This book was prepared for publication under the sponsorship of the Institute of International Studies. The Institute is devoted to research in the comparative and international fields at the University of California, Berkeley. Information about the activities of the Institute may be obtained by writing to The Secretary 2250 Piedmont Avenue Berkeley 4, California 1 I I ■ ■ ■ 1 i Ideology edited by DAVID E. APT ER university of California THE FREE PRESS OF GLENCOE collier - macmillan limited, london m ■ DEMOCRACY AND SOCIALISM 205 172. Senghor, "Elements construclifs d'une civilisation d'inspiration negro-africaine " Presence afncaine. Fevner-Mai, 1959, p. 255; "L'Esprit de la civilisation ou les lois de la culture negro-africaine," Presence afncaine, Juin-Novembre, 1956, p. 62. 173. Senghor, "Vues sur 1'Afrique noire, ou assimiler, non etre assimiles," in Robert Lemaignen, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Prince Sisowath Youlcvong, La communauti imperiale franchise (Pans, 1945), p. 65; Presence africaine, Juin-Novembre, 1956, p 216 174. Senghor, "Subir ou choisir?" Presence africaine. No, 8-9, issue entitled he monde noir, pp. 438-42; "Llements constmctifs d'une civilisation d'inspiration negro-africaine" Presence afncaine, Fevner-Mai, 1959, p. 277; "Discours de Leopold Sedar Senghor, Inauguration dc 1'Universite de Dakar, le 9 decembre, 1959," Reception du General de Gaulle, p. 24; "On Negrohood; Psychology of the African Negro," Diogenes, No. 37 (Spring, 1962), p. 14. 175. Senghor, "L'Esprit de la civilisation ou les lois de la culture negro-africaine," Presence africaine, Juin-Novembre, 1956, pp. 56-7. 176. Senghor, Eihiopiques (Paris, 1956), pp. 40-1. 177. Senghor, Nocturnes (Paris, 1961), p. 81. 178 Modibo Keila, "The Foreign Policy of Mali," International Aflairs, XXXVII (October, 1961), 438, 179. "Achievements in 1961," Supplement to Ghana Tod ay, January 3 1962 p 4 180. Toure, "Africa's Destiny," Africa Speaks, pp. 45-6. 181. "Appeal for World Peace," Supplement to Ghana Today, September 13, 1961, p. 3-/ Speak of Freedom, p. 199. ' 182. Abubakar Tafawa, Balewa, "Nigeria Looks Ahead," Foreign Affairs, XLI (October, 1962), 139. 183. "Africa Speaks to the United Nations: Kwame Nkrumah," International Organization, XVI (Spring, 1962), 316. 184. "The 99th Member Speaks at UN," Federal Nigeria, III (September-October, I960), 13. 185. "Africa Speaks to the United Nations: Leopold Sedar Senghor," Internationa! Organization, XVI (Spring, 1962), 324. 186. For a more complete account of the nature and intellectual sources of Pan-Africanism, see Charles F. Andrain, "The Pan-African Movement: The Search for Organisation and Community," Phyton, XXIII (Spring, 1962), 5-17. 187. Felix Houphouet-Doigny, "Les chances de 1'Afrlque," Revue politique et parle-menlaire, Juillet, 1961, p. 5. 188. For a brief statement of Houphouet's beliefs, sec ibid., pp. 4-6; Rapport du President flou phone t-Boigny au Congres Extraordinaire du Rassembiemeni Detnocratiaue A fricain (Abidjan, 1959), pp. 7, 10, 14, 19. 189. Azikiwe, "Nigeria in World Politics," Presence africaine, No. 32-3, 1960, pp 27-8-Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, "Nigeria Looks Ahead," Foreign Affairs, XLI (October, 1962), 190. "The 99th Member Speaks at UN," p. 13. 191. For an analysis of the historical development and prospects of a federation linking Kenya, Uganda, and Tanganyika, see Carl G, Rösberg, Jr., and Aaron Segal, "An East African Federation," International Conciliation, No. 543 (May, 1963). - 192. Nyerere, "Scramble for Africa," p. 16. 193. Senghor, "Elements conslructifs d'une civilisation negro-africaine," pp. 263, 266. 194. Senghor, Nation et vote africaine du socialisme, pp. 119-20; "Some Thoughts on Africa," International Affairs, XXXVI II (April, 1962), 189-92, 195. Toure, Texte des interviews, pp. 115, 47, 54, 112-3; "Africa's Future and the World," Foreign Affairs, XLI (October, 1962). 147. 196. Modibo Keita, "The Foreign Policy of Mali," International Affairs, XXXVII (October, 1961), 435-6, 197. Nkrumah, / Speak of Freedom, pp. 253, 220-1. 198. For a more detailed description of these structural components, see M. Brewster Smith, Jerome S, Bruner, and Robert W. White, Opinions and Personality (New York 1956), pp. 33-7, 242-6. 199. Toure, The Political Action . . . for the Emancipation of Guinean Youth, pp. 107-8. 200. Tom Mboya, "Vision of Africa," Africa Speaks, pp. 25-6, I VI The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics by PHILIP E. CONVERSE Belief systems have never surrendered easily to empirical study or quantification. Indeed, ihey have often served as primary exhibits for the doctrine that what is important td^sUidv- cannot be measured and thathat_can^Jie measured,, js „not. important-^a-^urd^—In-aB-^U decree that subjective states lie beyond the reaim of proper measurement [I gave Mannheim a justification for turning his back on measurement, for he had an unqualified interest in discussing belief systems,1 Even as Mannheim was writing, however, behaviorism was undergoing stiff challenges, and early studies of attitudes were attaining a degree of measurement reliability that had been deemed impossible. This fragment of history, along with many others, serves to remind us that no intellectual position is likely to become obsolete quite so rapidly as one that takes current empirical capability as the limit of the possible in a more absolute sense. Nevertheless, while rapid strides in the measurement of "subjective states" have been achieved in recent decades, few would claim that the millennium has arrived or that Mannheim could now find all of the tools that were lacking to him forty years ago. This article makes no pretense of surpassing such limitations. At the same time, our substantive concern forces upon us an unusual concern with measurement strategies, not simply because we propose to deal with belief systems or ideologies, but also because of the specific questions that we shall raise about them, pur focus in this article is upon differences in the nature of belief , | systems held on the one hand by elite political actors and, on the other, by the masses that appear to be ''numbered" within the spheres of influence of these belief systems. It is our thesis that there are important and predictable differences in ideational worlds as we progress downward through such "belief strata" and that these differences, while obvious at one level, are easily overlooked and not infrequently miscalculated. The fact that these ideational worlds differ in character poses problems of adequate representation and measurement. The vertical ordering of actors and beliefs that we wish to plumb bears some loose resemblance to the vertical line that might be pursued downward THE NATURE OF RELIEF SYSTEMS IN MASS PUBLICS 207 through an organization or political movement from the narrow cone of top leadership, through increasing numbers of subordinate officials, and on through untitled activists to the large base formally represented in membership rolls. It is this large base that Michels noted, from observations of political gatherings, was rarely "there", and analogues to its physical absence do not arise accidentally in dealing with belief systems. On the other hand, there is no perfect or necessary "fit" between the two orderings, and this fact in itself has some interest. That we intend to consider the total mass of people "numbered" within the spheres of influence of belief systems suggests both a democratic bias and a possible confusion between numbers and power or between numbers and the outcomes of events thai power determines. We are aware that attention to numbers, more or less customary in democratic thought, is very nearly irrelevant in many political settings. Generally, the logic of numbers collides head on with the logic of power, as the traditional power pyramid, expressing an inverse relation between power and numbers, communicates so well. "Power" and "numbers" intersect at only one notable point, and that point is represented by the familiar axiom that numbers are one resource of power. The weight of this resource varies in a systematic and obvious way according to. the political context. In a frankly designed and stable oligarchy, it is assumed to have no weight at all. In such a setting, the numbers of people associated with particular belief systems, if known at all, becomes important only in periods of crisis or challenge to the existing power structure. Democratic theory greatly increases the weight accorded to numbers in the daily power calculus. This increase still does not mean that numbers are of overriding importance; in the normal course of events it is the perception of numbers by democratic elites, so far as they differ from "actual" numbers, that is the more important factor. However this may be, claims to numbers are of some modest continuing importance in democratic systems for the legitimacy they confer upon demands; and, much more sporadically, claims to numbers become important in nondemocratic systems as threats of potential coercion. 208 PHILIP E. CONVERSE /. Some Clarification of Terms A term like "ideology" has been thoroughly muddied by diverse uses.2 We shall depend instead upon the term "belief system," although there is an obvious overlap between the two. We define a belief system as a configuration of ideas and attitudesin whichjhe ejements are bound tb^ether_by "some form . of constraint or functional.interdependence:?^^^Tn^ejitaiic_c^e, "constrain' may be taken to mean the success we would have in predicting, given initial knowledge that an individual holds a specified attitude, that he holds certain i further ideas and attitudes. We depend implicitly upon such notions of constraint in judging, for example, that, if a person is opposed to the expansion of social security, he is probably a conservative and is probably opposed as well to any nationalization of private industries, federal aid to education, sharply progressive income taxation, and so forth. Most discussions of ideologies make relatively elaborate assumptions about such constraints. Constraint must be treated, of course, as a matter of degree, and this degree can be measured quite readily, at least as an average among individuals.