice. The same appears to be true for public opinion generally (Althaus 2003). So if we could somehow erase information inequality, bringing everyone up to the same high level, we would have created a public that would make different decisions, reach different judgments, and offer different advice than the public we actually observe. From this perspective, too, the public seems not to be as intelligent as democratic theory would like it to be. Finally, miracle-of-aggregation accounts of the publics wisdom ignore the extraordinary diversity that characterizes modern mass publics, which Converse's analysis did so much to highlight. Sometimes there is a price to be paid for analysis carried on at such a high level of aggregation. For example, in their study of macropartisanship, Michael MacKuen, Robert Erikson, and James Stimson (1989) focus entirely on describing and explaining net swings in the national balance of party loyalty. This is a valuable perspective, but it is oblivious to other kinds of change that become visible at lower levels of aggregation. A nationcentered account has nothing to say about the realignment in party loyalties in the American South, organized by race and precipitated by the polarizing presidential campaign of 1964 and the controversial Voting Rights Act passed a year later. Black Americans moved into the Democratic party, while Southern whites moved out. This amounted to a political change of historic proportions, a fundamental transformation in
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the landscape of Southern politics. But from the perspective of national partisanship, these largely offsetting trends were undetectable (Black and Black 1992; Carmines and Stimson 1989; Green, Palmquist, and Schlickler 2002; Kinder and Sanders 1996). The point here is not that any one level of aggregation is best; it is rather to emphasize that a particular level of aggregation equips us both to see some things clearly and to see others badly or not at all. If we wish to understand public opinion, we need to understand it in the large and in the small. Converse and Beyond
At about the time Converse was putting the finishing touches on "The Nature of Belief Systems," Jerome Bruner, Fritz Heider, Herbert Simon, and their comrades were hatching a cognitive revolution in psychology. Research on mental models and the architecture of mind exploded; some of this work, as we've seen, made its way to the study of public opinion. The more of this, the better. Not that this borrowing will always result in simple and straightforward advances. Some of what cognitive research reveals may trouble the entire enterprise. Framing effects, preference reversals, anchoring and adjustment biases, sweeping concretization, accessibility bias: these deviations from rationality axioms are systematic; they are akin to psychological laws; they stubbornly resist correction. Bartels (2003, 49) concludes from these results that political attitudes are insufficient "to serve as a satisfactory starting point for democratic theory." I suggested earlier that public opinion is susceptible to elite framing, and from one point of view at least, this is a good thing. When provided helpful frames, citizens are more likely to find their way to a real opinion. But as Bartels points out, from the perspective of democratic theory, the problem is how to decide which frames are desirable. There is no neutral way to put a question. Policy proposal are always framed in particular ways. Who is to say which frames lead to "enlightened" opinions? In the absence of a coherent normative account of what makes one frame more appropriate than another as a basis for democratic choice, "political debate and policy choice can only be thought of as a rhetorical free-for-all, a practical art in whichat bestthe ends justify the means" (Bartels 2003, 68).
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There is, I think, a still larger point lurking in Bartels's complaint. As we have seen here, information matters to public opinion in all sorts of ways, but we have much yet to learn about how information is created and disseminated. We need theorizing and systematic empirical work that makes connections between the "information system," on the one hand, and the decisions, judgments, and advice of citizens, on the other.
By any reasonable standard, Americans are affluent, well educated, and virtually swimming in news of politics. And yet despite these advantages, most Americans glance at the political world mystified by its abstractions and ignorant of its particulars. So it was, according to Converse, nearly a half century ago, and so, by and large, it remains today. That Converse's conclusions have generally stood up well to the test of time should not be taken to mean that most people follow no political logic at all. Ideological principles are too abstract and too demanding for most of us, but we manage to muddle through nevertheless, at least in part by relying on group-centrism, simplifying complex questions of public policy by turning them into judgments on the deservingness of the groups involved. This makes for reasonably intelligible and modestly structured opinions.10 Likewise, that Converse's analysis is by and large sustained does not mean that Americans are typically empty-headed when it comes to politics. They are not, as Robert Lane (1962), Jennifer Hochschild (1981), and Feldman and Zaller (1992), among others, have shown. But their political ideas defy parsimonious description. Some are liberal, others conservative. Some political views are authentic and tenaciously held; others are nonattitudes, casually expressed or made up on the spot; and the rest are subject to manipulation and reversal, as well as to education. There are veins of knowledge, much confusion, and vast expanses of ignorance. For now at least, the final word still belongs to Converse ([1964] 2006, 54): "A realistic picture of political belief systems in the mass public, then, is not one that omits issues and policy demands completely nor one that presumes widespread ideological coherence; it is rather one that captures with some fidelity the fragmentation, narrowness, and diversity of these demands."
Kinder Belief Systems Today NOTES
