Levels Of Political Sophistication Research Articles

‘All hands on deck’ or separate lifeboats? Public support for European economic solidarity during the Covid-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT What are the sources of public support for international aid in times of crises? This paper investigates the determinants of public support for the EU Covid-19 aid package (‘NextGenerationEU’, NGEU), the largest aid package in EU history. Using what is to the best of our knowledge the first EU-wide study of public opinion on the Covid-19 rescue package, we first establish that public support for within-EU redistribution is influenced by long-standing factors such as ideology and citizen identities, corroborating previous literature. Next, our vignette survey experiment shows that short-term shifts in support for the rescue package are driven mostly by elite endorsement cues rather than information about the precise terms of aid or amount. We also find that the role of elite endorsement cues varies across different subsets of the population depending on their level of political sophistication, national level attachment and country context. Conversely, the effects of policy details about the aid package are more mixed. Thus, in the face of multidimensional decision-making in times of crises, national institutions are a key catalyst of moving short-term support for policies of international solidarity. We discuss how our findings have implications for democratic governance and accountability in the EU.

Constrained Citizens? Ideological Structure and Conflict Extension in the US Electorate, 1980–2016

AbstractPast the half-century mark of Converse's (1964) field-defining essay, the nature of political ideology in the mass public and how it has changed in response to partisan polarization remains enigmatic. To test the ideological structure of US public opinion, I develop and implement a Bayesian dynamic ordinal item response theory model. In contrast to static scaling procedures, this method allows for changes in the mappings between issue attitudes and the underlying ideological dimension over time. The results indicate that over the last forty years, mass attitudes on a range of long-standing policy controversies better fit a unidimensional ideological structure. As among elites, the left–right dimension has come to encompass a wide range of policy, partisan, and value divides in the mass public. Further, these trends hold for voters at all levels of political sophistication. Widespread conflict extension appears to be a defining feature of mass polarization in contemporary US politics.

How candidate characteristics matter: Candidate profiles, political sophistication, and vote choice

Our study examines the influence of various candidate characteristics (sociodemographic profile, competence and experience, issue positions, and party affiliation) on voters’ preference for a candidate, and investigates the impact of voters’ levels of political sophistication on their likelihood of considering various candidate characteristics when deciding whom to support. Using data from the 2015 Finnish National Election Study, this study is situated within the complex Finnish open list system with many candidates at display and mandatory preference voting. We find that voters mostly argue to make their choice based on candidate characteristics with direct politically relevant information such as candidate party affiliation and issue positions. Candidate sociodemographic profile has relatively little stated impact. Overall, voters with higher levels of political sophistication tend to be more likely to consider a broad range of candidate characteristics. When investigating the relative impact of each candidate characteristic (that is, their impact relative to the other candidate characteristics) on voting behaviour, political sophistication increases the likelihood of saying to rely on candidate characteristics that are more demanding in terms of information processing such as competence and experience, and issue positions. Our analyses also show how different measures of political sophistication have distinct effects.

Democracy belief systems in Europe: cognitive availability and attitudinal constraint

AbstractThere is a growing interest in analyzing what citizens think about democracy. However, gauging citizens’ opinions about a complex concept such as democracy might be hindered by the apparent low levels of political sophistication of mass publics. This paper contributes to the emerging literature on citizens’ views and evaluations of democracy by analyzing to what extent ordinary citizens are capable of developing structured opinions about democracy and its constitutive principles. For this purpose, the paper adapts Converse’s notion of political belief systems to analyze the articulation of individuals’ democracy belief systems (DBS). The first goal of this paper is to conceptualize and operationalize the main components of individuals’ DBS: cognitive availability, horizontal constraint, and vertical constraint. Drawing on data from the sixth round of the European Social Survey, the second goal is to describe the articulation of DBS in Europe. The third and final aim of this paper is to trace the most relevant individual- and country-level correlates of the articulation of the three components of DBS. In line with recent findings about political belief systems in other policy domains, the results indicate that most Europeans have coherently structured attitudes about democracy. However, even if the results imply that Europeans have a relatively articulated DBS, the empirical analysis also reveals some individual- and country-level variation in the articulation of specific components of DBS.