* f In the dynamic case, "constraint" or "interdependence" refers to the prob-■ ability that a change in the perceived status (truth, desirability, and so forth) \ 'of one idea-element would psychologically require, from the point of. view of >the actor, some compensating change(s) in the status of idea-elements else- j where in the configuration. The most obvious form of such constraint I (although in some ways the most trivial) is exemplified by a structure of propositions in logic, in which a change in the truth-value of one proposition necessitates changes in truth-value elsewhere within the set of related propositions. Psychologically, of course, there may be equally strong constraint among idea-elements that would not be apparent to logical analysis at all, as we shall see. We might characterize either the idea-elements themselves or entire belief systems in terms of many other dimensions. Only two will interest us here, j First, the idea-elementswithin a belief system vary in a property we shall call Xcentralii$) according to the role that they play in the belief system as a whole. That is, when new information changes the status of one idea-element in a belief system, by postulate some other change must occur as well. There are usually, however, several possible changes in status elsewhere in the system, any one of which would compensate for the initial change. Let us imagine, for example, that a person strongly favors a particular policy; is very favorably inclined toward a given political party; and recognizes with gratification that the party's stand and his own are congruent. (If he were unaware of the party's stand on the issue, these elements could not in any direct sense be constrained within the same belief system.) Let us further imagine that the party then changes its position to the opposing side of the issue. Once the information about the change reaching the actor has become so unequivocal that he can no longer deny that the change has occurred, he has several further choices. Two of the more important ones involve either a change in attitude toward the party or a change in position on the issue. In such an instance, the element more likely to change is defined as less central to the belief system than the element that, so to speak, has its stability ensured by the change in the first element.5 In informal discussions of belief systems, frequent assumptions are made about the relative centrality of various idea-elements. For example, idea-^ elements that are logically "ends" are supposed to be more central to the ; system than are "means." It is important to remain aware, however, that idea-elements can change their relative centrality in an individual's belief-system over time. Perhaps the most hackneyed illustration of this point is that of the miser, to whom money has become an end rather than a means. Whole belief systems may also be compared in a rough way with respect to thcrnAig^-of-objee«1hat are referents for the ideas and attitudes in the system. Some belief systems, while they may be internally quite complex and may involve large numbers of cognitive elements, are rather narrow in range: Belief systems concerning "proper" baptism rituals or the effects of changes in weather on health may serve as cases in point. Such other belief systems as, for example, one that links control of the means of production with the social functions of religion and a doctrine of aesthetics all in one more or less neat package have extreme ranges. By and large, our attention will be focussed upon belief systems that have THE NATURE OF RELIEF SYSTEMS IN MASS PUBLICS 209. I relatively wide ranges, and that allow some centrality to political objects, for they can be presumed to have some relevance to political behavior. This focus brings us close to what are broadly called ideologies, and we shall use the term for aesthetic relief where it seems most appropriate. The term originated in a narrower context, however, and is still often reserved for subsets of belief systems or parts of such systems that the user suspects are insincere; that he wishes to claim have certain functions for social groupings; or that have some special social source or some notable breadth of social diffusion.6 Since we are concerned, here ^about-only-one^-oMhese.Jimitations—tjte question ot^ci^^iffusion^and. since we wish to deal with it by hypothesis ratKer than by definition, a narrow construction of the term is never intended. II. Sources of Constraint on Idea-Elements It seems clear that, however logically coherent a belief system may seem to the holder, the sources of constraint are much less logical in the classical sense than they are psychological—and less psychological than social. This point is of sufficient importance to dwell upon. Logical Sources of Constraint *f Within very narrow portions of belief systems, certain constraints may be purely logical. For example, government revenues, government expenditures, and budget balance are three idea-elements that suggest some purely logical constraints. One cannot believe that government expenditures should be increased, that government revenues should be decreased, and that a more favorable balance of the budget should be achieved all at the same time. Of course, the presence of such objectively logical constraints does not ensure that subjective constraints will be felt by the actor. They will be felt only if these idea-elements are brought together in the same belief system, and there is no guarantee that they need be. Indeed, it is true that, among adult American citizens, those who favor the expansion of government welfare services tend to be those who are more insistent upon reducing taxes "even if it means putting off some important things that need to be done."7 Where such purely logical constraint is concerned, McGuire has reported a fascinating experiment in which propositions from a few syllogisms of the Barbara type were scattered thinly across a long questionnaire applied to a student population. The fact that logical contingencies bound certain questions together was never brought to the attention of the students by the investigator. Yet one week later the questionnaire was applied again, and changes of response to the syllogistic propositions reduced significantly the measurable level of logical inconsistency. The conclusion was that merely "activating" J these objectively related ideas in some rough temporal contiguity was suffi- ) cient to sensitize the holders to inconsistency and therefore to occasion re- | adjustment of their beliefs.8 On a broader canvas, such findings suggest that simple "thinking about" a domain of idea-elements serves both to weld a broader range of such elements into a functioning belief system and to eliminate strictly logical inconsistencies defined from an objective point of view. Since there can be no doubt that educated elites in general, and political elites in particular, "think about" 210 PIUL.1I> E. CONVERSE pj^ejflent^nvolved-in-polilicaLbeheL^ than 1 that characteristic of mass publics, we could conservatively expect that strict I logical inconsistencies (objectively definable) would be far more prevalent in a | broad public. Furthermore, if a legislator is noted for his insistence upon budget-balancing and tax-cutting, we can predict with a fair degree of success that he will also tend to oppose expansion of government welfare activities. If, however, a voter becomes numbered within his sphere of influence by virtue of having cast a vote for him directly out of enthusiasm for his tax-cutting policies, we cannot predict that the voter is opposed as well to expansion of government welfare services. Indeed, if an empirical prediction is possible, it may run in an opposing direction, although the level of constraint is so feeble that any comment is trivial. Yet we know that many historical observations rest directly upon the assumption that constraint among idea-elements visible at an elite level is mirrored by the same lines of constraint in the belief systems of their less visible "supporters." It is our argument that this assumption not only can he, but is very likely to be. fallacious. Psychological Sources of Constraint j Whatever may be learned through the use of strict logic (is a type of constraint, it seems obvious that few belief systems of any range at all depend for their constraint upon logic in this classical sense. Perhaps^ with a great deal of labor, parts of a relatively tight belief system like that fashioned by Karl Marx could be made to resemble a structure of logicalpropositions. It goes without saying, however, that many sophisticated peopfe have been •swept away by the "iron logic" of Marxism without any such recasting. There is a broad gulf between strict logic and the quasi-logic of cogent argument. And where the elements in the belief system of a population represent looser cultural accumulations, the question of logical consistency is even less appropriate. If one visits a Shaker community, for example, one finds a group of people with a clear-cut and distinctive belief system that requires among other things plain dress, centrality of religious concerns, celibacy for all members, communal assumptions about work and property, antagonism .to political participation in the broader state, and a general aura of retirement from the secular world. The visitor whose sense of constraint has been drawn from belief configurations of such other retiring sects as the Amish is entirely surprised to discover that the Shakers hav^ no abhorrence of technological progress but indeed greatly prize it. In their heyday, a remarkable amount of group energy appears to have been reserved for "research and development" of labor-saving devices, and among the inventions they produced was a prototype of the washing machine. Similar surprise has been registered at idea-elements brought together by such movements as Peronism and Italian Fascism by observers schooled to expect other combinations. Indeed, were one to survey a limited set of ideas on which many belief systems have registered opposite postures, it would be interesting to see how many permutations of positions have been held at one time or another by someone somewhere. •» Such diversity is testimony to an absence of any strict logical constraints among such idea-elements, if any be needed. What is important is that the ■J THE NATURE OF BELIEF SYSTEMS IN MASS PUBLICS 211 elites familiar with the total shapes of these belief systems have experienced them as logically constrained clusters of ideas, within which one part necessarily follows from another. Often such constraint is quasi-logically argued on the basis of an appeal to some superordinate value or posture toward man and society, involving premises about the nature of social justice, social change, "natural law," and the like. Thus a few crowning postures—like premises about survival of the fittest in the spirit of social Darwinism—serve as a sort of glue to bind together many more specific attitudes and beliefs, and these postures are of prime centrality in the belief system as a whole. Social Sources of Constraint The social sources of constraint are twofold and are familiar from an extensive literature in the past century. In the first place, were we to survey the combinations of idea-elements that have occurred historically (in the fashion suggested above), we should undoubtedly find that certain postures tend to co-occur and that this co-occurrence-has_ab-vious_roots in.the configuration of interests and information that characterize particular niches in the social structure. For example, if we were informed that dissension was rising within the Roman Catholic Church over innovations designed to bring the priest more intimately into the milieu of the modern worker, we could predict with a high degree of success that such a movement would have the bulk of its support among the bas-clerge and would encounter'indifference or hostility at the higher status levels of the hierarchy. Of course, such predictions are in no sense free from error, and surprises are numerous. The middle-class temperance movement in America, for example, which now seems "logically" allied with the small-town Republican right, had important alliances some eighty years ago with the urban social left, on grounds equally well argued from temperance doctrines.8 Nonetheless, there are some highly reliable correlations of this sort, and these correlations can be linked with social structure in the most direct way. Developmentally, they have status similar to the classic example of the spurious correlation—two terms that are correlated because of a common link to some third and prior variable. In the case of the belief system, arguments are developed to lend some more positive rationale to the fact of constraint: The idea-elements go Together not simply because both are in the interest_Qf_the person holding-a.particular.status burfo'rmOTe^bsrfa'crand quasi-logical reasons developed from a coherent world view as well. It is this type of constraint that is closest to the classicnieaiiimsJ-ttf-A6-tetaL "ideology." " " The second source of social constraint lies in two simple facts about the creation and diffusion of belief systems. First, the shaping of belief systems of any range into apparently logical wholes that are credible to large numbers of people is an ..acJLof_creati ye^syrubesis^characteristic.