THE NATURE OF BELIEF SYSTEMS IN MASS PUBLICS 231 .232 significantly from zero exhibit signs that anybody following politics in the newspapers during this period could have predicted without hesitation. That is, one need only have known that Democrats tended to favor expansion of government welfare activities and tended to be internationalists in foreign affairs, to have anticipated all the signs except one. This exception, the -.18 that links advocacy of military aid abroad with the Republican Party, would hold no surprises either, for the one kind of international involvement that Republicans came to accept in this period limited foreign aid to the military variety, a view that stood in opposition to "soft" liberal interests in international economic welfare. If these algebraic signs in the elite matrix are taken as the culturally defined "proper" signs—the sophisticated observer's assumption of what beliefs go with what other beliefs—then the algebraic differences between comparable entries in the two matrices provide an estimate of how ifiaccurate we would be in generalizing our elite-based assumptions about "natural" belief combinations to the mass public as a whole. A scanning of the two matrices with these differences in mind enhances our sense of high discrepancy between the two populations. To recapitulate, then, we have argued that the unfamiliarity of broader and more abstract ideological frames of reference among the less sophisticated is more than a problem in mere articulation. Parallel.lo ignorance and confusion over these ideological dimensions.among the less informed is a general decline in constraint among specific belief elements^ that such dimensions help to organize. It cannot therefore be claimed that the mass public shares ideological patterns of belief with relevant elites at a specific level any more than it shares the abstract conceptual frames of reference. Constraints and Overt Behavior There is still another counter-hypothesis that deserves examination. This view would grant that the political belief systems of the less well educated may be more fragmented and chaotic. It would maintain at the same time, however, that this fact is inconsequential in the determination of behavior. The presence, absence, or incoherence of these "intervening" psychological states is thus epiphenomenal: Social structure commits behavior to certain channels quite independent of specific cognitions and perceptions of the actors themselves.21 In other versions, researchable intervening mechanisms are suggested. The "opinion leader" model is one of them. If it is true that the mass of less knowledgeable people rely upon informal communication from a few more informed people for cues about desirable or appropriate behavior, then the lines of behavior choices followed in politics might indeed show strong sociostructural patterns, even though many uninformed actors have little of the opinion leaders' coherent and organized understanding of why one behavior is more appropriate than another. What these points of view have in common is the insistence that strong constraints can be expected to operate between sociostructural terms and conscious behavior choices quite apart from the presence or absence of appropriate intervening psychological "definitions of the situation." Figure 1 is addressed to such arguments. The graphs indicate the varying degrees of association between objective class position and partisan preference in the 1956 presidential election, as a function of differences in the PHILIP E. CONVERSE nature of political belief systems captured by our "levels of concepfualiza-P Hf objective locations in the^^^S.^S^ havioral consequences regardless of the presence or 30 ■ = 2 20- Key 1 Ideologues G Group benefit T Ncture of times N No issue content * Insufficient cases r '1 G T N (b) Women G TIN (c) Men Figure 1 G T N (a) Total sample 1. The Correlation of Occupation and Vote Preference withta Levels pf Conceptual ization. intervening organizations of conscious beliefs, then we would not expect any particular slope to the progression of bars within each graph. Asj Figure 1(a) shows for a sample of the adult electorate as a whole, howejver, die differences in intervening belief organization produce very marked and! orderly differences in the degree to which partisanship reflects sociostructural position. Of course, from one point of view, this observation seems only common sense, yet the doctrinaire position that the intervening psychological terms are unimportant or epiphenomenal continues to be argued with more vehemence than empirical evidence. Since it can be seen that a perfectly functioning opinion-leader model would also produce something approaching a rectangular distribution of bars in Figure 1, the slope depicted in Figure 1(a) can also be taken asi a commentary on the practical imperfections with which opinion leader processes operate in this domain. That is, the "ideologues" and "near-ideologues" represented by the first bar of each graph are opinion leaders par excellence: While they tend to be disproportionately well educated, they nevertheless include representatives from all broad social milieux. Empirically they differ sharply from the less sophisticated in their attention to new. political events and in the size of their store of information about past events. They get news firsthand and, presumably, form opinions directly from it. l3y their own report, they are much more likely than the less sophisticated ux attempt to persuade others to their own political opinions in informal communications. Finally, much social data leads us to assume that the bulk 'of these informal communications is addressed to others within their own social milieu. Since social-class questions are important for these opinion leaders and since their own partisan preferences are rather clearly geared to their own class, we would suppose that "opinion leading" should serve to diffuse this connection between status and behavior through less knowledgeable mem- THE NATURE OF BELIEF SYSTEMS IN MASS PUBLICS 233 bers of their milieu, whether or not the more complicated rationales were diffused. In other words, most of what goes on in the heads of the less informed of our respondents would indeed be irrelevant for study if the respondents could at least be counted upon to follow the lead of more informed people of their own milieu in their ultimate partisanship. And to the extent that they can be counted on to behave in this way, we should expect Figure 1 to show a rectangular distribution of bars. The departure from such a pattern is very substantial. Now there is one type of relationship in which there is overwhelming evidence for vigorous opinion-leading where politics is concerned in our society. It is the relationship within the family: The wife is very likely to follow her husband's opinions, however imperfectly she may have absorbed their justifications at a more complex level. We can do a fair job of splitting this relationship into its leader-follower components simply by subdividing our total sample by sex. As Figure 1(b) suggests, our expectation that the presence or absence of intervening belief systems is of reduced importance among sets of people who are predominantly opinion followers is well borne out by the relatively flat and disordered progression of bars among women. Correspondingly, of course, the same slope among men becomes steeper still in Figure 1(c).20 The fact that wives tend to double their husbands' votes is, from a broader "system" point of view, a relatively trivial one. If we are willing to consider the family as the basic voting unit, then Figure 1(c) suggests that diffusion of the sociostructurally "proper" behavior without diffusion of understanding of that behavior through simple opinion-leading processes is a very feeble mechanism indeed across the society as a whole, at least where political decisions of this sort are concerned.2' The organization of partisanship among those who give no evidence of intervening issue content shows no trace whatever of those residual effects that should be left by any systematic opinion-following (and that are visible among comparable women). Thus, while we are in no way questioning the existence of.some opinion-leading, it seems doubtful that it represents the dominant... effective -phenomenon™ sometimes supposed, a phenomenon that succeeds in lending shape to mass 1 politics despite the absence of more detailed individual comprehension of the political context.28 Much more broadly, we have become convinced that this class of finding— the declining degree of constraint between a term representing social structure and one representing an important political choice as one moves from the„jnoreL. to ihe..less. politicalJ^^ophistic^ied^n_tJifi_so.cLeiy.—is, a powerful and general one. It is powerful (for readers not accustomed to the statistics employed) in the simple sense that the variation in constraint a^a_ function of^ophiaic.atimelstrikinglJnkial^uppQit^Qii^uL, expectations. Up to this point, we have discussed two broad classes of findings. The first, as exemplified by Table VII and our more recent elaborations on it, suggests that groups as attitude_objects. (groups qua groups) have higher cent_rajity_jnjthe_ belief, sysierns_pf .the mass than of the elite. The second is exemplified by the many findings that the alignment of an individual's social-. group_ membership (like class or religious membership) and his political 4 r- jjehavior.is sharpest among the most politically involved and sophisticated --third of--a-mass-_sarnp!e~and-fades-Quuprogressiveiy as involvement and __sophistication decline. . In case these propositions do not seem to square perfectly with one another. Figure 2 provides a schematic view of the situation that may clarify the matter for the reader. Of course, the details of the figure (like the precise characters of the functions) are sheer fancy. But the gross contours ^eem empirically justified. The elite of Table VII would naturally be represented by a line along the top of Figure 2, which would be thin to the vanishing point. The "relative elite" of the mass sample, which defines "the public" as perceived by most impressionistic observers, might sweep in the top 2%, 5%, or 10% of the graph, as one chose. In the upper reaches of the group centrality graph, we have already seen glimmers of the inverse relationship between group centrality and sophistication in such diverse items as the falling-off of party loyalty at the very "top" of the mass sample or the lowered constraint for the Negro items in the elite sample. poli Amount of ical informa --High- 1 Figure 2. Political Information and the Centrality of Croups as Objects in Belief Systems. On the other hand, why is it that when we work downward from the tmore sophisticated third or'the~pöpulation,~the-centrairt"y of groups..begins!once again to diminish? We are already committed to the proposition that differences in information are crucial, but let us consider this point more fully. The findings that lead us to posit this decline come from a class of situations in which the actor himself must perceive some meaningful link between membership in a particular group and preference for a particular party or policy alternative. These situations are most typically those in which the link is not made explicit by the very nature of the situation (as we made it explicit in our battery of Negro questions above). In these cases, the indi- THE NATURE OF BELIEF SYSTEMS IN MASS PUBLICS I 237 vidua! must be endowed