Political Rhetoric and the Structure of Political Opinion: Some Experimental Findings

Abstract

ASS BELIEF systems research has generated a great deal more heat than light over the past fifteen years or so. Where Philip Converse (1964) once found evidence suggesting that politics and political issues were remote from the concerns of citizens' everyday lives, more recent studies have discovered substantially higher levels of belief consistency (or constraint) and ideological thinking among the American public.1 Explosive events, emotional issues, and controversial appeals by candidates for political office during the 1960s and early 1970s apparently combined to produce a crystallization of opinion at the mass level, and a growing polarization of society into contending liberal and conservative camps. Although it was unclear whether the observed changes represented a temporary deviation from the more normal patterns described by Converse, or a durable shift toward ideological confrontation in American politics, revisionist scholars were able to agree on one important point, i.e., that ideological sophistication is, at least in part, a function of political context and not solely an attribute of the individual citizen.