^ "proportion of any population. .Second, to the extent that multiple idea-elements of a belief system -aro^secjally diffused from such creative-sources, they tend To be diffused in\^a"ck4|^'^whicR' consumers come to see as "naturaVL-wholes^for they'are^i^se^^ in such terms ("If you believe this, then you will also believe that, for lFfollows in such-and-such ways"). Not 212 PHILIP E. CONVERSE that the more avid consumer never supplies personal innovations on the fringes—he is very likely to suppress an idea-element here, to elaborate one there, or even to demur at an occasional point. But any set of relatively intelligent consumers who are initially sympathetic to the crowning posture turns out to show more consensus on specific implications of the posture as a result of social diffusion of "what goes with what" than it would if each member were required to work out the implications individually without socially provided cues. Such constraint through diffusion is important, for it implies a dependence upon the transmission of information. If information is not successfully transmitted, there will be little constraint save that arising from the first social source. Where transmission of information is at stake, it becomes important "to distinguish between two classes of information. Simply put, these two levels t are what goes with-what and3rtiv?-Such levels of information logically stand in a scalar' relationship to one another, in the sense that one can hardly arrive at an understanding of why two ideas go together without being aware that they are supposed to go together. On the other hand, it is easy to know that two ideas go together without knowing why. For example, we can expect that a very large majority of the American public would somehow have absorbed the notion that "Communists are atheists." What is important is that this perceived correlation would for most people represent nothing more than a fact of existence, with the same status as the fact that oranges are orange and most apples are red. If we were to go and explore with these people their grasp of the "why" of the relationship, we would be surprised if more than a quarter of the population even attempted responses (setting aside such inevitable replies as "those Communists are for everything wicked"), and, among the responses received, we could be sure that the majority would be incoherent or irrelevant. The first level of information, then, is simple and straightforward. The second involves much more complex and abstract information, very, close to wha^Do^s^has--called.~tha.^'contextual-knowledge'—relevant to a body of information.10 A well informed person who has received sufficient information about a system of beliefs to understand the "whys" involved in several of the constraints between idea-elements is in a better position to make good guesses about the nature of other constraints; he can deduce with fair success, for example, how a true believer will respond to certain situations. Our first interest in distinguishing between these types of information, however, flows from our interest in the relative success of information transmission. The general premise is that the first type of information will be diffused much more readily than the second because it is less complex. It is well established that differences in information held in a cross-section population are simply staggering, running from vast treasuries of well organized information among elites interested in the particular subject Jto fragments that could virtually be measured as a few "bits" in the technical sense. These differences are a static tribute to the extreme imperfections in the transmission of information "downward" through the systems ^Yexyj^iejn-Jormation"trickles dgwjiIl_my—fax.„Qf course, the ordering of individuals on" this vertical information scale is largely due to differences in education, but it is strongly modified as well by different specialized interests and tastes that THE NATURE OF BELIEF SYSTEMS IN MASS PUBLICS 213 individuals have acquired over time (one for politics, another, for religious activity, another for fishing, and so forth). Consequences of Declining Information for Belief Systems It is our primary thesis that, as one moves from elite sources of belief systems downwards on such an information scale, several important things occur. First, the contextual grasp of "standard" political belief systems fades out very rapidly, almost before one has passed beyond the 10% of the American population that in the 1950s had completed standard college training.11 Increasingly, simpler forms of information about "what goes with what" (or even information about the simple identity of objects) turn up missing. The net result, as one moves downward, is that constraint declines across the universe of idea-elements, and that the range of relevant belief systems becomes narrower and narrower. Instead of a few wide-ranging belief systems ; that erganize^arge "aTnountsnof'^pecific infoffriat find ; a proliferation of clusters of ideas.among which little constraint is felt, even, quite often, in instances of sheer logical constraint.12 At the same time, moving from top to bottom of this information dimension, the character of the objects that are central in a belief system undergoes systematic change. These objects shift from the remote, generic, and abstract to the increasingly simple, concrete, or "close to home." Where potential political objects are concerned, this progression tends to be from abstract, "ideological" principles to the more obviously recognizable social groupings or charismatic leaders and finally to such objects of immediate experience as family, job, and immediate associates. Most of these changes have been hinted at in one form or another in a variety of sources. For_example, "limited horizons," "foreshortened time perspectives," and "concrete thinking" have been singled out as notable characteristics of the ideational world of the poorly educated. Such observations have impressed even those investigators who are dealing with subject matter rather close to the individual's immediate world: his family budgeting, what he thinks of people more wealthy than he, his attitudes toward leisure time,„ work regulations, and the like. But most of the stuff of politics—particularly that played on a national or international stage—is, in the nature of things, remote and abstract. Where politics is concerned, therefore, such ideational changes begin to occur rapidly below the extremely thin stratum of-the electorate that ever has occasion to make public pronouncements on political affairs. In other words, the changes in belief systems of which we speak are not a pathology limited to a thin and disoriented bottom layer of the lumpenproietariat; they are immediately relevant in understanding the bulk of mass political.behavior. ----- ^/ It is this latter fact which seems to be consistently misunderstood~by~t.lie sophisticated analysts who comment in one vein or another on the meaning of mass politics. There are some rather obvious "optical illusions" that are bound to operate here. A member of that tiny,.eliteJLhat. comments publicly about po!iticaLcurrentsiprobably,jsQmeiractiQn.Qf \% of a population) spends^ most of his time in informal communication about politics with others in the same select group. He rarely encounters a. conversation in which his assumptions of shared contextual grasp of political ideas are challenged) Intellectu- :.2'!4 PHILIP E. CONVERSE ally, he has learned that the level of information in the mass public is low, but he may dismiss this knowledge as true of only 10 to 20% of the voters, who affect the course of mass political events in insignificant ways if at all.18 It is largely from his informal communications that he learns how "public opinion" is changing and what the change signifies, and he generalizes facilely --irom.lhese observations to the bulk of the broader public." ///. Active Use of Ideological Dimensions of Judgment Economy and constraint are companion concepts, for the more" highly constrained a system of multiple elements, the more economically it may be described and understood. From the point of view of the actor, the idea organization that leads to constraint permits him to locate and make sense of a wider range of information from a particular domain than he. would .find possible without such organization. One judgmental dimension or "yardstick" that has been highly serviceable for simplifying and organizing events in most Western politics for the past century has been the liberal-conservative continuum, on which parties, political leaders, legislation, court decisions, and a number of other primary objects of politics could be more—or less—adequately located.15 The efficiency of such a yardstick in the evaluation of events is quite obvious. Under certain appropriate circumstances, the single word "conservative" used to describe a piece of proposed legislation can convey a tremendous amount of more specific information about the bill—who probably proposed it and toward what ends, who is likely to resist it, its chances of passage, its long-term social consequences, and, most important, how the actor himself should expect to evaluate it if he were to expend further energy to look into its details. The circumstances under which such tremendous amounts of information are conveyed by the single word are, however, twofold. First, the actor must bring a good deal of meaning to the term, which is to say that he must understand the constraints surrounding it. The more impoverished his understanding of the term, the less information it conveys. In the limiting case—if he does not know at all what the term rrjeans—it conveys no information at all. Second, the system-.oil beliefs' and actors referred to must in fact be relatively constrained: To the degree that constraint is lacking, uncertainty is less reduced by the label, and less information is conveyed. The psychological economies provided by such yardsticks for actors are paralleled by economies for analysts and theoreticians who wish to describe events in the system parsimoniously. Indeed, the search for adequate overarching dimensions on which large arrays of events may be simply understood is a critical part of synthetic description. Such syntheses are j more or ;:- less satisfactory, once again, according to the degree of constraint operative among terms in the system being described. The economies inherent in the liberal-conservative continuum were exploited in traditional fashion in the early 1950s to describe political changes in the United States as a swing toward conservatism or a "revolt of the moderates." At one level, this description was unquestionably apt. That is, a man whose belief system was relatively conservative (Dwight D. Eisenhower) jhad sup- THE NATURE OF BELIEF SYSTEMS IN MASS PUBLICS 215 planted in the White House a man whose belief system was relatively liberal (Harry Truman). Furthermore, for a brief period at least, the composition ■ Congress was more heavily Republican as