with some cognitions of the group as an entity and with some interstitial "linking" information indicating why a given party or policy is relevant to the group. Neither of these forms of information can be taken for granted, and our key proposition is that, as the_general bulk.ot political information declines, the probability increases that some key pieces^ of information relevant to this group:politics .equation ^will not.show up. _*. The first item—the individual's cognition that a group exists—is a very simple one and may not even seem plausible to question. For certain groups at certain times and places, however, the possibility that such a cognition is absent must be recognized. All groups, including those that become important politically, vary in their visibility. Groups delimited by physical characteristics "in the skin" (racial groups) are highly visible, if specimens are present for inspection or if the individual has been informed in some rather vivid way of -their existence. Similarly, groups that have buildings, meetings, and officers (church, congregation, and clergy for example) are more visible than groups, like social classes, that dp not, although the salience of any "official" group qua group may vary widely according to the individual's contact with its formal manifestations. Some groups—even among those to which an individual can be said to "belong"—are much less visible. Two important examples are the social class and the nation. Where social class is concerned, virtually all members of a population are likely to have absorbed the fact that some people have more means or status than others, and most presumably experience some satisfaction or envy on this score from time to time. Such perceptions may, however, remain at the same level as reactions to the simple fact of life that some people are born handsome and others homely; or, as Marx knew, they may proceed to cognitions of some more "real" and bounded groups. The difference is important. Much the same kind of observation may be made of the nation as group object. On the basis of our analysis, it might be deduced that nationalist ideologies stand a much better chance of penetrating a mass population than would, for example, the single-tax ideology of the physiocrats and Henry George, for nationalist ideologies hinge upon a simple group object in a way that single-tax notions do not. This kind of deduction is perfectly warranted, particularly if one has in mind those Western nations with systems of primary education devoted to carving the shape of; a nation in young minds as a "real" entity. But Znaniecki has observed, for example, that the vast majority of peasants in nineteenth-century Tsarist Russia was "utterly unconscious that they were supposed to belong to a Russian society united by a common culture." Again he reports that a 1934-1935 study in the Pripet marshes showed that nearly half of those inhabitants who were ethnically White Ruthenian had no idea that such a nationality existed and regarded themselves as belonging at most to local communities.*0 The nation as a bounded, integral group object is difficult to experience in_ any direct -way, and its psychological existence for..the individual depends, upon the social transmission of certain kinds of information. What is deceptive here, as elsewhererislhat decades or even centuries after the literati have come to take a nation concept for granted, there may be substantial proportions of the member population who have never heard of such a thing.91 238 PHILIP E. CONVERSE r While cognitions of certain groups are not always present., the. much more typical .case-is-one.in-which, the interstitial.or contextual information giving .the group a clear political, relevance is lacking. For example, a substantial proportion of voters in the United States is unable to predict that any particular party preference will emerge in the votes of different class groupings, and this inability is particularly noticeable among the least involved citizens, whose partisan behavior is itself essentially random with respect to social class.32 One important caveat must be offered on the generalization represented in Figure 2. From a number of points we have made, it should be clear that the figure is intended to represent an actuarial proposition and nothing more. That is, it has merit for most situations, given the typical state of distribution of political information in societies as we find them "in nature." In certain situations, however, the cues presented to citizens concerning links between group and party or policy are so gross that they penetrate rapidly even to the less informed. In such cases, the form representing group centrality in Figure 2 would taper off much less rapidly with declining over-all information in the lower strata of the population. For example, the linking information that made religion particularly relevant in the 1960 election'was extremely simple, of the ."what goes with what" variety. It was expressible in five words: "The Democratic candidate is Catholic." Studies have shown that, once Kennedy was nominated, this additional item of information was diffused through almost the entire popu-lation„with a speed that is rare and that, we.suspect, would,be impossible for - more complex-_contextual_information. The linking information that made social class unusually relevant after World War II was, however, precisely this vague, contextual type.33 It can be readily demonstrated with our data that the impact of the religious link in 1960 registered to some degree in the behavior of even the least sophisticated Protestants and Catholics, while the incremental impact of social-class cues in the earlier period had not registered at these lower levels. , The precise-form of the centrality function in Figure 2 depends heavily I therefore upon the character of the linking information at issue in the special lease. .Furthermore,, if .we wished to "tamper," it would not be difficult to / [supply a poorly informed person with a very tiny increment of linking informa- uon.too small to change his over-all amount of political ..information visibly iyet large enough to-increase considerably-the -centrality '.of-a .^specific group \in.a.specific situation. However this may be, Figure 2 is valid in an actuarial sense, for jn "natural" populations the probability that any given individual possesses such linking information declines as over-all information becomes less. VII. The Stability of Belief Elements over Time All of our data up to this point have used correlations calculated on aggregates as evidence of greater or lesser constraint among elements in belief systems. While we believe these correlations to be informative indicators, they do depend for their form upon cumulations among individuals and there- THE NATURE OF RELIEF SYSTEMS IN MASS PUBLICS 239 fore can never be seen as commenting incisively upon the belief structures of individuals. It might then be argued that we are mistaken in saying that constraint among comparable "distant" belief elements declines generally as we move!' from the more to the less politically sophisticated. Instead, the configuration;: of political beliefs held by individuals simply becomes increasingly idiosyn-;; cratic as we move to less sophisticated people. While an equally broad range, of belief elements might function as an interdependent whole for an un- J sophisticated person, we would find little aggregative patterning of belief] combinations in populations of unsophisticated people, for they would be out j of the stream of cultural information about "what goes with what" and would therefore put belief elements together in a great variety of ways. For the types of belief that interest us here, this conclusion in itself would be significant. "We believe however, that we have evidence that permits us to reject it rather categorically, in favor of our original formulation. A fair test of this counterhypothesis would seem to lie in the measurement of the same belief elements for the same individuals over time. For if we are, indeed. inyolve.d_here.Jn_ idiosyncrati.c_ratterns of_ beJieL ,each^ meaningful to the individual in hi.gj_yn way.-then we could expect that-indiVidualjre.<;pnnse_.r to the same set of itemsjat .different, points in time.should. show_SQme.funda_, mental stability. cTheV do ndtT ' ' ~ A longitudinal study of the American electorate over a four-year period has permitted us to ask the same questions of the same people a number of times, usually separated by close to two-year intervals. Analysis of the stability of responses to the "basic" policy questions of the type presented in Table VII yields remarkable results. Faced with the typical item of this kind, only about thirteen people out of twenty manage to locate themselves even on the same side of the controversy in successive interrogations, when ten out of twenty could have done so by chance alone. While we have no comparable longitudinal data for an elite sample, the degree of fit between answers to our issue items and congressional roll-calls is strong enough to suggest that time correlations for individual congressmen in roll-call choice on comparable bills would provide a fair estimate of the stability of an elite population in beliefs of this sort. It is probably no exaggeration to deduce that, in sharp contrast to a mass sample, eighteen out of twenty congressmen would be likely to take the same positions on the same attitude items after a two-year interval. In short, then, we feel very confident that elit.e-mass_d[fferenj;e^_in_ levels of constraint among beliefs are mirrored ii elite-mass ^differences. in-thctemporal -stability ..o£J_elief elements. for indi viduals, - t We observed much earlier that the centrality of a specific belief in a larger belief system and the relative stability of that belief over time should be highly related. From our other propositions about the role of groups as central objects in the belief systems of the mass public, we can therefore arrive at two further predictions. The first is simply that pure affect toward visible population groupings should be highly stable over time, even in a mass public, much more so in fact than beliefs on policy matters that more or less explicitly bear on the fortunes of these groupings. Second, policy items that do bear more rather than less explicitly upon their fortunes 240 PHILIP E. CONVERSE should show less stability than affect towards the group qua group but more than those items for which contextual information is required. Figure 3 gives strong confirmation of these hypotheses.34 First, the only question applied longitudinally that touches on pure affect toward a visible population grouping is the one about party loyalties or identifications. As the figure indicates, the stability of these group feelings for individuals over time (measured by the correlation between individual positions in two successive readings) registers in a completely different range from that .80 .70 — .60 — .50 — .40 — .30 .20 Party identification School desegregation F.E.P.C. Guaranteed employment Isolationism Federal aid to education Foreign economic aid Foreign military aid Federal housing Figure 3. Temporal stability of Different Belief Elements for Individuals, 1958-60». a. The measure of stability is a rank-order correlation For example, in Figure 4 we discover, in comparing pur indicators of the degree of instability associated with any particular belief as they register between t2 and t3 with the same figures for t, and i2, that estimates are