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The nature of belief
systems in mass publics
(1964)
Philip E. Converse
a
a
Professor Emeritus, Department
of Political Science , University of
Michigan , 5602 Haven Hall, Ann Arbor,
MI, 48109
Published online: 06 Mar 2008.
To cite this article: Philip E. Converse (2006) The nature of belief systems
in mass publics (1964), Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society,
18:1-3, 1-74, DOI: 10.1080/08913810608443650
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08913810608443650
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Philip E. Converse
THE NATURE OF BELIEF SYSTEMS
IN MASS PUBLICS (1964)
Belief systems have never surrendered easily to empirical study or
quantification. Indeed, they have often served as primary exhibits for
the doctrine that what is important to study cannot be measured and
that what can be measured is not important to study. In an earlier period,
the behaviorist decree that subjective states lie beyond the realm
of proper measurement gave Mannheim ajustification for turning his
back on measurement, for he had an unqualified interest in discussing
belief systems.1
Even as Mannheim was writing, however, behaviorism
was undergoing stiff challenges, and early studies of attitudes
were attaining a degree of measurement reliability that had been
deemed impossible. This fragment of history, along with many others,
serves to remind us that no intellectual position is likely to become
obsolete quite so rapidly as one that takes current empirical capability
as the limit of the possible in a more absolute sense. Nevertheless,
while rapid strides in the measurement of "subjective states" have
been achieved in recent decades, few would claim that the millennium
has arrived or that Mannheim could now find all of the tools
that were lacking to him forty years ago.
This article makes no pretense of surpassing such limitations. At the
same time, our substantive concern forces upon us an unusual concern
Critical Review 18 (2006), nos. 1-3. ISSN 0891-3811. www.criticalreview.com. ©2006 Critical Review
Foundation.
Originally published in David E. Apter, ed., Ideology and Its Discontents (New York: The Free
Press of Glencoe). Republished by permission of the author and the editor.
Philip E. Converse is Professor Emeritus, Department of Political Science, University of
Michigan, 5602 Haven Hall, Ann Arbor, MI 48109.
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2 Critical Review Vol. 18, Nos.1—3
with measurement strategies, not simply because we propose to deal
with belief systems or ideologies, but also because of the specific questions
that we shall raise about them. Our focus in this article is upon
differences in the nature of belief systems held on the one hand by elite
political actors and, on the other, by the masses that appear to be "numbered"
within the spheres of influence of these belief systems. It is our
thesis that there are important and predictable differences in ideational
worlds as we progress downward through such "belief strata" and that
these differences, while obvious at one level, are easily overlooked and
not infrequently miscalculated. The fact that these ideational worlds differ
in character poses problems of adequate representation and mea-
surement.
The vertical ordering of actors and beliefs that we wish to plumb
bears some loose resemblance to the vertical line that might be pursued
downward through an organization or political movement from the
narrow cone of top leadership, through increasing numbers of subordinate
officials, and on through untitled activists to the large base formally
represented in membership rolls. It is this large base that Michels noted,
from observations of political gatherings, was rarely "there," and analogues
to its physical absence do not arise accidentally in dealing with
belief systems. On the other hand, there is no perfect or necessary "fit"
between the two orderings, and this fact in itself has some interest.
That we intend to consider the total mass of people "numbered"
within the spheres of influence of belief systems suggests both a democratic
bias and a possible confusion between numbers and power or between
numbers and the outcomes of events that power determines.We
are aware that attention to numbers, more or less customary in democratic
thought, is very nearly irrelevant in many political settings. Generally,
the logic of numbers collides head on with the logic of power, as
the traditional power pyramid, expressing an inverse relation between
power and numbers, communicates so well. "Power" and "numbers" intersect
at only one notable point, and that point is represented by the
familiar axiom that numbers are one resource of power. The weight of
this resource varies in a systematic and obvious way according to the
political context. In a frankly designed and stable oligarchy, it is assumed
to have no weight at all. In such a setting, the numbers of people associated
with particular belief systems, if known at all, becomes important
only in periods of crisis or challenge to the existing power structure.
Democratic theory greatly increases the weight accorded to
numbers in the daily power calculus. This increase still does not mean
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Converse•The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics 3
that numbers are of overriding importance; in the normal course of
events it is the perception of numbers by democratic elites, so far as they
differ from "actual" numbers, that is the more important factor. However
this may be, claims to numbers are of some modest continuing importance
in democratic systems for the legitimacy they confer upon demands;
and, much more sporadically, claims to numbers become
important in nondemocratic systems as threats of potential coercion.
I. SOME CLARIFICATION OF TERMS
A term like "ideology" has been thoroughly muddled by diverse uses.2
We shall depend instead upon the term "belief system," although there
is an obvious overlap between the two. We define a beliefsystem as a
configuration of ideas and attitudes in which the elements are bound
together by some form of constraint or functional interdependence.3
In
the static case,"constraint" may be taken to mean the success we would
have in predicting, given initial knowledge that an individual holds a
specified attitude, that he holds certain further ideas and attitudes. We
depend implicitly upon such notions of constraint in judging, for example,
that, if a person is opposed to the expansion of Social Security,
he is probably a conservative and is probably opposed as well to any nationalization
of private industries, federal aid to education, sharply progressive
income taxation, and so forth. Most discussions of ideologies
make relatively elaborate assumptions about such constraints. Constraint
must be treated, of course, as a matter of degree, and this degree can be
measured quite readily, at least as an average among individuals.4
In the dynamic case, "constraint" or "interdependence" refers to the
probability that a change in the perceived status (truth, desirability, and
so forth) of one idea-element would psychologically require, from the
point of view of the actor, some compensating change(s) in the status
of idea-elements elsewhere in the configuration. The most obvious
form of such constraint (although in some ways the most trivial) is exemplified
by a structure of propositions in logic, in which a change in
the truth-value of one proposition necessitates changes in truth-value
elsewhere within the set of related propositions. Psychologically, of
course, there may be equally strong constraint among idea-elements
that would not be apparent to logical analysis at all, as we shall see.