well, and this shift meant on balance a greater proportion of relatively conservative legislators. Since the administration and Congress were the elites responsible for the development and execution of policies, the flavor of governmental action did indeed take il turn in a conservative direction. These observations are proper description/ The causes underlying these changes in leadership, however, obviously lay: with the mass public, which had changed its voting patterns sufficiently to bring the Republican elites into power. And this change in mas^s voting was frequently interpreted as a shift in public mood from liberal to conservative, a mass desire for a period of respite and consolidation after the rapid liberal innovations of the 1930s and 1940s. Such an account presumes, once again, that constraints visible at an elite level are mirrored in the mass public and that a person choosing to vote Republican after a decade or two of Democratic voting saw himself in some sense or other as giving up a more liberal choice in favor of a more conservative one. On the basis of some familiarity with attitudinal materials drawn from: cross-section samples of the electorate,'* this assumption seems thoroughly I implausible. It suggests in the first instance a neatness of organization in perceived political worlds, which, while accurate enough for elites, is a poor fit for the perceptions of the common public. Second, the yardstick that such an account takes for granted—the liberal-conservative continuum—is a rather : elegant high-order abstraction, and such abstractions are not typical conceptual tools for the "man in the street." Fortunately, our interview protocols collected from this period permitted us to examine this hypothesis more closely, for they include not only "structured" attitude materials (which merely require the respondent to choose between prefabricated alternatives) but also lengthy "open-ended" materials, which provided us with the respondent's current evaluations of the political scene in his own words, They therefore provide some indication of the evaluative dimensions that tend to be spontaneously applied to politics by such a national sample. We knew that respondents who were highly educated or strongly involved in politics would fall naturally into the verbal shorthand of "too conservative," "more radical," and the like in these evaluations. Our initial analytic question had to do with the prevalence of such usage. It soon became apparent, however, that such respondents were in a very small minority, as their unusual education or involvement would suggest. At this point, we broadened the inquiry to an assessment of the evaluative dimensions of policy significance (relating to political issues, rather than to the way a candidate dresses, smiles, or behaves in his private life) that seemed to be employed in lieu of such efficient yardsticks as the liberal-conservative continuum. The interviews themselves suggested several strata of classification, which were hierarchically ordered as "levels of conceptualization" on the basis of a priori judgments about the breadth of contextual grasp of the political system that each seemed to represent, In the first or top level were placed those respondents who did indeed rely in some active way on a relatively abstract and far-reaching conceptual dimension as a yardstick against which political objects and their shifting policy PHILIP E. CONVERSE I 216 significance over time were evaluated. We did not require that this dimension be the liberal-conservative continuum itself, but it was almost the only dimen-sion of the sort that occurred empirically. In a second stratum were placed those respondents who mentioned such a dimension in a peripheral way but did not appear to place much evaluative dependence upon it or who; used such concepts in a fashion that raised doubt about the breadth of their understanding of the meaning of the term. The first stratum was loosely labeled "ideologue" and the second "near-ideologue." In the third level were placed respondents who failed to rely upon any such over-arching dimensions yet evaluated parties and candidates in terms of | their expected favorable or unfavorable treatment of different social groupings in the population. The Democratic Party might be disliked because "it's trying to help the Negroes too much," or the Republican Party might be \ endorsed because farm prices would be better with the Republicans in. office. The more sophisticated of these group-interest responses reflected an awareness of conflict in interest between "big business" or "rich people," ; on the one hand, and "labor" or the "working man," on the other, and parties and candidates were located accordi ngly. [ It is often asked why these latter respondents are not considered full "ideologues," for their perceptions run to the more tangible core of what has traditionally been viewed as ideological conflict. It is quite true that such a syndrome is closer to the upper levels of conceptualization than are any of the other types to be described. As we originally foresaw, however, there turn out to be rather marked differences, not only in social origin and flavor of judgmental processes but in overt political reactions as well, between people of this type and those in the upper levels. These people, have a clear image 2 of politics as an arena of group interests and, provided that,diey have,..been properly advised on where their own group interests Tie,"they are relatively likely to. follow such advice. Unless an issue directly concerns their gijpuping in an obviously rewarding or punishing way, however, they lack the contextual grasp of the system to recognize- how-they-should respond to it > without being told by elites who_holdJh_eir__cflnfid£nce,- -Furthermore, their interest.in::politics:is^or-su pay much attention to I such communications. If a communication gets through and they absorb! t, I tjhey are most willing to behave "ideologically" in ways that will further the interests of their group. If they fail "to" receive such communication, which is I most unusual, knowledge of their group memberships may be of little help T , in predicting their responses. This syndrome wecame to call "ideology by proxy— The difference between such narrow group interest and the broader perceptions of the ideologue may be clarified by an extreme case. One respondent whom we encountered classified himself as a strong Socialist. He was a Socialist because he knew that Socialists stood four-square jfor the working man against the rich, and he was a working man. When askeld, however, whether or not the federal government in Washington "should leave things like electric power and housing for private businessmen to handle," he felt strongly that private enterprise should have its way, and responses to other structured issue questions were simply uncorrected with standard socialist doctrine. It seems quite clear that, if our question had pointed out THE NATURE OF BELIEF SYSTEMS IN MASS PUBLICS 217| explicitly to this man that "good Socialists" would demand government intervention over private enterprise or that such a posture had traditionally been viewed as benefiting the working man, his answer would have been different,!' But since he had something less than a college education and was not! generally interested enough in politics to struggle through such niceties, he* simply lacked the contextual grasp of the political system or of his chosen! "ideology" to know what the appropriate response might be. This case? illustrates well what we mean by constraint between idea-elements and how: such constraint depends upon a store of relevant information. For this man,' "Socialists." "the working man," "non-Socialists" and "the rich" with their appropriate valences formed a tightly constrained belief system. But, for lack of information, the belief system more or less began and ended there It strikes us as valid to distinguish such a belief system from that of the doctrinaire socialist. We, as sophisticated observers, could only class this' man as a full "ideologue" by assuming that he shares with us the complex; undergirding of information that his concrete group perceptions call up in our own minds. In this instance, a very little probing makes clear that this assumption of shared information is once again false. The fourth level was, to some degree, a residual category, intended to include those respondents who invoked some policy considerations in their : evaluations yet employed none of the references meriting location in any j of the first three levels. Two main modes of policy evaluation were charac- ' teristic of this level. The first we came to think of as a "nature of the times" response, since parties or candidates were praised or blamed primarily be-catise of their temporal association in the past with broad societal states of i war or peace, prosperity or depression. There was no hint in these responses that any groupings in the society suffered differentially from disaster or profited excessively in more pleasant times: These fortunes or misfortunes were those that one party or the other had decided (in some cases, apparently, on whim) to visit upon the nation as a whole. The second type included those respondents whose only approach to an issue reference involved some single narrow policy for which they felt personal gratitude or indignation toward a party or candidate (like social security or a conservation program). In these responses, there was no indication that the! speakers saw programs as representative of the broader policy postures of the parties. The fifth level included those respondents whose evaluations of the political scene had no shred of policy significance whatever. Some of these responses were from people who felt loyal to one party or the other but confessed that they had no idea what the party stood for. Others devoted their attention to personal qualities of the candidates, indicating disinterest in parties more generally. Still others confessed that they paid too little atten-Hon to either the parties or the current candidates to be able to say anything about them.17 The ranking of the levels performed on a priori grounds was corroborated by further analyses, which demonstrated that independent measures.QLpQlltii_ cal information,. education, and .political involvement all showed sharp and monotonic declines as one passled downward through~th"e~Ievets inihe order suggested. Furthermore, these correlations were strong enough so that each maintained some residual life when the other two items were controlled, des- 21S PHI I,IP E. CONVERSE pite the strong underlying relationship between education, information, and involvement. The distribution of the American electorate within these levels of conceptualization is summarized in Table I. The array is instructive as a port- TABLE I — Distribution of a Total Cross-Section Sample of the American Electorate and of 1956 Voters, by Levels of Conceptualization Proportion of Proportion total sample of voters 21% 31% 9 12 42 -~—45_^„ *~24" 22 22J 17-4 I. Ideologues II. Near-ideologues III. Group interest IV. Nature of the times V. No issue content 100% 100% rait of a mass electorate, to be laid against the common elite assumption that all or a significant majority of the public conceptualizes the main lines of politics after the manner of the most highly educated. Where the specific hypothesis of the "revolt of the moderates" in the early 1950s is concerned, the distribution does not seem on the face of it to lend much support to the key assumption. This