essentially the same. This result is an important one, for it assures us that within a medium time range (four years), differences among issues in degree of response stability are highly reliable. Far more fascinating, however, is another property that emerges. Quite generally, we can predict U issue positions of individuals fully as well from a knowledge of their t, positions alone as we can from a knowledge of their t2 positions alone. In other words, the turnover correlations between, different time points for these issues tend to fit the scheme shown in Figure <4. Figure 4. Pattern of Turnover Correlations between Different Time Points. It can be shown that there is no single meaningful process of change shared by all respondents that would generate this configuration of data.37 In fact, even if we assume that there is a relatively limited number of change processes present in the population, we find that only two such models could generate these observations. The first of these models posits that some of the respondents managed in a deliberate way to locate themselves from one measurement to another on the opposite side off an issue from the one they had selected at the preceding measurement. It wf>uld have to be assumed that a person who chose a leftish alternative on a certain issue in the first measure would be motivated to remember to seek out the richtish alternative two years later, the leftish again two years after that, ahd so on. Naturally, an assumption that this behavior characterizes one member of the population is sufficiently nonsensical for us to reject it out of hand. Once this possibility is set aside, however, there is only one other model involving a mixture of two types of process of change that fits the. observed data. This model is somewhat surprising but not totally implausible. It posits a very sharp dichotomy within the population according to processes of change that are polar opposites. There is first a "hard core" of opinion on a given issue, which is well crystallized and perfectly stable over time. _JFor the remainder of the population, response sequences overjime are statistically random. The model does not specify what proportions of the population fall into these two categories: This matter is empirically independent, and it is clear that the size of the turnover correlations between any two points in time is a simple function of these relative proportions.38 THE NATURE OF BELIEF SYSTEMS IN MASS PUBLICS 243 In view of our earlier remarks, this "black and white" model is credible in: its assumption that a mass public contains significant proportions of people who, for lack of information about a particular dimension of controversy," offer meaningless opinions that vary randomly in direction during repeated trials over time. We may be uncomfortable, however, at using a model that suggests such a rigid and polar division of the population, leaving no room for the "gray" area of meaningful change of opinion or "conversion." In this respect, while the randomness posited by the model is a discouraging property substantively, it is an empowering property mathematically, for aggregate randomness has certain predictable consequences For example, if the model were to fit the data, we would know that some people who are responding to the items as though flipping a coin could, by chance alone, supply the same responses at three trials in a row and would therefore have response paths* indistinguishable from those of perfectly stable respondents but for entirely different reasons. While we could not enter the stable group and "tag" such random people, we would at least have an excellent estimate of the number of them that lingers after three trials to pollute the set of genuinely stable respondents. Most important, however, is the fact that the very character of the model makes it possible to test quite rigorously the goodness of fit of the data to the model. For our initial test, we singled out the issue that seemed on a priori grounds most likely to fit the model. It was the most "ideological" item in the battery yet the one that had shown the highest degree of temporal instability: the question about the respective roles of private enterprise and government in areas like housing and electrical power. It is important to understand in detail the grounds on which this item was chosen. The model requires that some people have unswerving beliefs on the subject and that other people have no beliefs at all. It also requires that there be no middle ground, no set of people whose beliefs on the subject are in the process of evolution. For these requirements, the "government vs. private enterprise issue," more than any of the others, seemed "sheltered" from meaningful change. This isolation was true in two senses. First, it involved a very basic area of political controversy, and people understanding the stakes involved in a more ideological way would not be readily dissuaded from their respective positions. Secondly, while events like the crisis at Little Rock and exposes of waste in foreign aid were occurring in this period to touch off meaningful evolutions of opinion, little was occurring that might intuitively be expected to shake true beliefs on one side or the other. At the same time, of course, the relationships to be judged in the item were sufficiently remote and abstract from the experience of most people to make many meaningless responses likely. The fit between the data collected at three time points on this .issue and our black and white model was virtually perfect.30 This result lends remarkable assurance that our understanding of the "change" processes affecting the issue responses was accurate: The only change that occurred was random change. We naturally went on to apply this test of fit to the other issues, for which the black and white model had seemed less credible. And indeed, these other items showed a somewhat poorer fit with the model. None strays a great distance, but it is unlikely that any would survive signifi- 244 PHILIP E. CONVERSE cant tests of goodness of fit.40 What, then, can we say about the character of beliefs touched by these other items? Strictly speaking, as soon as we encounter data that depart in any significant measure from the black and white model, we lose all mathematical anchors, in the sense that, unless we insert a variety of restrictive assumptions, the number of models (even simple ones) that could logically account for the data becomes very large indeed. Despite this loss of power, the existence of one issue that does fit the black and white model perfectly, provides at least an intuitive argument that those that depart from it in modest degrees do not require a totally different class of model. In other words, we come to suppose that these other items depart from the model only because of the presence of a "third force" of people, who are undergoing meaningful conversion from one genuine opinion at u to an opposing but equally genuine opinion at t2. This "third force" is small, and the dominant phenomenon remains the two segments of the population, within one of which opihions are random and within the other of which opinions have perfect stability. Nevertheless, the presence of any third force suffices to disrupt the fit between the data and the black and white model, and the degree of departure is a function of the size of the third force. It should be reiterated that this view cannot be subjected to any unequivocal mathematical test but rather depends for its reasonableness upon the excellence of the fit shown by one issue and the approaches to fit shown by the others. It seems likely that responses to other issues of a similar type are generated in similar fashion. And while it is true that competing attitude models could be applied to describe most of these data, their assumptions simply lose all plausible ring when confronted with the results from the private-enterprise issue.11 Or, in another vein, the discouragingly large turnover of opinion on these issues in the total mass public might be taken as evidence that the questions were poorly written and thus extremely unreliable—that the main lesson is that they should be rewritten. Yet the issues posed are those posed by political controversy, and citizens' difficulties in responding to them in meaningful fashion seem to proffer important insights into their understanding of the same political debates in real life. More crucial still, what does it mean to say that an instrument is perfectly reliable vis-d-vis one class of people and totally unreliable vis-a-vis another, which is the proper description of the black and white model? The property of reliability is certainly not inherent solely in the instrument of measurement, contrary to what is commonly supposed. As another check on the question of reliability, we decided to examine the temporal stability of belief elements of this sort among very limited sets of people whose broader interviews gave us independent reasons to believe they had particular interest in narrower belief areas (like the Negro question). We took advantage once again of interviews with a good deal of open-ended material, sifting through this voluntary commentary to find people who had shown "self-starting" concern about particular controversies. Then we went back to the relevant structured issue questions to examine the stability of these belief elements for these people over time. The turnover correlations for these limited subpopulations did increase substantially, be- THE NATURE OF BELIEF SYSTEMS IN MASS PUBLICS , 245 ginning to approach the levels of stability shown for party identification' (see Figure 3). Once again, the. evidence seemed.clear.,.that...extreinc ilk. stability.is associated with, absence of information^pLatJeast..pf_interest^ and that item- reliability-is -adequate-for-people-with~ pre-existing concern:; about any given matter.12 The substantive conclusion imposed by these technical maneuvers is simply that large portions of an electorate do not have meaningful beliefs, even on] issues that have formed the basis for intense political controversy among* elites for substantial periods of time. If this conclusion seems self-evident, it is worth reflecting on the constancy with which it is ignored and on the fact that virtually none of the common modes of dealing empirically with ! public beliefs attempts to take it into account. Instead, it is assumed that a location must be found for all members of a population on all dimensions of controversy that are measured. Our data argue that,_where any_sJngle_dimeii:__ sion is concerned ,_yery substantial portionsof the public simply do not belong on the dimension at all. They should be set aside as not forming any"part .Qf_lhjit_particular issue public. And since it is only among "members" of any given issue public that the political effects of a controversy are felt (where such "effects" include activated public opinion expressed in the writing of letters to the editor, the changing of votes, and the like), we come a step closer to reality when we recognize the fragmentation of the mass public into a plethora of narrower issue publics. ' VIII. Issue Publics Our longitudinal data on eight specific political issues permit us to sketch crudely the boundaries of a sampling of eight issue publics.43 While details of specific publics are not appropriate here, the general picture that emerges provides some final confirming glimpses into the character of political belief systems in a mass public. First, of course, these publics vary in size, although none embraces any clear majority of the electorate. As would be expected, relative size is almost perfectly correlated with the ranking of issue stability (Figure 3). and the smallest issue public (that associated with the "ideological" private-enterprise issue) includes less than 20% of the electorate. Since all members of the same population fall either within or outside eight different issue publics, a second analytic question involves the struc- • ture that would be revealed were we to map several issue publics at once. What proportions of the electorate would fall at the intersection of two, three, or even more issue publics? One logically possible outcome of such mapping would be a set of concentric rings, suggesting that these issue concerns are cumulative in Gunman's sense. That is, the picture might show that, if a_perspn„fell within,the. bounds .of one,fairly narrow .issue public, embracing, only 20% of the population, then he would be j^riyjcerUun_to_falljvithin some_.