We might characterize either the idea-elements themselves or entire
belief systems in terms of many other dimensions. Only two will interest
us here. First, the idea-elements within a belief system vary in a
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4 Critical Review Vol. 18, Nos. 1-3
property we shall call centmlity, according to the role that they play in
the belief system as a whole. That is, when new information changes
the status of one idea-element in the belief system, by postulate some
other change must occur as well. There are usually, however, several
possible changes in status elsewhere in the system, any one of which
would compensate for the initial change. Let us imagine, for example,
that a person strongly favors a particular policy; is very favorably inclined
toward a given political party; and recognizes with gratification
that the party's stand and his own are congruent. (If he were unaware
of the party's stand on the issue, these elements could not in any direct
sense be constrained within the same belief system.) Let us further
imagine that the party then changes its position to the opposing side of
the issue. Once the information about the change reaching the actor
has become so unequivocal that he can no longer deny that the change
has occurred, he has several further choices. Two of the more important
ones involve either a change in attitude toward the party or a change in
position on the issue. In such an instance, the element more likely to
change is defined as less central to the belief system than the element
that, so to speak, has its stability ensured by the change in the first ele-
ment.5
In informal discussions of belief systems, frequent assumptions are
made about the relative centrality of various idea-elements. For example,
idea-elements that are logically "ends" are supposed to be more
central to the system than are "means." It is important to remain aware,
however, that idea-elements can change their relative centrality in an
individual's belief system over time. Perhaps the most hackneyed illustration
of this point is that of the miser, to whom money has become
an end rather than a means.
Whole belief systems may also be compared in a rough way with respect
to the range of objects that are referents for the ideas and attitudes
in the system. Some belief systems, while they may be internally quite
complex and may involve large numbers of cognitive elements, are
rather narrow in range: Belief systems concerning "proper" baptism rituals
or the effects of changes in weather on health may serve as cases in
point. Such other belief systems as, for example, one that links control
of the means of production with the social functions of religion and a
doctrine of aesthetics all in one more or less neat package have extreme
ranges.
By and large, our attention will be focused upon belief systems that
have relatively wide ranges, and that allow some centrality to political
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Converse•The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics 5
objects, for they can be presumed to have some relevance to political
behavior. This focus brings us close to what are broadly called ideologies,
and we shall use the term for aesthetic relief where it seems most appropriate.
The term originated in a narrower context, however, and is
still often reserved for subsets of belief systems or parts of such systems
that the user suspects are insincere; that he wishes to claim have certain
functions for social groupings; or that have some special social source or
some notable breadth of social diffusion.6
Since we are concerned here
about only one of these limitations—the question of social diffusion—
and since we wish to deal with it by hypothesis rather than by definition,
a narrow construction of the term is never intended.
II. SOURCES OF CONSTRAINT ON IDEA-ELEMENTS
It seems clear that, however logically coherent a belief system may seem
to the holder, the sources of constraint are much less logical in the classical
sense than they are psychological—and less psychological than social.
This point is of sufficient importance to dwell upon.
LogicalSourcesof Constraint
Within very narrow portions of belief systems, certain constraints may
be purely logical. For example, government revenues, government expenditures,
and budget balance are three idea-elements that suggest
some purely logical constraints. One cannot believe that government
expenditures should be increased, that government revenues should be
decreased, and that a more favorable balance of the budget should be
achieved all at the same time. Of course, the presence of such objectively
logical constraints does not ensure that subjective constraints will
be felt by the actor. They will be felt only if these idea-elements are
brought together in the same belief system, and there is no guarantee
that they need be. Indeed, it is true that, among adult American citizens,
those who favor the expansion of government welfare services
tend to be those who are more insistent upon reducing taxes "even if it
means putting off some important things that need to be done."7
Where such purely logical constraint is concerned, McGuire has reported
a fascinating experiment in which propositions from a few syllogisms
of the Barbara type were scattered thinly across a long questionnaire
applied to a student population. The fact that logical
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6 Critical Review Vol. 18, Nos. 1-3
contingencies bound certain questions together was never brought to
the attention of the students by the investigator. Yet one week later the
questionnaire was applied again, and changes of response to the syllogistic
propositions reduced significantly the measurable level of logical
inconsistency. The conclusion was that merely "activating" these objectively
related ideas in some rough temporal contiguity was sufficient to
sensitize the holders to inconsistency and therefore to occasion readjustment
of their beliefs.8
On a broader canvas, such findings suggest that simple "thinking
about" a domain of idea-elements serves both to weld a broader range
of such elements into a functioning belief system and to eliminate
strictly logical inconsistencies defined from an objective point of view.
Since there can be no doubt that educated elites in general, and political
elites in particular, "think about" elements involved in political belief
systems with a frequency far greater than that characteristic of mass
publics, we could conservatively expect that strict logical inconsistencies
(objectively definable) would be far more prevalent in a broad pub-
lic.
Furthermore, if a legislator is noted for his insistence upon budgetbalancing
and tax-cutting, we can predict with a fair degree of success
that he will also tend to oppose expansion of government welfare activities.
If, however, a voter becomes numbered within his sphere of
influence by virtue of having cast a vote for him directly out of enthusiasm
for his tax-cutting policies, we cannot predict that the voter
is opposed as well to expansion of government welfare services. Indeed,
if an empirical prediction is possible, it may run in an opposing
direction, although the level of constraint is so feeble that any
comment is trivial. Yet we know that many historical observations rest
directly upon the assumption that constraint among idea-elements
visible at an elite level is mirrored by the same lines of constraint in
the belief systems of their less visible "supporters." It is our argument
that this assumption not only can be, but is very likely to be,
fallacious.
Psychological Sourcesof Constraint
Whatever may be learned through the use of strict logic as a type of
constraint, it seems obvious that few belief systems of any range at all
depend for their constraint upon logic in this classical sense. Perhaps,
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Converse•The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics 7
with a great deal of labor, parts of a relatively tight belief system like
that fashioned by Karl Marx could be made to resemble a structure of
logical propositions. It goes without saying, however, that many sophisticated
people have been swept away by the "iron logic" of Marxism
without any such recasting. There is a broad gulf between strict logic
and the quasi-logic of cogent argument. And where the elements in
the belief system of a population represent looser cultural accumulations,
the question of logical consistency is even less appropriate. If one
visits a Shaker community, for example, one finds a group of people
with a clear-cut and distinctive belief system that requires among other
things plain dress, centrality of religious concerns, celibacy for all members,
communal assumptions about work and property, antagonism to
political participation in the broader state, and a general aura of retirement
from the secular world. The visitor whose sense of constraint has
been drawn from belief configurations of such other retiring sects as
the Amish is entirely surprised to discover that the Shakers have no abhorrence
of technological progress but indeed greatly prize it. In their
heyday, a remarkable amount of group energy appears to have been reserved
for "research and development" of labor-saving devices, and
among the inventions they produced was a prototype of the washing
machine. Similar surprise has been registered at idea-elements brought
together by such movements as Peronism and Italian Fascism by observers
schooled to expect other combinations. Indeed, were one to
survey a limited set of ideas on which many belief systems have registered
opposite postures, it would be interesting to see how many permutations
of positions have been held at one time or another by someone
somewhere.