Party images in Northern Ireland: evidence from a new dataset

ABSTRACTThe literature on belief systems in mass publics shows that survey respondents typically have difficulty in describing their images of political parties; only about half offer a meaningful description of how they see individual parties. This paper investigates what people in Northern Ireland think that parties stand for in their home jurisdiction, in Great Britain and in the Republic of Ireland, using open-ended questions in a survey of 1,008 Northern Ireland residents. Northern Ireland respondents resemble those elsewhere, in that only about half seem able to offer a politically meaningful description of what local parties stand for. Among the more politically sophisticated, the Northern Ireland parties are described in ethnonational terms, the British parties are placed in socio-economic (social class and left-right) categories, but few respondents know how to describe the parties in the Republic of Ireland. There is an intriguing asymmetry in the characterization of Northern Ireland’s unionist and nationalist parties: the DUP emerges as only marginally more ‘hard-line’ than the UUP, whereas a great gulf exists between the SDLP and Sinn Féin, the former being perceived as much more moderate. Notwithstanding high levels of electoral stability in Northern Ireland, our findings show that party supporters vary greatly in their levels of political sophistication, perhaps allowing elites greater freedom of action than if all voters were highly politically informed.

Public Policies toward Aboriginal Peoples: Attitudinal Obstacles and Uphill Battles

AbstractThis paper examines public attitudes towards aboriginal policy in Canada, focusing on evidence from two surveys conducted in Saskatchewan, a province with a large and growing Aboriginal population. We show that although non-Aboriginals are collectively divided on Aboriginal public policies, expressing considerable support for some, but strong reservations when it comes to others; the individual-level evidence indicates that there is a single Aboriginal policy agenda in the minds of non-Aboriginal Canadians. Support for, and opposition to, the privileging of Aboriginal claims is structured in part by prejudice toward outgroups but also by non-Aboriginal people's more general position on the role of government in society. Moreover, the impact of positions about the role of government in society on attitudes toward Aboriginal policies is moderated by people's level of political sophistication: the more educated and politically interested they are, the greater the impact of those ideological views.

From the Secret Ballot to the Public Vote: Examining Voters’ Experience of Political Discussion in Vote-by-Mail Elections

Considerable research on political discussion has focused on identifying its antecedents and outcomes. The rise of voting by mail provides an opportunity to examine the subject in a new context—one in which voters discuss their views and electoral choices with others while filling out their ballots. We explored the possibility that conventional predictors of political engagement would predict who partakes in such discussions. Past research also suggested that those voters most likely to report changing their minds as a result of discussion would perceive their discussants as holding contrary views and higher levels of political sophistication. We further hypothesized that less politically engaged voters would seek out discussants they rated as more knowledgeable than themselves, whereas the more politically sophisticated voters would seek out like-minded discussants. Past research also suggested that the least partisan voters would be those most likely to report disagreement in their absentee discussions. To test these hypotheses, we analyzed telephone survey data from two elections conducted in Washington State. Results showed that the factors that predict traditional forms of political participation and discussion do not explain who engages in discussion during vote-by-mail elections. We also found that independent voters were more likely to talk with ideologically divergent discussants, whereas less knowledgeable citizens sought discussants who knew more about politics than they did. Many voters reported that these discussions shaped their vote choices, with the highest rates of perceived influence coming from those who viewed their discussion partners as more knowledgeable and more ideologically divergent.