disconfirmation may be examined further, however. Since the resurgenceof. the Republicans in the Eisenhower1 period depended primarily upon crossing" of party lines by people who aormally considered themselves Democrats, we were able to isolate these people to see from what levels of conceptualization they had been reqruited. We found that such key defections had occurred among Democrats in the two bottom levels at a rate very significantly greater than the comparable rate in the group-interest or more ideological levels. In other words, the stirrings in the mass electorate that had led to a change in administration and ir "ruling ideology" were primarily the handiwork of the very people for whom assumptions of any liberal-conservative dimensions of judgment were riost farfetched. Furthermore, within those strata where the characteristics of conceptualization even permitted the hypothesis to be evaluated in its own terms, it was directly disproved. For example, the more sophisticated of the grouri-interest Democrats were quite aware that Eisenhower would be a more pro-business president than Stevenson. Those of this group who did defect to Eisenhower did not, however, do so because they were tired of a labor-oriented administration and wanted a business-oriented one for a change. Quite to the contrary, in the degree that they defected they did so in spite of rather than because of such quasi-ideological perceptions. That is, their attitudes toward the respective interests of these groups remained essentially constant, and they expressed misgivings about an Eisenhower vote on precisely these grounds. But any such worries were, under the circumstances, outweighed by admiration for Eisenhower's war record, his honesty, his good family life, and (in 1952) his potential for resolving the nagging problem of the Korean War. Among respondents at higher levels (ideologues and near-ideologues), THE NATURE OF BELIEF SYSTEMS IN MASS PUBLICS 217| explicitly to this man that "good Socialists" would demand government intervention over private enterprise or that such a posture had traditionally been viewed as benefiting the working man, his answer would have been differenti But since he had something less than a college education and was not! generally interested enough in politics to struggle through such niceties, he* simply lacked the contextual grasp of the political system or of his chosen! "ideology" to know what the appropriate response might be. This case? illustrates well what we mean by constraint between idea-elements and how: such constraint depends upon a store of relevant information. For this man,' "Socialists." "the working man," "non-Socialists" and "the rich" with their appropriate valences formed a tightly constrained belief system. But, for lack of information, the belief system more or less began and ended there It strikes us as valid to distinguish such a belief system from that of the doctrinaire socialist. We, as sophisticated observers, could only class this' man as a full "ideologue" by assuming that he shares with us the complex; undergirding of information that his concrete group perceptions call up in our own minds. In this instance, a very little probing makes clear that this assumption of shared information is once again false. The fourth level was, to some degree, a residual category, intended to include those respondents who invoked some policy considerations in their : evaluations yet employed none of the references meriting location in any j of the first three levels. Two main modes of policy evaluation were charac- ' teristic of this level. The first we came to think of as a "nature of the times" response, since parties or candidates were praised or blamed primarily be-catise of their temporal association in the past with broad societal states of i war or peace, prosperity or depression. There was no hint in these responses that any groupings in the society suffered differentially from disaster or profited excessively in more pleasant times: These fortunes or misfortunes were those that one party or the other had decided (in some cases, apparently, on whim) to visit upon the nation as a whole. The second type included those respondents whose only approach to an issue reference involved some single narrow policy for which they felt personal gratitude or indignation toward a party or candidate (like social security or a conservation program). In these responses, there was no indication that the! speakers saw programs as representative of the broader policy postures of the parties. The fifth level included those respondents whose evaluations of the political scene had no shred of policy significance whatever. Some of these responses were from people who felt loyal to one party or the other but confessed that they had no idea what the party stood for. Others devoted their attention to personal qualities of the candidates, indicating disinterest in parties more generally. Still others confessed that they paid too little atten-Hon to either the parties or the current candidates to be able to say anything about them.17 The ranking of the levels performed on a priori grounds was corroborated by further analyses, which demonstrated that independent measures.QLpQJilk_ cal information,. education, and .political involvement all showed sharp and monotonic declines as one passled downward through^tneTIevels inihe order suggested. Furthermore, these correlations were strong enough so that each maintained some residual life when the other two items were controlled, des- 21S PHI UP E. CONVERSE pite the strong underlying relationship between education, information, and involvement. The distribution of the American electorate within these levels of conceptualization is summarized in Table I. The array is instructive as a port- TABLE I — Distribution of a Total Cross-Section Sample of the American Electorate and of 1956 Voters, by Levels of Conceptualization Proportion of Proportion total sample of voters 21% 31% 9 12 42 -~—45_^„ *~24" 22 22J 174 I. Ideologues II. Near-ideologues III. Group interest IV. Nature of the times V. No issue content 100% 100% rait of a mass electorate, to be laid against the common elite assumption that all or a significant majority of the public conceptualizes the main lines of politics after the manner of the most highly educated. Where the specific hypothesis of the "revolt of the moderates" in the early 1950s is concerned, the distribution does not seem on the face of it to lend much support to the key assumption. This disconfirmation may be examined further, however. Since the resurgenceof. the Republicans in the Eisenhower1 period depended primarily upon crossing" of party lines by people who aormally considered themselves Democrats, we were able to isolate these people to see from what levels of conceptualization they had been reqruited. We found that such key defections had occurred among Democrats in the two bottom levels at a rate very significantly greater than the comparable rate in the group-interest or more ideological levels. In other words, the stirrings in the mass electorate that had led to a change in administration and ir "ruling ideology" were primarily the handiwork of the very people for whom assumptions of any liberal-conservative dimensions of judgment were rtost farfetched. Furthermore, within those strata where the characteristics of conceptualization even permitted the hypothesis to be evaluated in its own terms, it was directly disproved. For example, the more sophisticated of the grouri-interest Democrats were quite aware that Eisenhower would be a more pro-business president than Stevenson. Those of this group who did defect to Eisenhower did not, however, do so because they were tired of a labor-oriented administration and wanted a business-oriented one for a change. Quite to the contrary, in the degree that they defected they did so in spite of rather than because of such quasi-ideological perceptions. That is, their attitudes toward the respective interests of these groups remained essentially constant, and they expressed misgivings about an Eisenhower vote on precisely these grounds. But any such worries were, under the circumstances, outweighed by admiration for Eisenhower's war record, his honesty, his good family life, and (in 1952) his potential for resolving the nagging problem of the Korean War. Among respondents at higher levels (ideologues and near-ideologues), THE NATURE OF BELIEF SYSTEMS IN MASS PUBLICS 219 there was comparable attraction to Eisenhower at a personal level, but these people seemed more careful to hew to ideological considerations, and rates of Democratic defection in these levels were lower still. In short, then, the supposition of changing ideological moods in the mass public as a means of understanding the exchange of partisan elites in 1952 seems to have had little relevance to what was actually going on at the mass level. And once again, the sources of the optical illusion are self-evident. While it may be taken for granted among well educated and politically involved people that a shift from a Democratic preference to a Republican one probably represents a change in option from liberal to conservative, the assumption cannot be extended very far into the electorate as a whole. IV. Recognition of Ideological Dimensions of Judgment Dimensions like the liberal-conservative continuum, as we have observed, are extremely efficient frames for the organization of many political observations. Furthermore, they are used a great deal in the more ambitious treatments of politics in the mass media, so that a person with a limited under-" standing of their meaning must find such discussions more obscure than enlightening. Aside from active cognitive use, therefore, the simple status of public comprehension of these terms is a matter of some interest. It is a commonplace in psychology that recognition, recall, and habitual use of cognized objects or concepts are rather different. We are capable of recognizing many more objects (or concepts) if they are directly presented to us than we could readily recall on the basis of more indirect cues; and we are capable of recalling on the basis of such hints many more objects (or concepts) than might be active or salient for us in a given context without special prompting. In coding the levels of conceptualization from free-answer material, our interest had been entirely focused upon concepts with the last status (activation or salience). It had been our assumption that such activation would be apparent in the responses of any person with a belief system in which these organizing dimensions had high centrality. Nevertheless, we could be sure at the same time that if we presented the terms 'liberal" and "conservative" directly to our respondents, a much larger number would recognize them and be able to attribute to them some kind of meaning. We are interested both in the proportions of a normal sample who would show some recognition and also in the meaning that might be supplied for the terms. In a 1960 reinterview of the original sample whose 1956 responses had been assigned to our levels of conceptualization, we therefore asked in the context of the differences in "what the parties stand for," "Would you say that cither one of the parties is more conservative or more liberal than the other?" (It was the first time we had ever introduced these terms in our interviewing of this sample.) If the answer was affirmative, we asked which party seemed the more conservative and then, "What do you have in mind when you say that the Republicans {Democrats) are more conservative than the Democrats (Republicans)?" When the respondent said that he did not see differences of this kind between the two parties, we were anxious to dis-linguish between those who were actually cynical about meaningful party j 220 PHILIP E. CONVERSE differences and those who took this route to avoid admitting that they did not know what the terms signified. We therefore went on to ask this group, "Do you think that people generally consider the Democrats or the Republicans more conservative, or wouldn't you want to guess about that?" At this point, we were willing to assume that if a person had no idea of the rather standard assumptions, he probably had no idea of what the terms meant; and indeed, those who did try to guess which party other people thought more conservative made a very poor showing when we went on to ask them (paralleling our "meaning" question for the first group), "What do people have in mind when they say that the Republicans (Democrats) are more conservative than the Democrats (Republicans)?" In responding to the "meaning" questions, both groups were urged to answer as fully and clearly as possible, and their comments were transcribed. The responses were classified in a code inspired by the original work on levels of conceptualization, although it was considerably more detailed. Within this code, top priority was given to explanations that called upon broad philosophical differences. These explanations included mentions of such things as posture toward change (acceptance of or resistance to new ideas, speed or caution in responding to new problems, protection of or challenge to the status quo, aggressive posture towards problems vs. a laissez-faire approach, orientation toward the future or lack of it, and so forth); posture toward the welfare state, socialism, free enterprise, or capitalism (including mention of differential sensitivity to social problems, approaches to social-welfare programs, governmental interference with private enterprise, and so forth); posture toward the expanding power of federal government (issues of centralization, states* rights, local autonomy, and paternalism); and relationship of the government to the individual (questions of individual dignity, initiative, needs, rights, and so forth). While any mention of comparably broad philosophical differences associated with the liberal-conservative distinction was categorized in this top level, these four were the most frequent types of reference, as they had been for the full "ideologues" in the earlier open-ended materials. Then, in turn, references to differences in attitude toward various interest groupings in the population; toward spending or saving and fiscal policy more generally, as well as to economic prosperity; toward various highly specific issues like unemployment compensation, highway-building, and tariffs; and toward postures in the sphere of foreign policy were arrayed in a descending order of priority, much as they had been for the classification into levels of conceptualization. Since respondents had been given the opportunity to mention as many conservative-liberal distinctions as they wished, coding priority was given to the more "elevated" responses, and all the data that we shall subsequently cite rests on the "best answer" given by each respondent.18 The simple distributional results were as follows. Roughly three respondents in eight (37%) could supply no meaning for the liberal-conservative distinction, including 8% who attempted to say which party was the more conservative but who gave up on the part of the sequence dealing with meaning. (The weakest 29% will, in later tables, form our bottom stratum "V," while the 8% compose stratum "IV.") Between those who could supply no THE NATURE OF BELIEF SYSTEMS IN MASS PUBLICS 221 meaning for the terms and those who clearly did, there was naturally an intermediate group that answered all the questions but showed varying degrees of uncertainty or confusion. The situation required that one of two polar labels (conservative or liberal) be properly associated with one of two polar clusters of connotations and with one of two parties. Once the respondent had decided to explain what "more conservative" or "more liberal" signified, there were four possible patterns by which the other two dichotomies migh be associated with the first. Of course, all four were represented in at least some interviews. For example, a respondent might indicate that the Democrats were the more conservative because they stood up for the working man against big business. In such a case, there seemed to be a simple error consisting in reversal of the ideological labels. Or a respondent might say that the Republicans were more liberal because they were pushing new and progressive sociaMegislation. Here the match between label and meaning seems proper, but the party perception is, by normal standards, erroneous. The distribution of these error types within the portion of the sample that attempted to give "meaning" answers (slightly more than 60%) is shown in Table II. The 83% entered for the "proper" patterns is artifically increased to TABLE II — Association of Ideological Label with Party and Meaning Ideological label Meaning Party Conservative Conservative Republican Liberal Liberal Democrat Conservative Liberal Republican Liberal Conservative Democrat Conservative Conservative Democrat3 Liberal Liberal Republican Conservative Liberal Democrat Liberal Conservative Republican Proportion of those giving some answer 83% 6 100% a. While this patLern may appear entirely legitimate for the southern respondent reacting to the southern wing of the Democratic Party rather than to the national party, it showed almost no tendency to occur with greater frequency in the South than elsewhere (and errors as well as lacunae occurred more frequently in general in the less well educated South). Data from a very different context indicate that southerners who discriminate between the southern wing and the national Democratic Party take the national party as the assumed object in our interviews, if the precise object is not specified. an unknown degree by the inclusion of all respondents whose connotations for liberalism-conservatism were sufficiently impoverished so that little judgment could be made about whether or not they were making proper associations (for example, those respondents whose best explanations of the distinction involved orientations toward defense spending). The error types thus represent only those that could be unequivocally considered "errors." While Table II does not in itself constitute proof that the error types resulted from pure guesswork, the configuration does resemble the probable results if 20-25% of the respondents had been making random guesses about 222 PHILTP E. CONNJERSE how the two labels, the two polar meanings, and the two parties should be sorted out. People making these confused responses might or might not feel confused in making their assessments. Even if they knew that they were confused, it is unlikely that they would be less confused in encountering such terms in reading or listening to political communications, which 'is the important point where transmission of information is concerned. If, on the ither hand, they were wrong without realizing it, then they would be capable of hearing that Senator Goldwater, for example, was an extreme conservative and believing that it meant that he was for increased federal spending (or whatever other more specific meaning they might bring to the term). In either case, it seems reasonable to distinguish between the people who belong in this confused group at the border of understanding and those who demonstrate greater clarity about the terms. And after the confused groupj is set aside (stratum III in Tables III-VI), we are left with a proportion of the sample that is slightly more than 50%. This figure can be taken as a maximum estimate of reasonable recognition. We say "maximum" because, once within this "sophisticated" half of the electorate, it is reasonable to consider the quality of the meanings put forth to explain the liberal-conservative distinction. These meanings varied greatly in adequacy, from those "best answers" that did indeed qualify for coding under the "broad philosophy" heading (the most accurate responses, as defined above) to those that explained the distinction in narrow or nearly irrelevant terms (like Prohibition or foreign-policy measures). In all, 17%,of the total sample gave "best answers" that we considered to qualify as ''broad philosophy."19 This group was defined as stratum I, and the remainder, who gave narrower definitions, became stratum II. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the liberal-conservative definitions supplied was the extreme frequency of those hinging on a simple "spend-save" dimension vis-a-vis government finances. Very close to a majdjrity of all "best" responses (and two-thirds to three-quarters of all such responses in stratum II) indicated in essence that the Democratic Party was liberal because it spent public money freely and that the Republican Party was more conservative because it stood for economy in government or pinched pennies. In our earlier coding of the levels of conceptualization, we had already noted that this simple dimension seemed often to be what was at stakq when "ideological" terms were used. Frequently there was reason to believe that the term "conservative" drew its primary meaning from the cognate "conservation." In one rather clear example, a respondent indicated that he considered the Republicans to be more conservative in the sense that they were ". . . more saving with money and our natural resources. Less apt jto slap on a tax for some non-essential. More conservative in promises that can't be kept." (Italics ours.) Of course, the question of the proportion of national wealth that is to be spent privately or channeled through government for public spending has been one of the key disputes between conservatives and liberal "ideologies" for several decades. From this point of view, the great multitude of "spend-save" references can be considered essentially as accurate matching of terms. On the other hand, it goes without saying that the conservative-liberal dialogue does not exhaust itself on this narrow question alone, and our view of these The nature of belief systems in mass publics 223 responses as an understanding of the differences depends in no small measure on whether the individual sees this point as a self-contained distinction or understands the link between it and a number of other broad questions. On rare occasions, one encounters a respondent for whom the "spend-save" dimension is intimately bound up with other problem areas. For example, one respondent feels that the Republicans are more conservative because ". . . they are too interested in getting the budget balanced—they should spend more to get more jobs for our people." More frequently when further links are suggested, they are connected with policy but go no further: [Republicans more conservative because] "Well, they don'l spend as much money." [What do you have in mind?] "Well, a lot of them holler when they try to establish a higher interest rate but that's to get back a little when they do loan out and make it so people are not so free with it." Generally, however, the belief system involved when "liberal-conservative" is equated with "spend-save" seems to be an entirely narrow one. There follow a number of examples of comments, which taken with the preceding