Such diversity is testimony to an absence of any strict logical constraints
among such idea-elements, if any be needed.What is important
is that the elites familiar with the total shapes of these belief systems
have experienced them as logically constrained clusters of ideas, within
which one part necessarily follows from another. Often such constraint
is quasi-logically argued on the basis of an appeal to some superordinate
value or posture toward man and society, involving premises about
the nature of social justice, social change, "natural law," and the like.
Thus a few crowning postures—like premises about survival of the
fittest in the spirit of social Darwinism—serve as a sort of glue to bind
together many more specific attitudes and beliefs, and these postures are
of prime centrality in the belief system as a whole.
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8 Critical Review Vol. 18, Nos. 1-3
Social Sourcesof Constraint
The social sources of constraint are twofold and are familiar from an
extensive literature in the past century. In the first place, were we to
survey the combinations of idea-elements that have occurred historically
(in the fashion suggested above), we should undoubtedly fmd that
certain postures tend to co-occur and that this co-occurrence has obvious
roots in the configuration of interests and information that characterize
particular niches in the social structure. For example, if we were
informed that dissension was rising within the Roman Catholic
Church over innovations designed to bring the priest more intimately
into the milieuof the modern worker, we could predict with a high degree
of success that such a movement would have the bulk of its support
among the bas-clergS and would encounter indifference or hostility
at the higher status levels of the hierarchy.
Of course, such predictions are in no sense free from error, and surprises
are numerous. The middle-class temperance movement in America,
for example, which now seems "logically" allied with the smalltown
Republican right, had important alliances some eighty years ago
with the urban social left, on grounds equally well argued from temperance
doctrines.9
Nonetheless, there are some highly reliable correlations
of this sort, and these correlations can be linked with social structure in
the most direct way. Developmentally, they have status similar to the
classic example of the spurious correlation—two terms that are correlated
because of a common link to some third and prior variable. In the
case of the belief system, arguments are developed to lend some more
positive rationale to the fact of constraint: The idea-elements go together
not simply because both are in the interest of the person holding
a particular status but for more abstract and quasi-logical reasons
developed from a coherent world view as well. It is this type of constraint
that is closest to the classic meaning of the term "ideology."
The second source of social constraint lies in two simple facts about
the creation and diffusion of belief systems. First, the shaping of belief
systems of any range into apparently logical wholes that are credible to
large numbers of people is an act of creative synthesis characteristic of
only a minuscule proportion of any population. Second, to the extent
that multiple idea-elements of a belief system are socially diffused from
such creative sources, they tend to be diffused in "packages," which
consumers come to see as "natural" wholes, for they are presented in
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Converse•The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics 9
such terms ("If you believe this, then you will also believe that, for it
follows in such-and-such ways"). Not that the more avid consumer
never supplies personal innovations on the fringes—he is very likely to
suppress an idea-element here, to elaborate one there, or even to demur
at an occasional point. But any set of relatively intelligent consumers
who are initially sympathetic to the crowning posture turns out to
show more consensus on specific implications of the posture as a result
of social diffusion of "what goes with what" than it would if each
member were required to work out the implications individually without
socially provided cues.
Such constraint through diffusion is important, for it implies a dependence
upon the transmission of information. If information is not
successfully transmitted, there will be little constraint save that arising
from the first social source. Where transmission of information is at
stake, it becomes important to distinguish between two classes of information.
Simply put, these two levels are what goes with what and why.
Such levels of information logically stand in a scalar relationship to one
another, in the sense that one can hardly arrive at an understanding of
why two ideas go together without being aware that they are supposed
to go together. One the other hand, it is easy to know that two ideas go
together without knowing why. For example, we can expect that a very
large majority of the American public would somehow have absorbed
the notion that "Communists are atheists."What is important is that this
perceived correlation would for most people represent nothing more
than a fact of existence, with the same status as the fact that oranges are
orange and most apples are red. If we were to go and explore with
these people their grasp of the "why" of the relationship, we would be
surprised if more than a quarter of the population even attempted responses
(setting aside such inevitable replies as "those Communists are
for everything wicked"), and, among the responses received, we could
be sure that the majority would be incoherent or irrelevant.
The first level of information, then, is simple and straightforward.
The second involves much more complex and abstract information,
very close to what Downs has called the "contextual knowledge" relevant
to a body of information.10
A well informed person who has received
sufficient information about a system of beliefs to understand
the "whys" involved in several of the constraints between idea-elements
is in a better position to make good guesses about the nature of other
constraints; he can deduce with fair success, for example, how a true
believer will respond to certain situations. Our first interest in distin-
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io Critical Review Vol. 18, Nos. 1-3
guishing between these types of information, however, flows from our
interest in the relative success of information transmission. The general
premise is that the first type of information will be diffused much more
readily than the second because it is less complex.
It is well established that differences in information held in a crosssection
population are simply staggering, running from vast treasuries of
well organized information among elites interested in the particular
subject to fragments that could virtually be measured as a few "bits" in
the technical sense. These differences are a static tribute to the extreme
imperfections in the transmission of information "downward" through
the system: Very little information "trickles down" very far. Of course,
the ordering of individuals on this vertical information scale is largely
due to differences in education, but it is strongly modified as well by
different specialized interests and tastes that individuals have acquired
over time (one for politics, another for religious activity, another for
fishing, and so forth).
Consequences of Declining Informationfor Belief Systems
It is our primary thesis that, as one moves from elite sources of belief
systems downwards on such an information scale, several important
things occur. First, the contextual grasp of "standard" political belief
systems fades out very rapidly, almost before one has passed beyond the
10 percent of the American population that in the 1950s had completed
standard college training.11
Increasingly, simpler forms of information
about "what goes with what" (or even information about the
simple identity of objects) turn up missing. The net result, as one moves
downward, is that constraint declines across the universe of idea-elements,
and that the range of relevant belief systems becomes narrower
and narrower. Instead of a few wide-ranging belief systems that organize
large amounts of specific information, one would expect to find a
proliferation of clusters of ideas among which little constraint is felt,
even, quite often, in instances of sheer logical constraint.12
At the same time, moving from top to bottom of this information
dimension, the character of the objects that are central in a belief system
undergoes systematic change. These objects shift from the remote,
generic, and abstract to the increasingly simple, concrete, or "close to
home."Where potential political objects are concerned, this progression
tends to be from abstract, "ideological" principles to the more obviously
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Converse•The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics 11
recognizable social groupings or charismatic leaders and finally to such
objects of immediate experience as family, job, and immediate associ-
ates.
Most of these changes have been hinted at in one form or another in
a variety of sources. For example, "limited horizons," "foreshortened
time perspectives," and "concrete thinking" have been singled out as
notable characteristics of the ideational world of the poorly educated.