POLITINIS IŠPRUSIMAS IR JĮ LEMIANTYS VEIKSNIAI: LIETUVOS ATVEJIS

Straipsnyje analizuojami keli politinio piliečių išprusimo aspektai: politinio išprusimo kontekste vartojamos sąvokos, skirtingos paties politinio išprusimo sampratos, tyrimams naudojami politinio išprusimo matavimo kintamieji ir politinį išprusimą galintys lemti veiksniai. Dauguma politinio išprusimo tyrimų buvo atlikta užsienio valstybėse, tad kitų šalių autorių įžvalgas su tam tikromis išlygomis bandoma taikyti Lietuvai. Straipsnyje pateikiami statistinės analizės, atliktos remiantis 2008 m. reprezentatyvios Lietuvos gyventojų apklausos duomenimis, rezultatai: sukonstruotas Lietuvos gyventojų politinio išprusimo indeksas ir išskirti veiksniai, lemiantys piliečių politinio išprusimo lygį. Politinis išprusimas straipsnyje traktuojamas kaip individo turimos politinės žinios ir domėjimasis politika. Politinį išprusimą galinčių lemti individualaus lygmens veiksnių tyrimas leidžia daryti išvadą, kad svarbiausias veiksnys yra piliečių amžius. Santykinai labiau politiškai išprusę yra vyresni, geresnį išsilavinimą turintys, daugiau su aplinkiniais apie politiką diskutuojantys, daugiau informacijos priemonių naudojantys ir didesnes pajamas gaunantys individai.

The link between social attitudes and voting propensities: Attitude-vote consistency among adolescents in Belgium

Research on the political development of adolescents is mainly focused on political engagement and attitudes. The more complex relationship between attitudes and voting behavior is less studied among citizens under the legal voting age. We investigate whether there is a link between social attitudes and voting propensities among Flemish adolescents, using data from the Parent–Child Socialization Study 2012. We observe attitude-vote consistency for three Flemish parties with a clear-cut ideological profile – the Green, radical rightist and Flemish Nationalist party. Findings show that adolescents' attitude-vote consistency is reinforced by their level of political sophistication. The correspondence between social attitudes and vote choice, however, is not impressive and significantly lower than among experienced adults, leaving room for other influential factors.

Inequality in the ‘Conflict of Conflicts’? The Impact of Citizen Sophistication on Agenda-setting Effects

Influence upon the societal agenda is an important power resource in modern democracies. Consequently, inequalities in such influence across different segments of the public have important democratic implications. Using time-series methods on a unique Danish dataset, this article investigates the existence of inequalities in agenda power across groups with different levels of political sophistication and finds that the most sophisticated members of the public possess more such power vis-à-vis the media and politicians than the less sophisticated. The existence of inequalities in agenda power across different segments of the public, even in the homogenous Danish society, implies that countries characterised by higher levels of inequality should experience even larger disparities, thereby jeopardising the democratic principle that all citizens have equal access to placing issues on the agenda.

Creando ciudadanos comprometidos. Aportación de los hábitos comunicativos al desarrollo de la sofisticación política entre los jóvenes

<p>Una de las principales corrientes de trabajo dentro del estudio de los efectos mediáticos se ha centrado en el análisis de la contribución de los medios al desarrollo de actitudes políticas, entre ellas, la sofisticación política. De hecho, el consumo mediático, aunque también la comunicación interpersonal, puede suponer una contribución al desarrollo democrático de los países a través de la formación de ciudadanos experimentados y comprometidos en el terreno político, en especial de aquellos más jóvenes.</p><p>Se realizó una encuesta entre estudiantes de los últimos semestres de preparatoria de la zona metropolitana de Monterrey para determinar su nivel de sofisticación política, la contribución de las variables comunicacionales a su desarrollo y si ésta favorece la participación política. Los resultados muestran que cerca del 30% tenía una sofisticación política aceptable, la cual venía explicada por la búsqueda de información política en medios, el consumo de medios escritos y el mantenimiento de conversación política. Además, aquellos sofisticados políticamente también tendían a desarrollar mayor participación política, pero no cívica.</p>