citations, form a random drawing from the large group of "spend-save" comments: [Democrats more conservative because] "they will do more for the people at home before they go out to help foreign countries. They are truthful and not liars." [Republicans more liberal judging] '"by the money they have spent in this last administration. They spent more than ever before in a peace time. And got less for it as far as I can see." [Republicans more conservative because] "Well, they vote against the wild spending spree the Democrats get on." [Republicans more conservative because] "they pay as you go." [Democrats more conservative because] "i don't believe the Democrats will spend as much money as the Republicans." [Republicans more conservative because] "it seems as if the Republicans try to hold down the spending of government money." [Do you remember how?] "Yes," [by having] "no wars." From this representation of the "spend-save" references, the reader may see quite clearly why we consider them to be rather "narrow" readings of the liberal-conservative distinction as applied to the current partisan scene. In short, our portrait of the population, where recognition of a key ideological dimension is concerned, suggests that about 17% of the public (stratum I) have an understanding of the distinction that captures much of its breadth. About 37% (strata IV and V) are entirely vague as to its meaning. For the 46% between, there are two strata, one of which demonstrates considerable uncertainty and guesswork in assigning meaning to the terms (stratum III) and the other of which has the terms rather well under control but appears to have a fairly limited set of connotations for them (stratum II). The great majority of the latter groups equate liberalism-conservatism rather directly with a "spend-save" dimension. In such cases, when the sensed connotations are limited, it is not surprising that there is little active use of the continuum as an organizing dimension. Why should one bother to say that a party is conservative if one can convey the same information by saying that it is against spending? 224 PHILIP E. CONVERSE Since the 1960 materials on liberal-conservative meanings were drawn from the same sample as the coding of the active use of such frames of reference in 1956, it is possible to consider how well the two codings match. For a variety of reasons, we would not expect a perfect fit, even aside from coding error. The earlier coding had not been limited to the liberal-conservative dimension, and, although empirical instances were rare, a person could qualify as an "ideologue" if he assessed politics with the aid ,of some other highly abstract organizing dimension. Similarly, among those who did employ the liberal-conservative distinction, there were no requirements that the terms be defined. It was necessary therefore to depend upon appearances, and the classification was intentionally lenient. Furthermore, since a larger portion of the population would show recognition than showed active use, we could expect substantial numbers of people in the lower levels of conceptualization to show reasonable recognition of the terms. At any rate, we assumed that the two measures would show a high correlation, as they in fact did (Table III). Of course, very strong differences in education underlie the data shown in Table III. The 2% of the sample that occupy the upper left-hand cell have a mean education close to seven years greater than that of the 11 % that occupy the lower right-hand cell. Sixty-two per cent of this lower cell have had less formal education than the least educated person in the upper corner. The differences in education show a fairly regular progression across the intervening surface of the table (see Table IV). Although^cmeriJiaA'e^aJiigher. mean education than men, there is some sex bias to the table, for women. TABLE III — Levels of Conceptualization (1956) by Recognition and Understanding of Terms "Conservatism" and "Liberalism" (1960) LEVELS OF CONCEPTUALlZATldN Recognition and understanding" Number of cases a. The definitions of the strata are: I. recognition and proper matching of label, meaning, and party and a broad understanding of the terms "conservative" and "liberal"; II. recognition and proper matching but a narrow definition of terms (like "spend-save"); III. recognition but some error in matching; IV. recognition and an attempt at matching but inability to give any meaning for terms; V. no apparent recognition of terms (docs not know if parties differ in liberal-conservative terms and does not know if anybody else sees them as differing). ' ] are djs£TOpgj;tiojiately_ represented in the lower right-hand quadrant of the stable. Furthermore, although age is" negatively correlated with education, there is also rather clear evidence that the sort of political sophistication represented by the measures can accumulate with age. Undoubtedly even Near Group Nature of No issue Stratum Ideologue ideologue interest the times content I 51% 29% 13% 16% 10% II 43 46 42 40 22 III 2 10 14 7 7 IV 2 5 6 7 12 V 2 10 25 30 "j 49 ._ -. — ---' I--" 100% 100% 100% 100% 100% (45) (122) (580) (288) (290) THE NATURE OF BELIEF SYSTEMS IN MASS PUBLICS 225 sporadic observation of politics over long enough periods of time serves to nurture some broader view of basic liberal-conservative differences, although 1 is TABLE IV —Levels of Conceptualization (1956) and Term Recognition (I960) bv Mean Years of Formal Education 226 PHILIP E. CONVERSE LEVELS OF CONCEPTUALIZATION Recognition and understanding11 Stratum I II III IV V Ideologue 14.9» 13.9 Near ideologue 14.2 il.9 11.1 * 10.0 Group interest 12.3 10.7 10.6 10.4 9.5 Nature of the times 11.1 10,7 9.8 9.9 8.5 * Inadequate number of cases. a. The cell entry is mean number of years of formal education. Partial college was arbitrarily assumed to represent an average of 14 years, and work toward an advanced degree an average of 18 years. b. See Table III for definitions of the five strata. of course the same sophistication is achieved much more rapidly and in a more striking way by those who progress greater distances through the educational system. It is not surprising that political sophistication goes hand in hand with political activism at the "grass roots" (Table V). The relationship is certainly TABLE V —Amount of 1956-1960 Political Activity by Level of Conceptualization (1956) and Term Recognition (1960) LEVEL OF CONCEPTUALIZATION Recognition and understandingb Stratum I II III IV V Ideologue 3.8" 3.4 Near ideologu 2.6 3.0 2.5 * 1.7 Group interest 2.5 1.7 2,2 1.9 1.0 Nature of the times 2.6 1.8 1.5 1.5 .8 No issue content 2.2 1.3 1.1 .8 .4 * Inadequate number of cases, a. The cell entry represents a mean of the number of acts of political participation exclusive of voting reported for the two presidential campaigns of 1956 and 1960. For 1956, a point was awarded to each respondent for party membership, campaign contributions, attendance at political rallies, other party work, attempts to convince others through informal communication, and displaying campaign buttons or stickers. In 1960, essentially the same scoring applied, except that on two items more differentiated information was available. A point was awarded for attending one or two political rallies, two points for three to six rallies, and three points for seven or more. Similarly, a second point was awarded for people who reported having attempted in I960 to convince others in more than one class (friends, family, or coworkers). A total score of 15 was possible, although empirically the highest score was 14. Only about I % of the sample had scores greater than 9. b. See Table HI for definitions of the five strata. not perfect: About 20% of those in the most sophisticated cell engaged in none of the forms of participation beyond voting that were surveyed (see note a. Table V) in either the 1956 or 1960 election campaigns, and there is more "stray" participation than has sometimes been suspected among those who express little interest in politics or comprehension of party differences yet who may, for example, happen on a political rally. Furthermore, even the active hard core is not necessarily sophisticated in this sense: Two of the thirteen most active people fall in the lower right half of the table, and their activism is probably to be understood more in terms of mundane social gratifications than through any concern over the policy competition of politics. Nonetheless, persistent and varied participation is most heavily concentrated among the most sophisticated people. This fact is important, for much of what is perceived as "public reaction" to political events depends upon public visibility, and visibility depends largely upon forms of political participation beyond the vote itself. Anyone familiar with practical politics has encountered the concern of the local politician that ideas communicated in political campaigns be kept simple and concrete. He knows his audience and is constantly fighting ihe battle against the overestimation of sophistication to which the purveyor of political ideas inevitably falls prey. Yet, even the grass-roots audience that forms a reference point for the local politician is, we suspect, a highly self-selected one and quite sophisticated relative to the electorate as a whole. Since we have 1960 information on the number of political rallies attended by each of our respondents, we may simulate the "sophistication composition" of the typical political gathering. "Typical" is loosely used here, for real gatherings are various in character: A dinner for the party faithful at $15 a plate obviously attracts a different audience from1 the one that comes to the parade and street rally. Nonetheless, the contrast between the electorate and an hypothetical average rally is instructive (Table VI). People located in the three upper left-hand corner cells of the matrix; (6% of the electorate) form more than 15% of the composition of such rallies, and probably, in terms of further rally participation (vocal and otherwise), seem to form a still higher proportion. Yet on election day their vote (even with a HEi-'l i 1 TABLE VI — The Sophistication Composition of a "Typical" Political Rally, Compared to the Composition of the Total Electorate3 A RALLY THE ELECTORATE High Low High Low High 5% 5% 11% 11% 2% 2% 3 °/ 6% . 3% 2% 6 8 11 11 4 1 4 18 ! 