Such observations have impressed even those investigators who are
dealing with subject matter rather close to the individual's immediate
world: his family budgeting, what he thinks of people more wealthy
than he, his attitudes toward leisure time, work regulations, and the like.
But most of the stuff of politics—particularly that played on a national
or international stage—is, in the nature of things, remote and abstract.
Where politics is concerned, therefore, such ideational changes begin to
occur rapidly below the extremely thin stratum of the electorate that
ever has occasion to make public pronouncements on political affairs.
In other words, the changes in belief systems of which we speak are
not a pathology limited to a thin and disoriented bottom layer of the
lumpenproletariat; they are immediately relevant in understanding the
bulk of mass political behavior.
It is this latter fact which seems to be consistently misunderstood by
the sophisticated analysts who comment in one vein or another on the
meaning of mass politics. There are some rather obvious "optical illusions"
that are bound to operate here. A member of that tiny elite that
comments publicly about political currents (probably some fraction of i
percent of a population) spends most of his time in informal communication
about politics with others in the same select group. He rarely encounters
a conversation in which his assumptions of shared contextual
grasp of political ideas are challenged. Intellectually, he has learned that
the level of information in the mass public is low, but he may dismiss
this knowledge as true of only 10 to 20 percent of the voters, who affect
the course of mass political events in insignificant ways if at all.13
It is
largely from his informal communications that he learns how "public
opinion" is changing and what the change signifies, and he generalizes
facilely from those observations to the bulk of the broader public.14
III. ACTIVE USE OF IDEOLOGICAL DIMENSIONS OF JUDGMENT
Economy and constraint are companion concepts, for the more highly
constrained a system of multiple elements, the more economically it
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12 Critical Review Vol. 18, Nos. 1-3
may be described and understood. From the point of view of the actor,
the idea organization that leads to constraint permits him to locate and
make sense of a wider range of information from a particular domain
than he would find possible without such organization. One judgmental
dimension or "yardstick" that has been highly serviceable for simplifying
and organizing events in most Western politics for the past century
has been the liberal-conservative continuum, on which parties,
political leaders, legislation, court decisions, and a number of other primary
objects of politics could be more—or less—adequately located.15
The efficiency of such a yardstick in the evaluation of events is quite
obvious. Under certain appropriate circumstances, the single word
"conservative" used to describe a piece of proposed legislation can
convey a tremendous amount of more specific information about the
bill—who probably proposed it and toward what ends, who is likely to
resist it, its chances of passage, its long-term social consequences, and,
most important, how the actor himself should expect to evaluate it if
he were to expend further energy to look into its details. The circumstances
under which such tremendous amounts of information are conveyed
by the single word are, however, twofold. First, the actor must
bring a good deal of meaning to the term, which is to say that he must
understand the constraints surrounding it. The more impoverished his
understanding of the term, the less information it conveys. In the limiting
case—if he does not know at all what the term means—it conveys
no information at all. Second, the system of beliefs and actors referred
to must in fact be relatively constrained: To the degree that constraint is
lacking, uncertainty is less reduced by the label, and less information is
conveyed.
The psychological economies provided by such yardsticks for actors
are paralleled by economies for analysts and theoreticians who wish to
describe events in the system parsimoniously. Indeed, the search for adequate
overarching dimensions on which large arrays of events may be
simply understood is a critical part of synthetic description. Such syntheses
are more or less satisfactory, once again, according to the degree
of constraint operative among terms in the system being described.
The economies inherent in the liberal-conservative continuum were
exploited in traditional fashion in the early 1950s to describe political
changes in the United States as a swing toward conservatism or a "revolt
of the moderates." At one level, this description was unquestionably
apt. That is, a man whose belief system was relatively conservative
(Dwight D. Eisenhower) had supplanted in the White House a man
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Converse•The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics 13
whose belief system was relatively liberal (Harry Truman). Furthermore,
for a brief period at least, the composition of Congress was more
heavily Republican as well, and this shift meant on balance a greater
proportion of relatively conservative legislators. Since the administration
and Congress were the elites responsible for the development and
execution of policies, the flavor of governmental action did indeed take
a turn in a conservative direction. These observations are proper de-
scription.
The causes underlying these changes in leadership, however, obviously
lay with the mass public, which had changed its voting patterns
sufficiently to bring the Republican elites into power. And this change
in mass voting was frequently interpreted as a shift in public mood from
liberal to conservative, a mass desire for a period of respite and consolidation
after the rapid liberal innovations of the 1930s and 1940s. Such
an account presumes, once again, that constraints visible at an elite level
are mirrored in the mass public and that a person choosing to vote Republican
after a decade or two of Democratic voting saw himself in
somesenseor otheras giving up a more liberal choice in favor of a more
conservative one.
On the basis of some familiarity with attitudinal materials drawn
from cross-section samples of the electorate,16
this assumption seems
thoroughly implausible. It suggests in the first instance a neatness of organization
in perceived political worlds, which, while accurate enough
for elites, is a poor fit for the perceptions of the common public. Second,
the yardstick that such an account takes for granted—the liberalconservative
continuum—is a rather elegant high-order abstraction, and
such abstractions are not typical conceptual tools for the "man in the
street." Fortunately, our interview protocols collected from this period
permitted us to examine this hypothesis more closely, for they include
not only "structured" attitude materials (which merely require the respondent
to choose between prefabricated alternatives) but also lengthy
"open-ended" materials, which provided us with the respondent's current
evaluations of the political scene in his own words. They therefore
provide some indication of the evaluative dimensions that tend to be
spontaneously applied to politics by such a national sample. We knew
that respondents who were highly educated or strongly involved in politics
would fall naturally into the verbal shorthand of "too conservative,"
"more radical," and the like in these evaluations. Our initial analytic
question had to do with the prevalence of such usage.
It soon became apparent, however, that such respondents were in a
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14 Critical Review Vol. 18, Nos. 1-3
very small minority, as their unusual education or involvement would
suggest. At this point, we broadened the inquiry to an assessment of the
evaluative dimensions of policy significance (relating to political issues,
rather than to the way a candidate dresses, smiles, or behaves in his private
life) that seemed to be employed in lieu of such efficient yardsticks
as the liberal-conservative continuum. The interviews themselves suggested
several strata of classification, which were hierarchically ordered
as "levels of conceptualization" on the basis of apriori judgments about
the breadth of contextual grasp of the political system that each
seemed to represent.
In the first or top level were placed those respondents who did indeed
rely in some active way on a relatively abstract and far-reaching
conceptual dimension as a yardstick against which political objects and
their shifting policy significance over time were evaluated. We did not
require that this dimension be the liberal-conservative continuum itself,
but it was almost the only dimension of the sort that occurred empirically.