The Big Two in Social Judgment and Behavior

One of the most significant developments in research on social judgment was the realization that the same two fundamental content dimensions underlie judgments of the self, others, social groups, nations, cultures, faces, etc. These two fundamental dimensions are also called the “Big Two.” They denote two “modes of existence” (Bakan, 1966), namely, social relatedness (“communion”; alsocalled warmth, morality, expressiveness, affiliation) and individual strivings (“agency,” also-called competence, instrumentality, power). These “Big Two” have the potential to integrate different lines of research in psychology, and they are also relevant in numerous applied contexts. Most important for research on social information processing, the “Big Two” advance our knowledge on the role that content plays in information processing. This special issue of Social Psychology stems from a conference on the “Big Two” held in Erlangen, Germany, in 2010, and it continues a special issue of the European Journal of Social Psychology that was also devoted to the fundamental dimensions of social judgment (guest editors: Andrea E. Abele, Amy Cuddy, Charles Judd, and Vincent Yzerbyt). Our call for papers to the present special issue resulted in 26 submissions – and it proved very difficult to select only those 12 papers that seemed best suited for the present volume and could finally be accepted in October/ November 2012. Bruckmuller and Abele study the representation of agency and communion terms and show that negative terms related to the communion dimension are more densely clustered than both positive communion items and agency items in general. Radkiewicz, Skarzynska, and Hamer show that general opinions about people’s communion and agency are strongly related to how negativistic worldviews are, with the latter being most negative among respondents who think that people are highly agentic but low in communion/morality. The two papers by Abele and Brack as well as Wojciszke and Sobiczewska are concerned with a theoretical model assuming actor/observer differences in the “profitability” of agentic and communal traits, that is, that agentic traits are mainly profitable for the trait possessor (actor), while communal traits are profitable for the surrounding others (observers; see Peeters, 1992). Abele and Brack show that the communal trait of “trustworthiness” is of special importance when interacting with another person, and that the valuation of others’ agentic traits varies with the kind of relationship. Wojciszke and Sobiczewska show that self-evaluations are dominated by agentic content, whereas other evaluations rely on both kinds of content. Bi, Ybarra, and Zhao show that this agency-dominated perspective on self-esteem also holds in the cultural context of China. Moreover, these authors combine the agency/communion perspective with the perspective of genderstereotypic traits. Gender-stereotypic traits are also the focus of De Lemus, Spear, Bukowski, Moya, and Lupianez, who demonstrate a somewhat counterintuitive effect that women exposed to traditional gender roles activate stereotype-inconsistent traits faster than stereotype-consistent ones. Bertolotti, Catellani, Douglas, and Sutton show how defensive communication (involving downward and upward counterfactuals) influences the perception of politicians’ agency and morality, and how this influence is moderated by the participants’ level of political sophistication. Siman Tov-Nachlieli, Schnabel, and Nadler show that, following transgressions, victimized groups or individuals experience threats to their agency (and attempt to restore this facet of their identity), while perpetrating groups or individuals experience threats to their communion (and are motivated to restore this aspect of their identity). Cislak extends the Big Two to power relations showing that high power increases interest in and preference for agentic virtues in others which is mediated by increases in a task (versus relationships) orientation. The final three papers connect the Big Two with embodied information processing. In a series of experiments, Schubert, Schubert, and Topolinski show that spatial elevation can both increase and decrease respect (an agency-based attitudinal response) depending on whether the elevation is substantiated by the elevated person’s achievement or not. Building on previous findings that physical warmth induces prosociality, IJzerman, Karremans, Thomsen, and Schubert show that children with a secure attachment to their friends tend to be more generous

Attribute Priming Effects and Presidential Candidate Evaluation: The Conditionality of Political Sophistication

Traditionally, two competing claims have arisen that attempt to explain the role of political sophistication in media effectiveness. I reassess the positive versus negative impacts of political sophistication on media priming effects by considering a curvilinear approach. I combine public opinion data (National Election Studies) on candidate selection criteria in 1992 and 2000 presidential elections with content analyses of campaign news coverage to see which segment of voters at different sophistication levels is most susceptible to media agendas. Quadratic regression analyses reveal that an inverted U-shaped relationship exists between voters' susceptibility to campaign news and their level of political sophistication. Such a curvilinear relationship means that the moderately sophisticated are more likely to accept news agendas than the least or most sophisticated. The findings illuminate the long-standing debate about the inconsistent linear relationships between the two variables, providing a more cogent explanation underlying media priming effects.