£mer._.rela^djasjie^^ J __jThe ^alilx~doe§„nat_appTflach_suc^ neatness,, however. Memberships and overlapping memberships in issue publics are quite dispersed phenomena, although distribution is not entirely random. It can be shown, for example, that the number of respondents who warrant inclusion in all'eight of the |j46 PHILIP E. CONVERSE issue publics exceeds chance expectation by a factor greater than five. Exactly the same is true for the number of people who fall in none of the eight issue publics. Furthermore, the proportions of people who lie at the intersections of two or more issue publics tend to show increments above the chance level that, while much smaller, are nevertheless relatively large where the joint content of the issues would lead one to expect greater overlap- At any rate, the departure from a Guttman cumulative structure is extreme, and the simple conclusion seems to be that different controversies. excite different people to the point of real opinion formation. One man takes an interest in policies bearing on the Negro and is relatively indifferent to or ignorant about controversies in other areas. His neighbor may have few crystallized opinions on the race issue, but he may find the subject of foreign aid very important. Such sharp divisions of interest are part of what the term "issue public" is intended to convey. Since one of our early comparisons in this paper had to do with the general levels of constraint among an elite and a mass public on a sampling of belief elements, it is interesting to ask what degree of constraint can be found among the belief elements of those who fall at the intersection of any pair of issue publics. In such a case, we have some assurance that both sets of beliefs are important to the actor, and it is not therefore surprising that these correlations tend to be much stronger. A matrix of intercorrela-tions parallel to those of Table VII for people at these respective intersections looks more like the elite matrix than like the mass matrix. Of course, this "intersection" matrix is a spurious one, representing no particular population: Very few people contribute to all of the intercorrelations, a substantial number contribute to none, and the set contributing to each cell is quite variable in composition. Nevertheless, the fact remains that removal from analysis of individuals who, through indifference or ignorance, liej outside the issue publics in question serves to close much of the gap in constraint levels between mass and elite publics. ! IX. Summary 'Our discussion of issue publics has brought us full circle, for there is an. obvious relationship among the divisions of the common citizenry ipto relatively narrow and fragmented issue publics, the feeble levels of constraint registered.among specific belief elements of any range, and the absence of ; recognitiQn._Q.r understanding, of overarching ideological frames of reference ythat served as our point of departure. For the truly involved citizen, the development of political sophistication means the absorption of contextual information that makes clear to him the connections of the policy! area of his initial interest with policy differences in other areas; and' that these broader configurationsof policy, positions are describable quite economically in Jfie_ basic_a^straclions oL.ideology. Most members of the mass public, however, fail to proceed so far. Certain rather concrete issues may capture" the1r~respecttve~individual attentions and lead to some politically relevant opinion formation. This engagement of attention remains narrow however: Other issue concerns that any sophisticated observer would see as "ideologically" related to the initial concern tend not to be thus associated in THE NATURE OF BELIEF SYSTEMS IN MASS PUBLICS 247 any breadth or number. The common citizen fails to develop more global points of view about politics. A realistic picture of political belief systems in the mass public, then, is not one that omits issues and policy demands completely nor one that presumes widespread ideological coherence; it is \ rather one that captures with some fidelity the fragmentation, narrowness,^ and diversity of these demands. Such a description is not particularly economical, and the investigator is confronted by the fact that, in coping with a poorly constrained system, he^ must choose between parsimony and explanatory power. This dilemma confronts him only in the degree that he insists upon dealing with the issue or ideological base of mass politics. That is, the very diffusion of this issue base at the mass level means that many of the threads cancel themselves out and can be ignored at one level of description. With good information on basic party loyalties in a population, with knowledge of sudden disruptions of economic expectations, and with freedom to treat other short-term perturbations in mass political behavior in terms of such inelegant factors as candidate popularity, there is no reason to feel that mass political phenomena are difficult to understand or predict in relatively economical terms. But such accounts do not probe to the level that supplies for many the fundamental "why" of politics—its issue or ideological base. If we insist on treating this base and choose economy over explanatory power, then we are likely to select one or two ideological threads to follow, with recognition that the consequences of substantial numbers of other threads must be ignored. If the limited threads are well chosen, this strategy has a number of strengths, and a "good" choice of threads is likely to involve visible and competing population groupings,"T6TTeasonT"sl(etched above. This latter strategy is essentially that employed by Lipset in tracing the imprint of social class upon mass political behavior across tjime and nationality in Political Man. His choice of threads is good, in part because of the ubiquity of social-class differences historically and cross-nationally and in I part because, among issue threads, social class is one of the more reliably : prominent. Despite the great diversity of issue concerns in the American public in the 1950s, if one were required to pick the single thread of ideologi- 1 cal relevance most visible and persistent, it undoubtedly would be related to social class. I / |" - '- < ' --- On the other hand, there is a major sacrifice of explanatory power here. For example, when we argue that social-class concerns represent the most prominent, unitary "issue". Jiircad jn_niass._American...politics . in the past _ decade,..the-scar-e_af-OLLr...statemer^ the diversity and number of such threads, it need only mean (as is probably the case) that such concerns have made some greater or lesser contribution to the significant political behaviors—for the mass, largely in voting—of 20 to 40% of the American population in this period. This contribution is enough, of course, to leave a clear imprint on mass political phenomena,_ "although it does not constitute even substantial explanation.1' Furthermore, it may well be that, in pluralist societies with other highly visible group cleavages, these cleavages may often have greater penetration into mass publics than do class differences, as far as consequences for political behavior are concerned. Religious pluralism is a case in point. While 248 PHILIP E. CONVERSE class differences mark every society, not all current democracies 'contain fundamental religious differences. Where such differences exist and can in some measure be separated from social class differences- the Netherlands, Austria, and the United States are good examples—there is fair reason to believe that they are fully as important, if not more important, in .shaping mass political behavior than are class differences. Even in current France, one can predict with greater accuracy whether a citizen will be a partisan of the "left" or of the "right" by knowing his position on the "clerical question" than by knowing his position on the more central class issues typically associated with the left-right distinction. And this accuracy is possible despite several decades during which French elites have focused primary attention on other more gripping controversies and have frequently attempted to deflate the clerical question as a "phony" issue.41 Whatever problems are posed for description by the diffuseness of the issue base of mass politics, the most important insights are to be gained from the fact that ideological constraints in belief systems decline with decreasing political information, which is to say that they are present among elites at the "top" of political systems^ or subsystems and disappear rather rapidly as one moves ."downward" into their mass clienteles. We see the importance of this fact in a number of standard phenomena of both routine and crisis politic^." 3 . Perhaps the simplest and most obvious consequences are those that depend on the fact that reduced constraint with reduced information means in turn that ideologically ..constrained belief systems are necessarily more , common in upper than in lower social strata. This fact in turn means that ', upper social strata across history have much, more predictably supported : conservative or rightist parties and movements than lower strata have sup-• ported leftist parties and movements. 