In a second stratum were placed those respondents who mentioned
such a dimension in a peripheral way but did not appear to
place much evaluative dependence upon it or who used such concepts
in a fashion that raised doubt about the breadth of their understanding
of the meaning of the term. The first stratum was loosely labeled "ideologue"
and the second "near-ideologue."
In the third level were placed respondents who failed to rely upon
any such over-arching dimensions yet evaluated parties and candidates
in terms of their expected favorable or unfavorable treatment of different
social groupings in the population. The Democratic Party might be
disliked because "it's trying to help the Negroes too much," or the Republican
Party might be endorsed because farm prices would be better
with the Republicans in office. The more sophisticated of these groupinterest
responses reflected an awareness of conflict in interest between
"big business" or "rich people," on the one hand, and "labor" or the
"working man," on the other, and parties and candidates were located
accordingly.
It is often asked why these latter respondents are not considered full
"ideologues," for their perceptions run to the more tangible core of
what has traditionally been viewed as ideological conflict. It is quite
true that such a syndrome is closer to the upper levels of conceptualization
than are any of the other types to be described. As we originally
foresaw, however, there turn out to be rather marked differences, not
only in social origin and flavor of judgmental processes but in overt
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Converse•The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics 15
political reactions as well, between people of this type and those in the
upper levels. These people have a clear image of politics as an arena of
group interests and, provided that they have been properly advised on
where their own group interests lie, they are relatively likely to follow
such advice. Unless an issue directly concerns their grouping in an obviously
rewarding or punishing way, however, they lack the contextual
grasp of the system to recognize how they should respond to it without
being told by elites who hold their confidence. Furthermore, their interest
in politics is not sufficiently strong that they pay much attention
to such communications. If a communication gets through and they
absorb it, they are most willing to behave "ideologically" in ways that
will further the interests of their group. If they fail to receive such
communication, which is most unusual, knowledge of their group
memberships may be of little help in predicting their responses. This
syndrome we came to call "ideology by proxy."
The difference between such narrow group interest and the broader
perceptions of the ideologue may be clarified by an extreme case. One
respondent whom we encountered classified himself as a strong Socialist.
He was a Socialist because he knew that Socialists stood four-square
for the working man against the rich, and he was a working man.When
asked, however, whether or not the federal government in Washington
"should leave things like electric power and housing for private businessmen
to handle," he felt strongly that private enterprise should have
its way, and responses to other structured issue questions were simply
uncorrelated with standard socialist doctrine. It seems quite clear that, if
our question had pointed out explicitly to this man that "good Socialists"
would demand government intervention over private enterprise or
that such a posture had traditionally been viewed as benefiting the
working man, his answer would have been different. But since he had
something less than a college education and was not generally interested
enough in politics to struggle through such niceties, he simply
lacked the contextual grasp of the political system or of his chosen
"ideology" to know what the appropriate response might be. This case
illustrates well what we mean by constraint between idea-elements and
how such constraint depends upon a store of relevant information. For
this man, "Socialists," "the working man," "non-Socialists" and "the
rich" with their appropriate valences formed a tightly constrained belief
system. But, for lack of information, the belief system more or less
began and ended there. It strikes us as valid to distinguish such a belief
system from that of the doctrinaire socialist. We, as sophisticated ob-
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16 Critical Review Vol. 18, Nos. 1—3
servers, could only class this man as a full "ideologue" by assuming that
he shares with us the complex undergirding of information that his
concrete group perceptions call up in our own minds. In this instance, a
very little probing makes clear that this assumption of shared information
is once again false.
The fourth level was, to some degree, a residual category, intended to
include those respondents who invoked some policy considerations in
their evaluations yet employed none of the references meriting location
in any of the first three levels. Two main modes of policy evaluation
were characteristic of this level. The first we came to think of as a "nature
of the times" response, since parties or candidates were praised or
blamed primarily because of their temporal association in the past with
broad societal states of war or peace, prosperity or depression. There
was no hint in these responses that any groupings in the society suffered
differentially from disaster or profited excessively in more pleasant
times: These fortunes or misfortunes were those that one party or the
other had decided (in some cases, apparently, on whim) to visit upon
the nation as a whole. The second type included those respondents
whose only approach to an issue reference involved some single narrow
policy for which they felt personal gratitude or indignation toward a
party or candidate (like Social Security or a conservation program). In
these responses, there was no indication that the speakers saw programs
as representative of the broader policy postures of the parties.
The fifth level included those respondents whose evaluations of the
political scene had no shred of policy significance whatever. Some of
these responses were from people who felt loyal to one party or the
other but confessed that they had no idea what the party stood for.
Others devoted their attention to personal qualities of the candidates,
indicating disinterest in parties more generally. Still others confessed
that they paid too little attention to either the parties or the current
candidates to be able to say anything about them.17
The ranking of the levels performed on apriorigrounds was corroborated
by further analyses, which demonstrated that independent measures
of political information, education, and political involvement all
showed sharp and monotonic declines as one passed downward through
the levels in the order suggested. Furthermore, these correlations were
strong enough so that each maintained some residual life when the
other two items were controlled, despite the strong underlying relationship
between education, information, and involvement.
The distribution of the American electorate within these levels of
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Converse •The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics 17
Table 1. Distribution of a Total Cross-Section Sample of the American
Electorate and of 1956 Voters, by Levels of Conceptualization
I. Ideologues
II. Near-ideologues
III. Group interest
IV Nature of the times
V. No issue content
Proportion of
total sample
2'A%
9
42
24
22'A
100%
Proportion
of voters
3%%
12
45
2 2
17*
100%
conceptualization is summarized in Table 1. The array is instructive as a
portrait of a mass electorate, to be laid against the common elite assumption
that all or a significant majority of the public conceptualizes
the main lines of politics after the manner of the most highly educated.
Where the specific hypothesis of the "revolt of the moderates" in the
early 1950s is concerned, the distribution does not seem on the face of
it to lend much support to the key assumption. This disconfirmation
may be examined further, however.
Since the resurgence of the Republicans in the Eisenhower period
depended primarily upon crossing of party lines by people who normally
considered themselves Democrats, we were able to isolate these
people to see from what levels of conceptualization they had been recruited.
We found that such key defections had occurred among Democrats
in the two bottom levels at a rate very significantly greater than
the comparable rate in the group-interest or more ideological levels. In
other words, the stirrings in the mass electorate that had led to a change
in administration and in "ruling ideology" were primarily the handiwork
of the very people for whom assumptions of any liberal-conservative
dimensions of judgment were most far-fetched.