Individual-level Predictors of Leader and Public Support for the Use of Force

A great deal of the research examining the structure of foreign policy attitudes has focused on the aggregate level. Page and Shapiro (1992; also see Knopf, 1998; Erikson, MacKuen, & Stimson, 2002; Isernia, Juhasz, & Rattinger, 2002) argued that the public as a whole exhibits consistent and coherent attitudes at the aggregate level. However, Althaus (2003) and Converse (2000) point out that the opinions of the “informed public” differ from those of the rest of the public in that they are more consistent and reliable. Most political information and knowledge is contained within a small portion of the electorate and these differences in information affect the quality and coherence of opinions (Althaus, 2003; Bartels, 1994; Converse, 2000; Zaller, 1992). Note, however, that Kuklinski and Hurley (1994; also see Stimson, 2004) argue that the bulk of the public compensates for this lack of information by taking cues from the “informed public” and trusted opinion leader sources, and therefore still maintain consistent and understandable opinions at the individual level. In addition, Page and Shapiro (1992) and others (Erikson et al., 2002; Wlezien, 1995; Enns & Kellstedt, 2008) find attitude stability and updating of beliefs to general political information occurs at all levels of political sophistication within the public. Specifically, Enns and Kellstedt (2008) demonstrated that members of the public, regardless of sophistication, updated their general policy mood in similar ways, demonstrating similar structure. Could this be the case for members of the public and political elites, at least to the extent that simple attitudes and policy preferences are expressed in opinion surveys?

Let's Blame Everyone: Executive and Legislative Evaluations of Economic Performance in Brazil and Chile

In this paper we bring together institutional, contextual, and behavioral perspectives in a comprehensive model that explores determinants of executive and legislative approval based on economic performance in Brazil and Chile. Our main question is, do voters attribute responsibility for the state of the economy to their representatives in the Legislative Branch as they apparently do to officeholders in the Executive Branch? We search for answers to this question with an eye on how active the distinct branches of government are in economic policy-making and voters’ levels of political sophistication. Our main hypothesis is that less sophisticated voters will blame politicians indiscriminately for the state of the economy, independent of how influential each branch of government is on economic policy. More sophisticated voters will better discern the role each branch plays in economic policy-making and will not blame representatives in the Legislative Branch for the state of the economy when Congress is not active in economic policy-making. The cases of Brazil and Chile under Cardoso and Lagos offer the perfect opportunity to test this hypothesis, which is confirmed by our data.

The Central Role of Group‐Based Hatred as an Emotional Antecedent of Political Intolerance: Evidence from Israel

In recent years, political scientists have shifted the focus of explaining political phenomena from the purely cognitive perspective to an integrated emotion‐cognition one. Yet most studies which examine antecedents of political intolerance ignore the potential role played by “gut feelings” or group‐based negative emotions in endorsing those attitudes. Moreover, even the few studies that deal with emotions and intolerance concentrate exclusively on the role of groups of emotions (positive vs. negative, dispositional vs. surveillance) or on basic emotions (anger or fear) and ignore the potential influence of more complex discrete emotions like hatred on political intolerance. Hence, the main goal of this study was to create a deeper understanding regarding the role of discrete negative emotions in increasing political intolerance among different groups of individuals in different contexts. In order to do so, the relations between political intolerance and three group‐based negative emotions (hatred, anger, and fear) were tested by means of four large‐scale nationwide surveys. Within the surveys, various intolerance measurement methods were used in various contexts (wartime vs. no‐war/routine periods) and among individuals with different levels of political sophistication. Results, obtained via multiple regression analysis and structural equation modeling, show that: (1) Group‐based hatred is the most important antecedent of political intolerance even when controlling for important intolerance inducers such as perceived threat. (2) Other group‐based negative emotions like anger or fear influence political intolerance wholly through the mediation of hatred or perceived threat. (3) The role of group‐based hatred in inducing political intolerance is more substantial in the face of heightened existential threat and among unsophisticated individuals than among sophisticated ones.

The Electoral Relevance of Political Talk: Examining Disagreement and Expertise Effects in Social Networks on Political Participation

Although people with larger, more politicized social networks are more likely to participate in elections, we know very little about what drives this relationship. I argue that the electoral relevance of political talk depends heavily on the political expertise imbedded in discussion networks. Using data gathered during the 1996 presidential election, I demonstrate that the level of political sophistication in a person's social network exerts a positive influence on participation. Importantly, this effect is greater than the impact of political preferences in the network, the factor that is implicitly considered to be the main link between networks and involvement. This evidence makes two contributions to research on networks and participation. First, it provides support for a theoretical model that better accounts for research on the relationship between political talk, political disagreement, and involvement. Second, it changes the normative implications associated with political talk by suggesting that networks can encourage both higher levels of involvement and increased consideration of differing viewpoints.