1 These facts have further bearing on a number of asymmetries infpolitical strategy, which typically arise between elites of rightist and leftist parties. These elites operate under rather standard ideological assumptions, and therefore recognize their "natural" clienteles in the upper and lower Jstrata of the society respectively. The cultural definitions that separate upper and lower in most if not all modern societies are such that the lower clientele numerically outweighs the upper./ The net result of these circumstances is ^jhat the elites of leftist paffies~enjoy a "natural" numerical superiority, yet /they are cursed with a clientele that is less dependable or solidary in its I support. The rightist elite has a natural clientele that is more limited but ymore dependable. - ^Asymmetrical elite_strategies therefore emerge. They are best summed up perhapsTn terms"oran increasingly overt stress on group loyalty and cohesion. _j2££ji£-as.one moves.fjiom-xighUtoJefLacross-party. spectra in most political. *L_systems,__This difference has a great number of concrete manifestations. I . For example, where political institutions encourage multiparty development, 7 there is likely to be less party fragmentation on the left than on the right. Where political institutions permit interparty differences in the stririgency of party discipline at the legislative level, it is common to find a rather steady progression in strength of discipline exacted as one moves from right to left. I At an electoral level, rightist candidates are more likely to run as individual mm:-? ■ { THE NATURE OF BELIEF SYSTEMS IN MASS PUBLICS 249 notables, dissociating themselves from party per se or claiming positions "above the parties" and priding themselves on the independence of their consciences from party dictation. Entirely parallel asymmetries arise in the relations between party elites and elites of organized interest groups based "outside" the political order as it is narrowly conceived. These relations tend to be more overtly close as | one moves from the right to the left. Trade unions have with some frequency created or coalesced with leftist parties, and, where such coalition-has-not-occurred, trade unions (and particularly those with the less politically sophisticated memberships) publicize political endorsements that link them rather unequivocally with specific leftist parlies. Associations of professional and business people, to the degree that they perform public political activity at all, tend toward non-partisan exhortations to "work for the party of your choice" and in other ways maintain or are kept at a "proper" distance from rightist parties so far as self-publicized connections are concerned. All these differences flow from the simple fact that, for leftist parties, the ^transmission,, of gross, simple, group-oriented cues is a functionaljmperative. For rightist! parties, there is much to lose and nothing to gain in such publicity, for the basic clientele can be counted on for fair support without blatant cues, and the tactical needs are to avoid the alienation of potentially large-scale "haphazard" support from the lower-status clientele. These simple social biases in the presence of ideological constraints in belief systems thus register to some degree in the calculations of practical political elites. Fully as interesting, however, are the miscalculations that arise when the low incidence of these constraints in the middle and lower reaches of mass publics is forgotten. While this forgetting is more common among academic commentators than among practical politicians, it is sometimes hard to avoid—particularly where an elite with a distinctive ideology captures a broad surge of mass support. Here it is difficult to keep in mind that the true motivations and comprehensions of the supporters may have little or nothing to do with the distinctive beliefs of the endorsed elite. Yet we believe that such hiatuses or discontinuities are common and become more certain in the degree that (1) the distinctive elements of the elite ideologies are bound up in abstractions or referents remote from the immediate experience of the clientele; (2) and that the clientele, for whatever.reason, is recruited from the less informed strata of a population. We shall close by applying these propositions to historical cases. Abolition and the Rise of the Republican Party Historians have devoted a great deal of prose to the rise of abolitionist ferment in the North after 1820. Popular sentiment against slavery seems to have gathered momentum in the relatively unbroken line that is so typical of successful reform movements, from the persistent agitations of Lundy and William Lloyd Garrison through the formation of antislavery societies in the 1830s, the development of the underground railroad, the birth of the Republican Party in the name of abolition, and its final electoral triumph in a popular majority for Lincoln outside the South in 1860. A number of figures are commonly cited to express the deep penetration of the ferment into the consciousness of the general public, including the membership of 200,000 250 PHILIP E. CONVERSE attracted by the American Anti-Slavery Society in the seven short years after 1833 and the truly remarkable sales of Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852 andj after. We obviously do not challenge the mountains of evidence concerning the high pitch of this controversy. We assume from the outset that this ferment among the elites and near-elites was in point of fact most noteworthy and has been accurately described. If we take the figures at face value, for example, we can compute that the Anti-Slavery Society's membership amounted jto between 3 and 4% of the adult population outside of the South at that time.44 Against what we have considered to be the commonly "visible" part of the political public (5 to 15% of the total adult public!, this figure does indeed represent a vigorous development of antislave sentiment. What interests us instead is the gap between the figure of 4% indicative of a sturdy ideological movement, and the 46% of the nonsouthern popular presidential vot,e won by the Republican Party two years after its conception in Wisconsin and birth in Michigan under the pure banner of abolition. The question is, Essentially what part did beliefs in abolition play in attracting the votes of the mass base that made the Republican Party a political success? ■ The question seems particularly worth asking, for among events or causes that have commonly been assumed to have had some substantial resonance among the mass public in American history, few would strike us fcs less plausible than abolition. Panics, the promise of free land in the Wesn, railroad charges for transportation of farm produce, and competition by' immigrants for urban jobs could all be expected to have had some immediate impact on at least limited portions of the mass public. Similarly, the; threat of abolition would have had some concrete and day-to-day meaning for many citizens in the South. But it is hard to imagine that the ordinary non-southerner in 1855 would have had reason to be concerned ;ibout the plight of his "black brother" in a land several days' journey away—certairjly not reason sufficient to make any visible contribution to his political responses. Indeed, we are tempted to the heresy that there were very substantial portions of the nonsouthern population in that period who were only dimly aware that slavery or a controversy about it existed. If this latter statement seems dubious in the light of the torrents of literature poured out on the subject in the 1850s, the reader might reflect upon the feeble impact registered in the mass public by "the communist hysteria" of the McCarthy era in the early 1950s. At an elite level, the controversy was bitter and all-pervasive for a considerable period of time. Yet, during the nationally televised hearings that climaxed the affair, Stouffer found that 30% of a cross-section public could not think of any senator or congressman investigating internal communism, and the low salience of the whole controversy for most of the public was clearly demonstrated in other ways as weal.4' In the 1952 presidential campaign, the Republican charges against the I Democratic Party were summed up in the handy slogan "Corruption.} Korea and Communism." Our materials drawn at the time from a mass electorate showed a strong spontaneous response to the issues of corruption and Korea (although there was little understanding of the "Great Debate" that was in full swing over how the Korean conflict should be terminated) but almost no response at all to the third item, even though it referred to a controversy that, like abolition in the 1850s, has tended to remain im elite THE NATURE OF BELIEF SYSTEMS IN MASS PUBLICS 251 minds as the principal struggle of its period.18 And evidence of this lack of public recognition or resonance emerges despite the existence of a population that relative to that of 1850, was highly literate, leisured, and exposed to mass media of a speed, breadth, and penetration that simply had no counterpart in an earlier day." The controversy over internal communism provides a classic example of a mortal struggle among elites that passed almost unwitnessed by an astonishing portion of the mass public. Quite clearly, there is no necessary connection between the noise, acrimony, or duration of an elite debate and the mass penetration of the controversy; however automatically the equation is made. A better guide to penetration seems to be the character of the issue itself. A student recently decided to analyze the contents of caches of letters from the 1850s and 1860s, which had been preserved by old families in the various attics*of a small Ohio community. He was interested in tracing the development of abolitionist sentiment, and Ohio had been the first state to give the new Republican Party a mass base in the election of 1854. The problem was that no references to abolition were ever found in any of the letters, despite the fact that their writers necessarily represented the "upper" stratum of the community, the stratum that, by all odds, would be most likely to have some awareness of the controversy. In letters written on the eve of the Civil War, there were increasing "ideological" references to the dis-1 ruption of the Union. Once political events had passed to the dramatic point at which the South was clearly in treasonable rebellion against the Union, the mass penetration of the controversy in the North is not difficult to understand. But it is likely that this stage was reached at a mass level much later than is customarily assumed. And for the preceding period, the Ohio letters betrayed no concern for abolition.80 There is, furthermore, a major leap from some awareness that a controversy is in the air to opinion formation of a strength sufficient to register in an individual's own political behavior. Once again, modern data are instructive. Although civil rights and the race question have been primary controversies in the past five years and although a very large majority of the public was aware of the struggles at Little Rock and the University of; Mississippi, opinion formation on the subject among a cross-section of nonsouthern whites was far from intense. While everybody responds to opinion items on the matter, the true issue publics are made up very disproportionately of Negroes and southerners. A sprinkling: of nonsouthern whites shows some genuine interest in the issue, and the bulk of mem is positively disposed toward the Negro. But a measure of the salience of the : Negro question as a political problem stringent enough to register two-thirds of nonsouthern Negroes as intensely concerned leaves scarcely one non-. southern white out of ten qualifying at the same level, ljt should be remembered that this indifference is evident at a time when the Negro has become an important problem in urban areas outside the South, a situation that did not exist in 1850 or 1860. Most northern whites with intense positive or negative concern also live in areas where Negroes live or are inordinately interested in politics. In the hinterland, opinion :is superficial or indifferent. If the population of the hinterland that gave initial mass impetus to the ■pfe 252 philtp e Converse Hp i Republican Party had indeed felt some deep humanitarian concernj about the plight of the Negro in the South, then we would be forced to conclude that empathy in human nature has suffered an astonishing decline in the past century. In fact, however, there are enough anomalies in the voting records of the period to leave room for fair doubt about the nature of the Republican mass base in its first three years. Fringe votes for the earlier abolitionist parties (the Liberty and Free Soil