Furthermore, within those strata where the characteristics of conceptualization
even permitted the hypothesis to be evaluated in its own
terms, it was directly disproved. For example, the more sophisticated of
the group-interest Democrats were quite aware that Eisenhower would
be a more pro-business president than Stevenson. Those of this group
who did defect to Eisenhower did not, however, do so because they
were tired of a labor-oriented administration and wanted a businessoriented
one for a change. Quite to the contrary, in the degree that
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18 Critical Review Vol. 18, Nos. 1-3
they defected they did so in spiteofrather than because o/such quasi-ideological
perceptions. That is, their attitudes toward the respective interests
of these groups remained essentially constant, and they expressed
misgivings about an Eisenhower vote on precisely these grounds. But
any such worries were, under the circumstances, outweighed by admiration
for Eisenhower's war record, his honesty, his good family life, and
(in 1952) his potential for resolving the nagging problem of the Korean
War. Among respondents at higher levels (ideologues and near-ideologues),
there was comparable attraction to Eisenhower at a personal
level, but these people seemed more careful to hew to ideological considerations,
and rates of Democratic defection in these levels were lower
still. In short, then, the supposition of changing ideological moods in
the mass public as a means of understanding the exchange of partisan
elites in 1952 seems to have had little relevance to what was actually
going on at the mass level. And once again, the sources of the optical
illusion are self-evident. While it may be taken for granted among well
educated and politically involved people that a shift from a Democratic
preference to a Republican one probably represents a change in option
from liberal to conservative, the assumption cannot be extended very
far into the electorate as a whole.
IV. RECOGNITION OF
IDEOLOGICAL DIMENSIONS OF JUDGMENT
Dimensions like the liberal-conservative continuum, as we have observed,
are extremely efficient frames for the organization of many political
observations. Furthermore, they are used a great deal in the more
ambitious treatments of politics in the mass media, so that a person
with a limited understanding of their meaning must find such discussions
more obscure than enlightening. Aside from active cognitive use,
therefore, the simple status of public comprehension of these terms is a
matter of some interest.
It is a commonplace in psychology that recognition, recall, and habitual
use of cognized objects or concepts are rather different. We are capable
of recognizing many more objects (or concepts) if they are directly
presented to us than we could readily recall on the basis of more indirect
cues; and we are capable of recalling on the basis of such hints
many more objects (or concepts) than might be active or salient for us in
a given context without special prompting. In coding the levels of conceptualization
from free-answer material, our interest had been entirely
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Converse'The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics 19
focused upon concepts with the last status (activation or salience). It
had been our assumption that such activation would be apparent in the
responses of any person with a belief system in which these organizing
dimensions had high centrality. Nevertheless, we could be sure at the
same time that if we presented the terms "liberal" and "conservative"
directly to our respondents, a much larger number would recognize
them and be able to attribute to them some kind of meaning. We are
interested both in the proportions of a normal sample who would
show some recognition and also in the meaning that might be supplied
for the terms.
In a i960 reinterview of the original sample whose 1956 responses
had been assigned to our levels of conceptualization, we therefore asked
in the context of the differences in "what the parties stand for," "Would
you say that either one of the parties is more conservative or more liberal
than the other?" (It was the first time we had ever introduced these
terms in our interviewing of this sample.) If the answer was affirmative,
we asked which party seemed the more conservative and then, "What
do you have in mind when you say that the Republicans (Democrats)
are more conservative than the Democrats (Republicans)?" When the
respondent said that he did not see differences of this kind between the
two parties, we were anxious to distinguish between those who were
actually cynical about meaningful party differences and those who took
this route to avoid admitting that they did not know what the terms
signified. We therefore went on to ask this group, "Do you think that
people generally consider the Democrats or the Republicans more
conservative, or wouldn't you want to guess about that?" At this point,
we were willing to assume that if a person had no idea of the rather
standard assumptions, he probably had no idea of what the terms
meant; and indeed, those who did try to guess which party other people
thought more conservative made a very poor showing when we
went on to ask them (paralleling our "meaning" question for the first
group), "What do people have in mind when they say that the Republicans
(Democrats) are more conservative than the Democrats (Republicans)?"
In responding to the "meaning" questions, both groups were
urged to answer as fully and clearly as possible, and their comments
were transcribed.
The responses were classified in a code inspired by the original work
on levels of conceptualization, although it was considerably more detailed.
Within this code, top priority was given to explanations that
called upon broad philosophical differences. These explanations in-
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20 Critical Review Vol. 18, Nos.1—3
eluded mentions of such things as posture toward change(acceptance of
or resistance to new ideas, speed or caution in responding to new problems,
protection of or challenge to the status quo,aggressive posture towards
problems vs. a laissez-faire approach, orientation toward the future
or lack of it, and so forth);posture toward the welfarestate, socialism,free enterprise,
or capitalism (including mention of differential sensitivity to social
problems, approaches to social-welfare programs, governmental interference
with private enterprise, and so forth); posture toward the
expanding power offederal government (issues of centralization, states'
rights, local autonomy, and paternalism); and relationship of the government
to the individual(questions of individual dignity, initiative, needs, rights,
and so forth). While any mention of comparably broad philosophical
differences associated with the liberal-conservative distinction was categorized
in this top level, these four were the most frequent types of reference,
as they had been for the full "ideologues" in the earlier openended
materials.
Then, in turn, references to differences in attitude toward various interest
groupings in the population; toward spending or saving and fiscal
policy more generally, as well as to economic prosperity; toward various
highly specific issues like unemployment compensation, highway-building,
and tariffs; and toward postures in the sphere of foreign policy were
arrayed in a descending order of priority, much as they had been for
the classification into levels of conceptualization. Since respondents had
been given the opportunity to mention as many conservative-liberal
distinctions as they wished, coding priority was given to the more "elevated"
responses, and all the data that we shall subsequently cite rests on
the "best answer" given by each respondent.18
The simple distributional results were as follows. Roughly three respondents
in eight (37 percent) could supply no meaning for the liberal-conservative
distinction, including 8 percent who attempted to say
which party was the more conservative but who gave up on the part of
the sequence dealing with meaning. (The weakest 29 percent will, in
later tables, form our bottom stratum "V," while the 8 percent compose
stratum "IV.") Between those who could supply no meaning for the
terms and those who clearly did, there was naturally an intermediate
group that answered all the questions but showed varying degrees of
uncertainty or confusion. The situation required that one of two polar
labels (conservative or liberal) be properly associated with one of two
polar clusters of connotations and with one of two parties. Once the
respondent had decided to explain what "more conservative" or "more
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Converse •The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics 21
liberal" signified, there were four possible patterns by which the other
two dichotomies might be associated with the first. Of course, all four
were represented in at least some interviews. For example, a respondent
might indicate that the Democrats were the more conservative because
they stood up for the working man against big business. In such a case,
there seemed to be a simple error consisting in reversal of the ideological
labels. Or a respondent might say that the Republicans were more
liberal because they were pushing new and progressive social legislation.