Political Sophistication and Economic Voting in the American Electorate: A Theory of Heterogeneous Attribution

This article presents a theory of heterogeneous attribution, in which an individual's ability to make causal associations depends on his level of political sophistication. Specifically, we maintain that political sophistication dramatically influences the relative importance of personal and national economic judgments in shaping presidential candidate preference. Pocketbook voting, we argue, should be common only among relatively voters, who are able to make the associative linkage between changes in their personal financial status and governmental policy. Additionally, we hypothesize that evaluations should be most influential for less voters. Low sophisticates, we argue, will tend to assume that the national economy is entirely in the President's hands (and vote accordingly), whereas more voters understand that the economy is affected by many actors and conditions that are largely beyond the President's control. Testing our theory using data from 1992, 1996, and 1998, we find strong support for our hypotheses. T here is little doubt that changing economic conditions profoundly influence voters' electoral decisions. Since the work of Kramer (1971), a large body of research has accumulated indicating that electoral results at both the state and national levels are driven at least partly by economic fluctuations (Tufte 1975; Hibbs, Rivers, and Vasilatos 1982; Chappell and Keech 1988). There is, however, less consensus on how individual voters, many of whom only the fuzziest of notions about many aspects of politics and government, (Markus 1988, 137), evaluate the economic information they receive and connect it to the political world. Do voters assess political candidates based on their personal economic well being (the pocketbook voting hypothesis), or on the perceived health of the national economy (the sociotropic voting hypothesis)? The answer depends centrally on how voters attribute causal responsibility for changes in both personal and national economic conditions, a process that, we argue, is strongly influenced by the voter's level of political sophistication. In this research, we explicitly incorporate political sophistication into the model of economic voting. For years, researchers have debated the degree of sophistication that voters bring to bear when making politically relevant evaluations (Suzuki 1991; Mackuen, Erikson, and Stimson 1992). At the macro-level, the debate has hinged largely on the difference between voter evaluations based on retrospective assessments and those guided by more sophisticated prospective economic forecasts. This dichotomy is typified by Mackuen, Erikson, and Stimson's (1992) distinction between retrospective voters, or cognitive peasants, and prospective voters, or cognitive bankers. Micro-level theorists have also noted the importance of

Institutional Context and Reduction of the Resource Bias in Political Sophistication

I argue that institutional context conditions the effect of socioeconomic resources on individuals' levels of political sophistication. Specifically, because the decision to become sophisticated is quite expensive for citizens at the lower end of the SES scale, the relatively high levels of free information produced in certain party and electoral system contexts leads disproportionately large numbers of these citizens-as compared to those with more resources-to decide to become politically sophisticated. I formulate and test (using OLS regression) a conditional model of political sophistication that includes institutional context variables, a “resources” factor score, and interaction terms representing the product of “resources” and each of these context variables. The model is supported empirically. The interaction term coefficients have signs that are the reverse of those for the context variables, indicating that the effect of resources on sophistication is greater or smaller depending on the value of the institutional variables. This conditional effect is graphically depicted.

Alternative models of issue voting: The case of the 1991 and 1995 elections in Belgium

Abstract. Previous research has indicated that the success of the directional model of issue voting depends on levels of political sophistication and how party position is measured. Using 1991 and 1995 Belgian Election Surveys, the predictive power of proximity and directional measures are compared controlling for both variables. It is shown that when one uses overall mean placements, instead of mean placements by level of political sophistication, the proximity effect declines most among the highly sophisticated voters. The article also compares the performance of the proximity and directional measures across party systems. Contrary to theoretical expectations, party–system differences between Flanders and Wallonia do not affect the explanatory power of either of these measures. It is only in the cases of the liberal, socialist and extreme right parties that the directional measure is clearly superior. A closer analysis of this result indicates that the relative success of the directional measure is due to the limited number of issues from which those parties draw support.