Parties) were never strong injthe urban centers—Boston and New York—which were generating much; of! the intellectual ferment about abolition, although they were concentrated in smaller towns in Massachusetts and New York outside these centers and probably reflect the lines of genuine if thinly sprinkled abolitionist feeling. When, however, the Whig Party no longer presented itself as an alternative to the Democrats and when broad-gauged mass support had to turn either to the Republicans or to the anti-Catholicism of the "Know-Nothing" s American Party, the patterns were somewhat different. In 1856 the largest northeastern centers (excluding all but the potentially abolitionist North11), where intellectuals had pursued abolition most doggedly and where Catholic immigrants ! were accumulating, gave the Know-Nothings their clearest mass support and the Republicans their weakest harvest of former Whig or Free-Soil votes. The capacity to move these votes into the Republican column was greater in those surrounding areas that had shown the strongest traces of support for the earlier abolition parties, although in many of these areas the Know-Nothings cut into the vote as well. The least blemished successes of the new Republican party lay in the deeper hinterland, which had given the feeblest support to abolition in preceding elections.52 While any evidence pertaining to the thoughts and motivations of the mass of citizens who did not make public speeches or leave written records must /be circumstantial, it is worth suggesting that there was probably an impor-: / tant discontinuity between the intransigent abolitionism associated with the I Republican Party at an elite level in its early phases and its early mass successes. How great this discontinuity was we do not and doubtlesjs shall not ever know, although we have some confidence that, if the truth w£re known, the discontinuity would be large enough to shock many students ofjjdocuments and data from more elite levels. Of course, from the point of view of historical outcomes, all that is important is that this particular conjunction of circumstances occurrbd when it did and was interpreted as it was by political elites in both North and South. These facts shaped history and placed the abolitionist movement in the forefront of "popular" American reforms, set apart from other reforms that have either achieved general elite acceptance without need: for .mass support or have faded into semioblivion because times were not propitious for the capture of a mass base. Nonetheless, our understanding of history may be improved at some points if we recognize the possibility that such dis-| continuities can occur. ^^Hii; j V The Mass Base of the Nazi Party The rise of the Nazi Party in Germany between the two World Wars entrained such a tragic sequence of events that the experience has provoked THE NATURE OF BELIEF SYSTEMS IN MASS PUBLICS 253 diagnoses from every school of thought concerned with, people, politics, or societies. Typically, the question has been. How could the German people have lent support to a movement with an ideology as brutal and authoritarian as that of the Nazis? Some years ago, Bendix argued that it was important to differentiate between the top Nazi leaders, the party members, and the masses whose sudden surge of support at the polls converted the National Socialists from simply another extremist fringe group of the sort that many societies harbor much of the time to a prominence that permitted them to become masters of Germany soon after 1932." Few would now question that the simple magnitude of economic collapse Germany suffered in the wake of World War I was the critical catalyst, ~both for the organizational strength the cadre of Nazi activists had attained prior to 1930 and for the sweeping successes they attained at the polls in that year. Once this point is made, however, we concur with Bendix that the explanatory paths for the mass and the elite are likely to diverge. Our interest here has to do solely with the relationship between the new-found mass of Nazi voters and the ideology of the movement they endorsed. Who was particularly attracted to this mass base? Once again, there is fair agreement among analysts that there was a significant connection between the marked increase in voter turnout and the sudden surge in Nazi votes that marked the 1928-1932 period. Bendix noted that the staggering increase of 5£ million votes picked up by the Nazi Party in 1930 over its 1928 totals coincided with a rapid influx into the active electorate of nearly 2\ million adults who had failed to vote in 1928. These figures for new voters are exclusive of the estimated 1,760,000 young people who became eligible and voted for the first time, and there is reason to believe that these young people flocked to the Nazis in disproportionate numbers." In addition, there is convincing evidence from Heberle and others that, among older voters, the most dramatic shifts from other parties to the Nazi Party occurred in rural areas and especially among peasants/'5 We conclude therefore that, whatever the social backgrounds or motivations of the activist cadre of the Nazis, its mass base was disproportionately recruited from among customary non-voters, the young and the peasantry. Of course, chronic_^nonvoters-would-.lie_aL.the ._bottom..-of—any—scale of political sophistication or ideological comprehension. In a matrix constructed after the fashion of Table'ITTfthere'is a very sharp gradient in voting fidelity from the upper left-hand corner to the lower right. As we have noted, too, there is a decline in average age from the upper right-hand corner to the lower left, despite the negative correlation between age and education: The young are also the most politically unsophisticated age grade, despite their higher average education. Finally, for American data at least, it is clear that political information and political involvement decline systematically with declining mean education from urban areas to increasingly rural areas. Even taken as a whole, farmers in modern America are more remote from and comprehend less of the normal political process than do the lower echelons of the urban occupational hierarchy.''1 Furthermore, the Heberle data for Germany suggest that, among farmers, it was the most isolated and the poorest educated who shifted in the most dramatic proportions to the Nazi ticket in the crucial years.5'" In sum, it seems safe to conclude that the 254 PHILIP E. CONVERSE mass base of the Nazi movement represented one of the mor| unrelievedly ill-informed clienteles that a major political party has assembled in a modern state. "Heberle. who was anxious to show that Nazi popularity jin Schleswig-Holstein was not the result of an ingrained antidemocratic bias, commented on how incredible it seemed that the Nazis should be so widely acceptable to these "generally sober-minded and freedom-loving North Germans, who were not at all accustomed to a tradition of authoritarian government." He devoted a lengthy analysis to an attempt to find comparable belief elements in earlier ideational movements of Schleswig-Holstein that could explain the area's receptiveness to the new ideology. While occasional common threads could be discerned, their number was meager enough to be quite accidental, and antithetical elements predominated.56 Heberle concluded that farmers and other rural people respond to politics less in terms of "ideologies and general political ideals" than in terms of "concrete advantages and disadvantages" of one party relative to another, and he closed with the hope that, under better circumstances, these rural people would "revert")to their more innocuous attitudes of the past.59 Even had the clientele of the Nazi Party been of average education and political sophistication, there would be strong reason to doubt the degree to which prior awareness of Nazi ideology among its voters could be claimed. In view of the actual peculiarities of its mass base, the question verges on the absurd. The Nazis promised changes in a system that was near collapse. Under comparable stresses.'it" is likely that large numbers of citizens in any society (and particularly those without any long-term affective, ties to more traditional parties) would gladly support ad hoc promises of change without any great concern about ideological implications. And typically, they would lack the contextual information necessary to assess these implications, even if some stray details were absorbed. We believe this response would be true of any mass public and not only those that, like Germany, had experienced only a brief democratic tradition.00 To the farmers in particular, the Nazis promised a moratorium on, if not an abolition of, all debts."1 Furthermore, they had the disciplined and motivated party organization capable of disseminating such propaganda through the hinterland. While they had conceived of themselves as an urban party (which by origin and personnel they were), the Nazis appeared to have made a conscious discovery in the late 1920s that a golden harvest of votes had ripened in rural areas, and they set about to exploit this fact,systematically, having become quite discouraged with their lack of progress in urban areas. The Communists had preceded them among the peasantry—but in an earlier and less propitious period—and they had relaxed their efforts. Furthermore, in view of Marxist dogma on the dubious political utility of the peasant, it is unlikely that their energies had ever been concentrated in quite the same manner. In principle, however, there is no reason to believe that, had the Communists instead of the Nazis arrived freshly on the rural scene at the same point and with similar vigor and sketchy propaganda. European history would not have taken a dramatically different turn. All evidence suggests that, in this historical case, the link between specific ideology and mass response was probably of the weakest. THE NATURE OF BELIEF SYSTEMS IN MASS PUBLICS X. Conclusion We have long been intrigued, in dealing with attitudinal and behavioral materials drawn from cross-section publics, at the frequency with which the following sequence of events occurs. An hypothesis is fornied that seems reasonable to the analyst, having to do with one or another sei of systematic differences in perceptions, attitudes, or behavior patterns. The hypothesis is tested on materials from the general population but shows at best some rather uninteresting trace findings. Then the sample is further subdivided by formal education, which isolates among other groups the 10% of the American population with college degrees or the 20% with some college education. It. frequently turns out that the hypothesis is then very clearly confirmed for the most educated, with results rapidly shading off to zero within the less educated majority of the population. We do not claim that such an analytic approach always produces findings of this sort. From time to time, of course, the hypothesis in question can be more broadly rejected for all groups, and, on rare occasions, a relationship turns out to be sharper among the less educated than among the well-educated. Nevertheless, there is a strikingly large class of cases in which confirmation occurs only, or most sharply, among the well educated. Usually it is easy to see, after the fact if not before, the degree to which the dynamics of the processes assumed by the hypothesis rest upon the kinds of broad or abstract contextual information about currents of ideas, people, or society that educated