Here the match between label and meaning seems proper, but the party
perception is, by normal standards, erroneous.
The distribution of these error types within the portion of the sample
that attempted to give "meaning" answers (slightly more than 60
percent) is shown in Table 2. The 83 percent entered for the "proper"
patterns is artificially increased to an unknown degree by the inclusion
of all respondents whose connotations for liberalism-conservatism were
Table 2. Association of Ideological Label with Party and Meaning
Ideological
label
Conservative
Liberal
Conservative
Liberal
Conservative
Liberal
Conservative
Liberal
Meaning
Conservative
Liberal
Liberal
Conservative
Conservative
Liberal
Liberal
Conservative
Party
Republican
Democrat
Republican
Democrat
Democrat
Republican
Democrat
Republican
Proportion of those
giving some answer
83%
5
6
6
100%
a.While this pattern may appear entirely legitimate for the southern respondent reacting
to the southern wing of the Democratic Party rather than to the national
party, it showed almost no tendency to occur with greater frequency in the South
than elsewhere (and errors as well as lacunae occurred more frequently in general
in the less well educated South). Data from a very different context indicate that
southerners who discriminate between the southern wing and the national Democratic
Party take the national party as the assumed object in our interviews, if the
precise object is not specified.
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22 Critical Review Vol. 18, Nos. 1-3
sufficiently impoverished so that little judgment could be made about
whether or not they were making proper associations (for example,
those respondents whose best explanations of the distinction involved
orientations toward defense spending). The error types thus represent
only those that could be unequivocally considered "errors." While
Table 2 does not in itself constitute proof that the error types resulted
from pure guesswork, the configuration does resemble the probable results
if 20—25 percent of the respondents had been making random
guesses about how the two labels, the two polar meanings, and the two
parties should be sorted out. People making these confused responses
might or might not feel confused in making their assessments. Even if
they knew that they were confused, it is unlikely that they would be
less confused in encountering such terms in reading or listening to political
communications, which is the important point where transmission
of information is concerned. If, on the other hand, they were
wrong without realizing it, then they would be capable of hearing that
Senator Goldwater, for example, was an extreme conservative and believing
that it meant that he was for increased federal spending (or
whatever other more specific meaning they might bring to the term).
In either case, it seems reasonable to distinguish between the people
who belong in this confused group at the border of understanding and
those who demonstrate greater clarity about the terms. And after the
confused group is set aside (stratum HI in Tables 3—4),we are left with a
proportion of the sample that is slightly more than 50 percent. This figure
can be taken as a maximum estimate of reasonable recognition.
We say "maximum" because, once within this "sophisticated" half of
the electorate, it is reasonable to consider the quality of the meanings
put forth to explain the liberal-conservative distinction. These meanings
varied greatly in adequacy, from those "best answers" that did indeed
qualify for coding under the "broad philosophy" heading (the
most accurate responses, as defined above) to those that explained the
distinction in narrow or nearly irrelevant terms (like Prohibition or
foreign-policy measures). In all, 17 percent of the total sample gave
"best answers" that we considered to qualify as "broad philosophy."19
This group was defined as stratum I, and the remainder, who gave narrower
definitions, became stratum II.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the liberal-conservative definitions
supplied was the extreme frequency of those hinging on a simple
"spend-save" dimension vis-a-vis government finances. Very close to a
majority of all "best" responses (and two-thirds to three-quarters of all
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Converse 'The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics 23
such responses in stratum II) indicated in essence that the Democratic
Party was liberal because it spent public money freely and that the Republican
Party was more conservative because it stood for economy in
government or pinched pennies. In our earlier coding of the levels of
conceptualization, we had already noted that this simple dimension
seemed often to be what was at stake when "ideological" terms were
used. Frequently there was reason to believe that the term "conservative"
drew its primary meaning from the cognate "conservation." In one
rather clear example, a respondent indicated that he considered the Republicans
to be more conservative in the sense that they were "... more
saving with money and our natural resources. Less apt to slap on a tax for
some non-essential. More conservative in promises that can't be kept."
(Italics ours.)
Of course, the question of the proportion of national wealth that is
to be spent privately or channeled through government for public
spending has been one of the key disputes between conservative and
liberal "ideologies" for several decades. From this point of view, the
great multitude of "spend-save" references can be considered essentially
as accurate matching of terms. On the other hand, it goes without saying
that the conservative-liberal dialogue does not exhaust itself on this
narrow question alone, and our view of these responses as an understanding
of the differences depends in no small measure on whether
the individual sees this point as a self-contained distinction or understands
the link between it and a number of other broad questions. On
rare occasions, one encounters a respondent for whom the "spendsave"
dimension is intimately bound up with other problem areas. For
example, one respondent feels that the Republicans are more conservative
because " . . . they are too interested in getting the budget balanced—they
should spend more to get more jobs for our people."
More frequently when further links are suggested, they are connected
with policy but go no further:
[Republicans more conservative because] "Well, they don't spend as
much money." [What do you have in mind?] "Well, a lot of them
holler when they try to establish a higher interest rate but that's to get
back a little when they do loan out and make it so people are not so
free with it."
Generally, however, the belief system involved when "liberal-conservative"
is equated with "spend-save" seems to be an entirely narrow
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24 Critical Review Vol. 18, Nos.1—3
one. There follow a number of examples of comments, which taken
with the preceding citations, form a random drawing from the large
group of "spend-save" comments:
[Democrats more conservative because] "they will do more for the
people at home before they go out to help foreign countries. They are
truthful and not liars."
[Republicans more liberal judging] "by the money they have spent
in this last administration. They spent more than ever before in a peace
time. And got less for it as far as I can see."
[Republicans more conservative because] "Well, they vote against
the wild spending spree the Democrats get on."
[Republicans more conservative because] "they pay as you go."
[Democrats more conservative because] "I don't believe the Democrats
will spend as much money as the Republicans."
[Republicans more conservative because] "it seems as if the Republicans
try to hold down the spending of government money." [Do you
remember how?] "Yes," [by having] "no wars."
From this representation of the "spend-save" references, the reader
may see quite clearly why we consider them to be rather "narrow"
readings of the liberal-conservative distinction as applied to the current
partisan scene. In short, our portrait of the population, where recognition
of a key ideological dimension is concerned, suggests that about 17
percent of the public (stratum I) have an understanding of the distinction
that captures much of its breadth. About 37 percent (strata IV and
V) are entirely vague as to its meaning. For the 46 percent between,
there are two strata, one of which demonstrates considerable uncertainty
and guesswork in assigning meaning to the terms (stratum III)
and the other of which has the terms rather well under control but appears
to have a fairly limited set of connotations for them (stratum II).
