Holding a position: Public opinion as cognition in a disorganized field

Abstract

I develop a theoretical model of the relationship between the macro-structure of political communications and the micro-structure of individuals’ political attitudes. This model conceives of public opinion as a field of competition, where positions correspond to stances on issues, and are occupied both by individuals and by major political actors who compete over their support via political communications. Individuals attend to these communications to better develop their political attitudes. Since a large volume of interdisciplinary work suggests that reliably answering survey questions is an acquired cultural competency that requires substantial training to achieve, I use survey response reliability as a key measure of this enculturation. This points me to a concrete question: do patterns of survey response reliability suggest that competing ideological camps focus on the same issues? To answer this, I develop a formal latent class model of position reliability and estimate it with the 2008-2010-2012 General Social Survey panel. I find that more popular positions are generally reported more reliably than less popular ones, as would be expected if ideological camps predominantly focused on issues where they had an advantage.