Abstract
How stable are elite survey responses over time? Scattered previous research casts doubt on the standard assumption that elite political attitudes are significantly more stable than mass attitudes. After a discussion of problems of interpreting and measuring attitude stability, this study presents evidence from a six-year panel survey of Italian regional political elites. The respondents are full-time, highly successful, professional politicians. Their ideological commitments, their orientations to social and political conflict, their attitudes toward democratic institutions, their political style, and some aspects of their attitudes toward Italian regionalism are shown to be remarkably stable over this period. Some methodological lessons for elite survey research are drawn from these analyses, including (most basically) the comforting conclusion that the fundamental beliefs of elites can be measured with a high degree of reliability.
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