people come to take for granted as initial ingredients of thought but that the most cursory studies will demonstrate are not widely shared. As experiences of this sort accumulate, we become increasingly sensitive to these basic problems of information and begin to predict their results in advance. This awareness means that we come to expect hypotheses about wide-ranging yet highly integrated belief systems and their behavioral consequences to show results among relative elites but to be largely discon-firmed below them. It is our impression, for example, that even some of the more elaborate "ideological" patterns associated with the authoritarian personality syndrome follow this rule. Some recent results that have accumulated in connection with the Protestant-ethic hypothesis of Weber seem to hint at something of the same pattern as well."2 ' In this paper, we have attempted to make some systematic comments on this kind of phenomenon that seem crucial to any understanding of elite and mass belief systems. We have tried to show the character of this "continental shelf" between elites and masses and to locate the sources of differences in their belief systems in some simple characteristics' of information and its social transmission. The broad contours of elite decisions over time can depend in a vital way upon currents in what is loosely called "the history of ideas." | These decisions in turn have effects upon the mass of more common citizens. But, of any^djrect^participation.in this history of ideas and the behayjorjt shapes,^ , the.rnassjs remarkably innocent. We do hot disclaim the existence of entities that might best be called "folk ideologies," nor do we deny for a moment that strong differentiations in a variety of narrower values may be found 256 - ■ " ■ ^ " PHILIP E, CONVERSE within subcultures of less educated people. Yet for the familiar belief systems that, in view of their historical importance, tend most to attract the sophisticated observer, it is likely that an adequate mapping of a society (or,1 for that matter, the world) would provide a jumbled cluster of pyramids or a mountain range, with sharp delineation and differentiation in beliefs frpm elite apex to elite apex but with the mass bases of the pyramids overlapping in such profusion that it would be impossible to decide where one pyramid ended and another began. NOTES 1. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (New York, 1946), especially pp. 39: ff. 2. Minar has compiled a useful if discouraging survey of this diversity. See ŤJavid W. Minar. "Ideology and Political Behavior," Midwest Journal of Political Science, V (November, 1961), No. 4, 317-31. 3. Garner uses the term "constraint" to mean "the amount of imerrelatedness of structure of a system of variables" when measured by degree of uncertainty reduction. Wendell R. Garner, Uncertainty and Structure as Psychological Concepts (New York, 1962), pp. 142ff. Wé use the term a bit more broadly as relief from such polysyllables as "interrelatedness" and "interdependence." 4. Measures of correlation and indices of the goodness of fit of a cumulative scale model to a body of data are measures of two types of constraint. ' 5. Definitions of belief systems frequently require that configurations of ideas be stable for individuals over long periods of time. The notion of centrality fulfills this requirement in a more flexible way. That is, once it is granted that changes in the perceive^ status of idea-elements are not frequent in any event and that, when change does occur, the central elements (particularly in large belief systems) are amply cushioned by more peripheral elements that can be adjusted, it follows that central elements are indeed likely to, be highly stable. 6. Minar, loc. cit. 7. See A. Campbell, P. E. Converse, W. Miller, and D. Stokes, The American V oter (New York, 1960), pp. 204-9. 8. William J, McGuire, "A Syllogistic Analysis of Cognitive Relationships," in Milton J. Rosenberg, Carl I. Hovland, William J. McGuire, Robert P. Abelsoni and Jack W. Brehm, Attitude Organization and Change, Yale Studies in Attitude and Comrrtunication, Vol. 3 (New Haven, 1960), pp. 65-111. ) 9. Joseph R. Gusfield, "Status Conflicts and the Changing Ideologies of the American Temperance Movement," in Pittman and Snyder, eds., Society, Culture and Drinking Patterns (New York, 1962). 10. Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York, 1957),jp. 79. 11. It should be understood that our information dimension is not so perfectly Icorrelatcd with formal education as this statement implies. Since educational strata have a more ready intuitive meaning, however, we shall use them occasionally as convenieni ways of measuring off levels in the population. In such cases, the reader may keep ininind that there are always some people of lesser education but higher political involvement who are numbered in the stratum and some people with education befitting the straturfi who are not numbered there because their interests lie elsewhere and their information about politics is less than could be expected. 12. There is a difference, of course, between this statement and a suggestion that poorly educated people have no systems of belief about politics. 13. This observation is valid despite tbe fact that surveys showing ignorance of crucial political facts are much more likely to run in a range from 40-80% "unaware." At the height of the 1958 Berlin crisis, 63% of the American public did not know that the city was encircled by hostile troops. A figure closer to 70% is a good estimate of the proportion of the public that does not know which party controls Congress. 14. In this regard, it was enlightening to read the stunned reactions of die political columnist Joseph Alsop when, during the 1960 presidential primaries, he left the elite circuits of the East Coast and ventured from door to door talking politics with) "normal" people in West Virginia. He was frank to admit that the change in perceive)! political worlds was far greater than anything he had ever anticipated, despite his prior recognition that there would be some difference. 15. The phrase "less adequately" is used to show recognition of the frequent complaint THE NATURE OF BELIEF SYSTEMS IN MASS PUBLICS 257 that the liberal-conservative dimension has different meanings in different politics at different times. More importantly, it takes into account the fact that in most politics new issues are constantly arising that are difficult before the fact to relate to such a yardstick. Some of these intrinsically "orthogonal" issues may remain unrelated to the dimension, and, if they become of intense importance, they can split existing parties and redefine alignments. More typically, however, elites that are known on some other grounds to be "liberal" or "conservative" ferret out some limited aspect of an issue for which they can argue some liberal-conservative relevance and begin to drift to one of the alternative positions in disproportionate numbers. Then, either because of the aspect highlighted or because of simple pressures toward party competition, their adversaries drift toward the opposing position. Thus positions come to be perceived as "liberal" or "conservative," even though such alignments would have been scarcely predictable on logical grounds. After the fact, of course, the alignments come to seem "logical," by mechanisms discussed earlier in this paper. Controversy over British entry into the European Common Market is an excellent example of such a process. Currently the conservatives are officially pro-entry, and Labour leadership has finally declared against it, but the reverse of this alignment had frequently been predicted when the issue was embryonic. 16. All American data reported in this paper, unless otherwise noted, have been collected by the Survey Research Center of The University of Michigan under grants from the Carnegie Corporation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. 17. This account of the "levels of conceptualization" is highly abbreviated. For a much more detailed discussion and rationale, along with numerous illustrations drawn at random from interviews in each stratum, see Campbell, et at., op. cii., Chapter 10. , 18. Some modest internal support for the validity of the distinction between those who spoke in terms of broad philosophy and those who offered narrower explanations may be seen in the fact that only 5% of the former category had previously judged the Democrats to be more conservative than the Republicans. Among those giving less elevated "best answers," 14% deemed the Democrats the more conservative party. And, to give some sense of the "continental shelf" being explored here, among those who had responded that a certain party was more conservative than the other but who subsequently confessed that they did not know what the distinction implied, 35% had chosen the Democrats as the more conservative, a figure that is beginning to approach the 50-50 assignment of sheer guesswork. 19. In all cancTffr, it should probably be mentioned that a teacher grading papers would be unlikely to give passing marks to more than 20% of the attempted definitions (or to 10% of the total sample). We made an effort, however, to be as generous as possible in our assignments. 20. This cell is laden, of course, with people who are apathetic and apolitical, although more than half of them vote in major elections. Flanigan, working with the total sample, set aside those who never vote as politically inconsequential and then set about comparing the remainder of self-styled independents with strong partisans. Some of the customary findings relating political independence with low involvement and low- information then became blurred or in some cases reversed themselves altogether. Our highly sophisticated independents contribute to this phenomenon. See William H. Flanigan. "Partisanship and Campaign Participation" (Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Yale University, 1961). 21. As a general rule, questions broad enough for the mass public to understand tend to be too simple for highly sophisticated people to feel comfortable answering without elaborate qualification. The pairing of questions, with those for the mass public given first, arc as follows: , Employment. "The government in Washington ought to see to it that everybody who wants to work can find a job," "Do you think the federal government ought to sponsor programs such as large public works in order to maintain full employment, or d for each of the two divisions of the population are determinate. The purely random group should show a correlation of .00 between t2 and U; the adulterated stable group should show a correlation that falls short of unity as a direct function of the known proportions of random people still in the group, For our critical test, the original total-population turnover correlation (1956-1958) was .24. With the population properly subdivided as suggested by the model, this over-all correlation could be expected to fork into two correlations between ts and U of .00 and .47, if the model was applicable. The empirical values turned out to be .004 and .49. 40. For instance, in terms parallel to the expectations of the final sentence of Note 39, the correlations may fork into a pair that are .07 and .35, rather than .00 and .47. 