The Structure of Beliefs Among Leaders and the Public

Abstract

C;ONCEPTS such as consensus, social attitudes, political culture, and belief systems appear with increasing frequency in our literature. Since McClosky's seminal piece on party leaders and followers,' many have focused on the differences in beliefs between the small group of political activists and the much larger and often apolitical public. This paper focuses on one important hypothesis as to how leaders and the public differ in their beliefs. Although the leader-follower distinction might at first glance be taken as an indication that society is divided into two groups, a better perspective is of a continuum of differing involvement, knowledge, and concern with political affairs, with leaders and followers representing the poles. With governments that emphasize leadership's responsibility, with the movement toward modernity in developing countries impelled primarily by Western-trained leaders, and for many other reasons, differences among leaders and their publics are important to us. Philip Converse hypothesizes significant differences between the belief systems of persons of varying degrees of education and political involvement.2 They differ, he argues, in the degree of constraint between the various elements in their belief systems. While the concept of constraint is operationally simple, derived from the statistical