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1. For a timequite a long timeit seemed that the commotion would never end. At the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in 1982, I presented a paper under the title "Enough Already about Ideology." It had no effect: the avalanche of papers and books dedicated to determining whether Converse had got the story right continued unabated. 2. Elsewhere I have provided reviews of the evidence justifying this conclusion (Kinder 1983 and 1998). I seem to be tougher on Converse's critics than Converse (1975) himself is inclined to be. 3. But how should all this attitudinal wandering be interpreted? Converse took instability to signal the flimsiness of public opinion. Reluctant to admit their own ignorance, people invented evanescent opinions: liberal on one occasion, conservative on the next. Others have interpreted instability to be a reflection of imperfections in attitude measurement. From this perspective, instability reflects vague and confused questions, not vague and confused citizens. This is the position taken by Achen 1975, which drew for its analysis on the same national panel study that provided the raw materials for Converse's claim of non-attitudes. Capitalizing on the statistical opportunities provided by opinion measurement at three points in time, Achen corrected Converse's over-time correlations for the attenuation associated with measurement error, on the presumption that all of the error properly belonged to the instrument. Following these corrections, the over-time correlations increased dramatically. By Achen's calculations, all of the instability in response was due to measurement error; opinion itself was perfectly stable. A more plausible starting assumption seems to me that instability was a product of imperfections in both instrumentation and in citizens, particularly given their low levels of information (Converse [1964] 2006 and 1970). If this is right, then opinion stability should be predictable from how much citizens knowand it is (Feldman 1989). And if this is right, then when questions used to assess opinions on policy are improved, stability should increaseand this turns out to be true, too (e.g., Krosnick and Berent 1993). 4. For other examples of framing effects in political communication, see Jacoby 2000 and Nelson, Oxley, and Clawson 1997. Framing effects are issue specific; they have to do with the development of real opinions on particular matters, not the generation of panoramic belief systems or broad ideologies. These effects can be erased when the alternative frames are attributed to ludicrous sources (Jerry Springer on government programs for the poor, or the National Enquirer on constitutional protection of hate speech); when frame recipients are induced to talk to others recently armed with opposing frames (Druckman 2001; Druckman and Nelson 2003); and when frames are presented simultaneously with their transparently logically equivalent opposites (Druckman 2004). 5. This claim is in fact widely shared among psychologists: that strong attitudes also known as important, central, or accessible attitudesmotivate action, while
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Critical Review Vol. 18, Nos. 1-3 weak attitudes do not (e.g., Eagley and Chaiken 1998; Petty and Krosnick 1995). It is Converses view as well: Presented with an individual holding some positive or negative disposition toward an attitude object, the first thing we want to ask is whether the attitude is held with overpowering conviction, is merely some passing fancy, or lies somewhere in between. . . . Both high theory and common sense converge to say that a strong attitude is one that will endure, will resist attempts at persuasion in contrary directions, will exert influence on the formation of related perceptions and beliefs, andperhaps most importantwill predict behavioral decisions with highest fidelity. (Converse 1995, xi.)
6. From a certain point of view, such ignorance is rational. As Anthony Downs famously argued in An Economic Theory of Democracy (1957), there are costs attached to the procurement and analysis of political informationmeasured in time, energy, and opportunities foregoneand purely rational voters will pay such costs only insofar as the information promises a return. But in a large electorate, one person's vote is "lost in a sea of votes," and so the instrumental benefits from an enlightened vote are infinitesimal. The result, according to Downs, is "rational ignorance." 7. Zaller acknowledges his intellectual debt to Converse in the preface to The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (1992, xi). 8. Many economists adopt a similar explanation for the relative efficiency of financial markets. Market efficiency comes from decisions made by a relatively small number of rational and foresighted investors (the "marginal trader"). Most investors are ill informed, irrational, or both, and their decisions are poorbut they tend to cancel (e.g., Forsythe, Nelson, Neumann, and Wright
1992).
9. There are at least two other accounts of the "rationality" of the collective. One is from Page and Shapiro (1992), who offer an inspiring story about the division of political labor and the circulation of ideas and information through society. But thus far it is only a story, and not a very persuasive one, in that it presumes adequate communication across long chains of citizens, most of whom have little interest in, and even less information about, the political topic that is supposed to be in circulation. The second is the application of Condorcet's jury theorem (Miller 1986), which indicates an aggregation gain when (1) all jurors have at least a reasonable and equal chance of being correct (that is, voting for the alternative that would be preferred under conditions of complete information); and (2) all jurors decide independently. But if the average voter is wandering around in the dark, and if voters vary considerably in the likelihood that they will vote "correctly," then aggregation may actually makes things worse, not better (Bartels 1996). 10. Though we should keep in mind that some of the sentiments that may be supplying the intelligibility and structureanti-Semitism, racism, and the likeare not exactly meritorious.

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Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society

Belief systems today

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BELIEF SYSTEMS TODAY

Critical Review Vol. 18, Nos. 1-3

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