41. For example, a random path of responses would be laid down over time by a set of people for whom the content of the item was very meaningful, yet put each individual in such a quandary that his pro-con response potential balanced exactly a* .5O-.50. In such cases, it could be assumed that slight rewording of the item, making it "harder" or "easier" in a Gunman sense, would shift the response potentials away from this .50-.50 balance and would thus begin to produce correlations between individual responses over time. This view cannot be challenged in any decisive way for issues generating responses that depart from our black and white model, since, in these cases, a distribution of the population continuously across the total range of response probabilities is entirely compatible with the data. It is even possible to describe the empirical situation surrounding the private-enterprise iiem in these terms. The problem is that such a description seems patently absurd, for it implies that the question was somehow constructed so that the content drew highly unequivocal responses from one class of people but left all the rest in perfect and exquisite conflict. Intermediate classes—people with probabilities of responding to the content positively at a level of .6, .7, .8 or .9—are simply not necessary to account for the data. Such a description lacks verisimilitude. Our assumption is rather that, had the private-enterprise item been rendered "harder" or "easier" in a GuUman sense, the respondents we call "random" would have continued to respond randomly, at least across a zone of items so broad as to bracket any plausible political alternatives. In other words, the problem is not one of specific wording that puts the respondent in particularly delicate conflict; it is rather that the whole area from which this item is drawn is so remote to the respondent that he has not been stimulated to any real opinion formation within it. 260 PHILIP E. CONVERSE 42. Results of this sort lend considerable weight to Scott's proposals for assessing cultural values through analysis of responses to open-ended questions. William A. Scott, "Empirical Assessment of Values and Ideologies," American Sociological Review, 24 (June, 1959), No. 3, 299-310. 43. The definition of these boundaries is necessarily crude. While we have means of improving upon it in the future, it rests for the moment upon the exclusion, of those people with unstable opinions, along with those who at one point or another confessed that they had no opinions. We know that each public, so defined, contains some respondents who give stable patterns of response by chance alone and therefore do not belong in the issue-public conceptually. On the olher hand, for those issues where it is necessary to posit some small "third force" undergoing conversion on the issue, these 'people are inadvertently overlooked, Nonetheless, these two contingents appear to be sm^ll, and the issue-public boundaries arc thus roughly accurate. ' i 44. And if we take as a goal the explanation of political changes touched of| by movements in mass political decisions in this period, as opposed to questions of more static political structure, then the explanatory utility of the social-class thread is almpst nil, for the ideological class voters were least likely to have contributed to these {hanges by corresponding changes in their voting patterns. 45. P. E. Converse and G. Dupeux, "Politicization of the Electorate in France and the United States," Public Opinion Quarterly, 26 (Spring, 1962), For complementary evidence covering an earlier period, see Duncan MacRae, "Religious and Socioeconomic Factors in the French Vote, 1945-1956," American Journal of Sociology, LXIV (November, 1958), No. 3. 46. This figure is for 1840, and it undoubtedly advanced further in the next decade or two, although one deduces that the expansion of membership slowed down after 1840. Our estimates do not take into account, however, the standard inflation of claimed membership (intentional or unintentional) that seems to characterize all movements of this sort. 47. S. A. Stouffer, Communism, Conformity and Civil Liberties (New York, ;i955). 48. Campbell, et at., op. cit., pp 50-51. 49. In 1954, the average circulation of daily newspapers amounted to about 20% more papers than households. In 1850, one newspaper had to stretch across five households. These estimates are calculated from Bureau of the Census figures in Historical Statistics of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1961). 50. Informal communication from Professor Robert L. Crane. 51. We set aside Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland, all of which had been slow in 'moving toward complete abolition and -which tended to follow southern voting patterns through the election of 1856. 52. A simple ordering of potentially abolitionist states according to apparent success in transfer of 1S52 Free-Soil and Whig votes to the Republicans in 1856 is negatively correlated with an ordering of these states according to the relative amount of fringe support they had tended to contribute to the abolitionist parties of the 1840s. 53. Rein hard Bendix. "Social Stratification and Political Power," in Bendix and S. M. Lipset, eds., Class, Status and Power (New York, 1953), pp. 596-609. 54. Bendix, ibid., pp. 604-5. 55. Rudolf Heberle, From Democracy to Nazism (Baton Rouge, 1945). See also Charles P. Loomis and J. Allen Beegle, "The Spread of German Nazism to Rural Areas,'' American Sociological Review, 11 (December, 1946), 724-34. 56. See Campbell et at., op. cit., Chap. 15. The above remarks on the Nazi movement are a condensation of a case study originally written as part of this chapter. 57. The most extreme shifts to the Nazis, arriving at a peak of between 80 and 100% of the votes in some hamlets, occurred in the central zone of Schleswig-Holstein; the Geest. To the East and West lay the sea, a somewhat more cosmopolitan coast, better farmland with larger estates, and a more stratified rural population. While the farmers of the Geest owned their own family farms and have been designated as "lower middle class," they appear to have been subsistence farmers on land that did not interest gentry. Heberle describes them as being "in mentality and habits still more of a real peasant" than farmers in the other sectors, who regarded the Geest farmer "very much as the Southern hillbilly or redneck is looked upon by the planters." Heberle, ibid., p. 39. 58. Heberle and others have argued that the Nazi Party had particular kppeal for villagers and rural people living in simple gemeinschaft societies because it dfcmanded a degree of active and disciplined participation not required by other parties and'such rural folk had a need to give themselves totally to a cause. At another point, however, Heberle implies that, although Schleswig-Holstein was the "most Nazi" province at the polls in both 1930 and 1932, it contributed but a meager share of activists or members to the party. See Heberle, ibid., p. 87. What the mass base of the Nazi Party in its urban and rural segments seemed to share, in addition to a desperate desire for a change that would 1 THE NATURE OF BELIEF SYSTEMS IN MASS PUBLICS 261) bring respite from economic duress, was low education or, in the case of the young, low political sophistication. 59. Heberle, ibid., pp. 100, 124. 60. This is not to challenge the importance of a lengthening democratic tradition or of the bearing of its absence in the German case. But we suspect that once beyond the stabilizing influence of mass identifications with standard parties, the primary salutary effects of a longer democratic tradition are limited to elite political processes. Two hundred years of democracy and several decades of elementary civics courses in the United States " have not given the model citizen much capacity to recognize antidemocratic maneuvers and movements, particularly when they occur "at home." 61. Heberle, ibid., p. 112. 62. All investigators have had success in showing high "achievement motivation" among American Jews (a remarkably well educated group). Furthermore, some early findings confirmed Weber's thesis, in a modern setting, by showing higher achievement motivation among Protestants than among Catholics. VerofT, Feld, and Gurin, working with a national sample, were able, however, to replicate these findings only among higher-status Catholics and Protestants (with income the criterion) in the Northeast. This more sophisticated subpopulation is alleged to be the one within which the original confirmations were found. See J. Veroff, S.^Feld, and G. Gurin, "Achievement Motivation and Religious Background," American Sociological Review, 27 (April, 1962), No. 2, 205. While even poorly educated adherents of differing creeds can probably be counted on for fairly accurate knowledge of concrete matters of ritual and mundane taboos, they would be much less likely to absorb the broad and abstract theological conceptions that are the crucial "intervening variables" in the Webcrian hypothesis. Vll America's Radical Right: Politics and Ideology* by RAYMOND E. WOLFINGER, BARBARA KAYE WOLFINGER, KENNETH PREWITT, and SHEILA H ROS. NHACK Extreme right-wing movements have been a recurring feature of American political life. The antilibertarian pronouncements and tactics of these movements, as well as the frequently deviant character of their demands, lead many observers to consider them a threat to prevailing political values. For the most part, their influence has not been enduring at the national lefvel. They seem to have their greatest success in local communities, chiefly in intimidating educators and librarians. But at every level of government these movements influence the course of events by distracting and limiting political discussion. The profound dissatisfactions they express seem to reflect deep stresses in American society. For this reason, social scientists have tried to understand the sources of right-wing extremism and to discern the jcharacteristics of the people who are attracted to it. The manifestation of this political tendency in the early 1960s4 is known as the radical right. It has attracted much scholarly and journalistic attention.1 While a good deal is known about the radical right's organizations, doctrines, tactics, and leaders, there is little information, albeit much speculation, about the composition and motivations of its following. This article describes a study of the attitudes, political behavior, and demographic characteristics of 308 people who attended and supported an "Anti-Communism School" presented by the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade in Oakland, California, early in 1962. * The authors are more than ordinarily indebted to people whose generosity and skill aided them at every stage of this research. Hugh Schwartz played an important role in planning the data collection, which was done by an unusually talented and dedicated group of students at Stanford University. At succeeding stages, we profited greatly from the advice of Bo Anderson, Adam Haber, and Morris Zelditch, Jr. Ian Dengler and Peter Lyman kindly volunteered their services for coding. Charles E. Lindblom, JDean Man-heimer, Nelson W. Polsby, Martin Shapiro, Aaron Wildavsky, and Professor Zelditch made many helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. Drs. Fred C. fcchwarz and Joost Sluis graciously gave free tickets to the interviewers. Additional financial support was provided by the Stanford Committee for Research on Public Affairs, the Dean of the Stanford Graduate School, and the Stanford Computation Center. A previous version of this article was read at the 1963 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association in New York City.