9 5 0 5 9 0 * ■* 1 6 1 1 2 * 0 1 * * * * 3 1 2 3 Low * 2 7 1 0 * 1 ' If 1 11 • Less than half of 1%. a. Both five-by-five matrices are those employed in Tables HI, IV, and V, Aside from rounding error, the proportions entered in each matrix total 100%. The table should be read by observing differences between proportions in the same regions of the two tables. For example, the three least sophisticated cells in the lower right-hand corner constitute 21 % of the electorate and 1 % of a typical rally audience. THE NATURE OF BELIEF SYSTEMS IN MASS PUBLICS 227 100% turnout) is numerically outweighed by those votes mustered by people ^ in the single cell at the opposite corner of the table who do not attend at all. ii One of the most intriguing findings on the surface of the matrix is that strength of party loyalty falls to one of its weakest points in the upper left- I hand corner cell of the matrix. In other words, among the most highly sophisticated, those who consider themselves "independents" outnumber 1 those who consider themselves "strong" partisans, despite the fact that the most vigorous political activity, much of it partisan, is carried on by people falling in this cell. If one moves diagonally toward the center of the matrix, ■ this balance is immediately redressed and redressed very sharply, with strong partisans far outnumbering independents. In general, there is a slight tendency (the most sophisticated cell excepted) for strength of party loyalty to decline as one moves diagonally across the table, and the most "independent" cell fs that in the lower right-hand corner.20 This irregularity has two implications. First, we take it to be one small and special case of our earlier hypothesis that,_group_-objects.. (here, the party as group) are likely to have less centrality in the.belief system of the most sophisticated and.. thaj^he„cenj.rality„pf^grp.ups„as referents, increases- "Jqwex, down" in the sophistication ordering,,. We shall see more handsome evidence of the same phenomenon later. Second, we see in this reversal at least a partial explanation for the persistence of the old assumption that the "independent voter" is relatively informed and involved. The early cross-section studies by Lazarsfeld and his colleagues turned up evidence to reverse this equation, suggesting that the "independent voter" tends instead to be relatively uninformed and uninvolved. Other studies have added massively to this evidence. Indeed, in many situations, the evidence seems so strong that it is hard to imagine how any opposing perceptions could have developed. The perception is somewhat easier to understand, however, if one can assume that the discernment of the informed observer takes in only 5, 10, or 15% of the most sophisticated people in the public as constituting "the public." This "visible" or "operative" public is largely made up of people from the upper left-hand corner of our preceding tables. The illusion that such people are the full public is one that the democratic sample survey, for better or for worse, has destroyed. V. Constraints among Idea-Elements In our estimation, the use of such basic dimensions of judgment as the liberal-conservative continuum betokens a contextual grasp of politics that permits a wide range of more specific idea-elements to be organized into more tightly constrained wholes. We feel, furthermore, that there are many crucial consequences of such organization: With it, for example, new political events have more meaning, retention of political information from the past is far more adequate, and political behavior increasingly approximates that of sophisticated "rational" models, which assume relatively full information. It is often argued, however, that abstract dimensions like the liberal-conservative continuum are superficial if not meaningless indicators: All that they show is that poorly educated people are inarticulate apd have diffi- 228 PHILIP E. CONVERSE culty expressing verbally the more abstract lines along which their specific political beliefs are organized. To expect these people to be able to express what they know and feel, the critic goes on, is comparable to the fallacy of assuming That people can say in an accurate way why they behave as they do. When it comes down to specific attitudes and behaviors, the organization is there nonetheless, and it is this organization that matters, not the capacity for discourse in sophisticated language. If it were true that such organization does exist for most people, apart from their capacities to be articulate about it. we would agree out of hand that the question of articulation is quite trivial. As a cold empirical matter, however, this claim does not seem to be valid. Indeed, it is for this reason that we have cast the argument in terms of constraint, (ot constraint and organization are very nearly the same thing. Therefore when we hypothesize that constraint among political idea-elements begins to lose its range verv rapidly once we move from the most sophisticated few toward the "grass r©ots," we TABLE VII- Constraint between Specific Issue Beliefs for an Elite Sample and Section Sample, 1958» DOMESTIC FOREIGN a Cross- Congressional candidates 3 — .62 5 .59 .61 — .47 35 .26 .06 .17 .53 .50 .06 .35 .41 -.03 .47 .11 ^0 .23 .68 .55 .68 .34 _ .19 .59 , .25 — .32 f.18 — } .05 .45 .08 .34 — .12 .29 — .08 Employment Aid to education Federal housing F.E.P.C. Economic aid Military aid Isolationism Party preference Cross-Section Sample Employment Aid to education Federal housing F.E.P.C. Economic aid Soldiers abroadb Isolationism Party preference a. Entries are tau-gamma coefficients, a statistic proposed by Leo A. Goodman and William H. Kruskal in "Measures of Association for Cross Classifications," Journal of the American Statistical Association, 49 (Dec., 1954), No. 268, 749. The coefficient was chosen because of its sensitivity to constraint of the scalar as well as the correlational type. b. For this category, the cross-section sample was asked a question about keeping American road, rather than about military aid in general. j -.04 .06 -.06 .24 .10 -.22 .14 -.17 .02 J07 .13 .02 .20 .16 .18 -.04 _ .16 .33 -.07 — .21 .12 --.03 THE NATURE OF BELIEF SYSTEMS IN MASS PUBLICS 229 are contending that the organization of more specific attitudes into wide-ranging belief systems is absent as well. Table VII gives us an opportunity to see the differences in levels of constraint among beliefs on a range of specific issues in an elite population and in a mass population. The elite population happens to be candidates for the United States Congress in the off-year elections of 1958, and the cross-section sample represents the national electorate in the same year. The assortment of issues represented is simply a purposive sampling of some of the more salient political controversies at the time of the study, covering both domestic and foreign policy. The questions posed to the two samples were quite comparable, apart from adjustments necessary in view of the backgrounds of the two populations involved.21 For our purposes, however, the specific elite sampled and the specific beliefs tested Sre rather beside the point_^e_WDuld.expecUhe^am^gejieral_ contrast to appear if the. elite had been _a set of newspaper editors, political;, writers, or any other group that takes an interest in politics. Similarly, we would expect the same results from any other broad sampling of political issues or, for that matter, any sampling of beliefs from other domains: A set of questions on matters of religious controversy should show the same pattern between an elite population like the clergy and the church members who form their mass "public." What is generically important in comparing the two types of population is the difference in levels of constraint among belief-elements. Where constraint is concerned, the absolute value of the coefficients in Table VII (rather than their algebraic value) is the significant datum. The first thing th£ table conveys is the fact that, for both populations, there is some falling off of constraint between the domains of domestic and foreign policy, relative to the high level of constraint within each domain. This result is to be expected: Such lowered values signify boundaries between belief systems that are relatively independent. If we take averages of appropriate sets of coefficients entered in Table VII however, we see that the strongest j constraint within, a. domain, for the mass public is less than that between ' domestic, and foreign domains for the elite sample. Furthermore, for the public, in sharp contrast to the elite, party preference seems by and large to be set off in a belief system of its own, relatively unconnected to issue positions (Table VIII).22 TABLE VIII ■— Summary of Differences in Level of Constraint within and between Domains Public and Elite (based on Table VII) Average Coefficients Elite Mass Within domestic issues .53 .23 Between domestic and foreign .25 .11 Within foreign issues .37 .23 Between issues ana'party .39 .11 It should be remembered throughout, of course, that the mass sample of Tables VII and VIII does not exclude college-educated people, ideologues, 230 PHILIP E. CONVERSE or the politically sophisticated. These people, with their higher levels of constraint, are represented in appropriate numbers, and certainly contribute to such vestige of organization as the mass matrix evinces. But they are grossly outnumbered, as they are in the active electorate. The general point is that the matrix of correlations for the elite sample is of the sort that would be appropriate for factor analysts, the statistical technique designed to reduce a number of correlated variables to a more limited set of organizing dimensions. The matrix representing the mass public, however, despite its realistic complement of ideologues, is exactly the type that textbooks advise fJ"^' against using for factor analysis on the simple grounds that through inspection +,A . it is clear that there is virtually nothing in the way of organization to be discovered. Of course, it is the type of broad organizing dimension to be suggested by factor analysis of specific items that is usually presumed when observers discuss "ideological postures" of one sort or another. j Although the beliefs registered in Table VII are related to topics of controversy or political cleavage, McClosky has described comparable differences in levels of constraint among beliefs for an elite sample (delegates to national party conventions) and a cross-section sample when the items deal with propositions about democracy and freedom—topics on which fundamental consensus among Americans is presumed.2S Similarly, Prothro and Grigg, among others, have shown that, while there is widespread support for statements of culturally familiar principles of freedom, democracy, and tolerance in a cross-section sample, this support becomes rapidly obscured when questions turn to specific cases that elites would see as the most direct applications of these principles.-1 Tn our estimation, such findings are less a demonstration of cynical lip service than of the fact that, while both of two inconsistent opinions are honestly held, the individual lacks the contextual grasp to understand that the specific.case and the general principle belong in the same belief system: In the absence of such understanding, he maintains psychologically independent beliefs about both. This is another important instance of the decline in constraint among beliefs with declining information. While an assessment of relative constraint between the matrices rests only on comparisons of absolute values, the comparative algebraic values have some interest as well. This interest arises from the sophisticated observer's almost automatic assumption that whatever beliefs "go together" in the visible political world (as judged from the attitudes of elites and the more articulate spectators) must naturally go together in the same way among mass public. Table VII makes clear that this assumption is a very dangerous one, aside from the question of degree of constraint. For example, the politician who favors federal aid to education could be predicted to be more, rather than less, favorable to an internationalist posture in foreign affairs, for these two positions in the 1950s were generally associated with "liberalism" in American politics. As we see from Table VII, we would be accurate in this judgment considerably more often than chance alone would permit. On the other hand, were we to apply the same assumption of constraint to the American public in the same era, not only would we have been wrong, but we would actually have come closer to reality by assuming no connection at all. All the correlations in the elite sample except those that do not depart