The great majority of the latter groups equate liberalism-conservatism
rather directly with a "spend-save" dimension. In such cases, when the
sensed connotations are limited, it is not surprising that there is little
active use of the continuum as an organizing dimension. Why should
one bother to say that a party is conservative if one can convey the
same information by saying that it is against spending?
Since the i960 materials on liberal-conservative meanings were
drawn from the same sample as the coding of the active use of such
frames of reference in 1956, it is possible to consider how well the two
codings match. For a variety of reasons, we would not expect a perfect
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Converse•The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics 25
Table 3. Levels of Conceptualization (1956) by Recognition and Understanding
of Terms "Conservatism" and "Liberalism" (i960)
LEVELS OF CONCEPTUALIZATION
Nature No
Near Group of the issue
Stratum Ideologue ideologue interest times content
I
Recognition II
and III
understanding3
IV
V
Number of cases
51%
43
2
2
2
100%
(45)
29%
46
10
5
10
100%
(122)
13%
42
14
6
25
100%
(580)
16%
40
7
7
30
100%
(288)
1 0 %
2 2
7
12
49
100%
(290)
a. The definitions of the strata are: I. recognition and proper matching of label,
meaning, and party and a broad understanding of the terms "conservative" and "liberal";
II. recognition and proper matching but a narrow definition of terms (like
"spend-save"); III. recognition but some error in matching; IV. recognition and an
attempt at matching but inability to give any meaning for terms; V. no apparent
recognition of terms (does not know if parties differ in liberal-conservative terms
and does not know if anybody else sees them as differing).
fit, even aside from coding error. The earlier coding had not been limited
to the liberal-conservative dimension, and, although empirical instances
were rare, a person could qualify as an "ideologue" if he assessed
politics with the aid of some other highly abstract organizing dimension.
Similarly, among those who did employ the liberal-conservative
distinction, there were no requirements that the terms be defined. It
was necessary therefore to depend upon appearances, and the classification
was intentionally lenient. Furthermore, since a larger portion of
the population would show recognition than showed active use, we
could expect substantial numbers of people in the lower levels of conceptualization
to show reasonable recognition of the terms. At any rate,
we assumed that the two measures would show a high correlation, as
they in fact did (Table 3).
Of course, very strong differences in education underlie the data
shown in Table 3. The 2 percent of the sample that occupy the upper
left-hand cell have a mean education close to seven years greater than
that of the 11 percent that occupy the lower right-hand cell. Sixty-two
per cent of this lower cell have had less formal education than the least
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26 Critical Review Vol. 18,Nos. 1-3
Table 4. Levels of Conceptualization (1956) and Term Recognition
(i960) by Mean Years of Formal Education
LEVELS OF CONCEPTUALIZATION
Nature No
Near Group of the issue
Stratum Ideologue ideologue interest times content
Recognition
and
understanding13
I
II
III
IV
V
14.93
13-9
*
*
*
14.2
11.9
11.1
•
10.0
12.3
10.7
10.6
10.4
9-5
11.1
10.7
9.8
9-9
8.5
11.9
11.5
9.6
10.3
8.2
* Inadequate number of cases.
a. The cell entry is mean number of years of formal education. Partial college was
arbitrarily assumed to represent an average of 14 years, and work toward an advanced
degree an average of 18years.
b. See Table 3 for definitions of the five strata.
educated person in the upper corner. The differences in education
show a fairly regular progression across the intervening surface of the
table (see Table 4). Although women have a higher mean education
than men, there is some sex bias to the table, for women are disproportionately
represented in the lower right-hand quadrant of the table.
Furthermore, although age is negatively correlated with education,
there is also rather clear evidence that the sort of political sophistication
represented by the measures can accumulate with age. Undoubtedly
even sporadic observation of politics over long enough periods of time
serves to nurture some broader view of basic liberal-conservative differences,
although of course the same sophistication is achieved much
more rapidly and in a more striking way by those who progress greater
distances through the educational system.
It is not surprising that political sophistication goes hand in hand
with political activism at the "grass roots" (Table 5). The relationship is
certainly not perfect: About 20 percent of those in the most sophisticated
cell engaged in none of the forms of participation beyond voting
that were surveyed (see note a, Table 5) in either the 1956 or i960 election
campaigns, and there is more "stray" participation than has sometimes
been suspected among those who express little interest in politics
or comprehension of party differences yet who may, for example, hap-
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Converse•The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics 27
Table 5. Amount of 1956—1960 Political Activity by Level of Conceptualization
(1956) and Term Recognition (i960)
LEVELS OF CONCEPTUALIZATION
Nature No
Near Group of the issue
Stratum Ideologue ideologue interest times content
I 3.8s
2.6 2.5 2.6 2.2
Recognition II 3.4 3.0 1.7 1.8 1.3
and III * 2.5 2.2 1.5 1.1
understanding15
IV * * 1.9 1.5 .8
V * 17 i.o .8 .4
* Inadequate number of cases.
a. The cell entry represents a mean of the number of acts of political participation
exclusive of voting reported for the two presidential campaigns of 1956 and i960.
For 1956, a point was awarded to each respondent for party membership, campaign
contributions, attendance at political rallies, other party work, attempts to convince
others through informal communication, and displaying campaign buttons or stickers.
In i960, essentially the same scoring applied, except that on two items more
differentiated information was available. A point was awarded for attending one or
two political rallies, two points for three to six rallies, and three points for seven or
more. Similarly, a second point was awarded for people who reported having attempted
in i960 to convince others in more than one class (friends, family, or
coworkers).A total score of 15 was possible, although empirically the highest score
was 14.Only about 1percent of the sample had scores greater than 9.
b. See Table 3 for definitions of the five strata.
pen on a political rally. Furthermore, even the active hard core is not
necessarily sophisticated in this sense: Two of the thirteen most active
people fall in the lower right half of the table, and their activism is
probably to be understood more in terms of mundane social gratifications
than through any concern over the policy competition of politics.
Nonetheless, persistent and varied participation is most heavily concentrated
among the most sophisticated people. This fact is important,
for much of what is perceived as "public reaction" to political events
depends upon public visibility, and visibility depends largely upon
forms of political participation beyond the vote itself. Anyone familiar
with practical politics has encountered the concern of the local politician
that ideas communicated in political campaigns be kept simple and
concrete. He knows his audience and is constantly fighting the batde
against the overestimation of sophistication to which the purveyor of
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28 Critical Review Vol. 18, Nos. 1-3
Table 6. The Sophistication Composition of a "Typical" Political
Rally, Compared to the Composition of the Total Electoratea
High
Low
High
5%
6
0
A
5%
8
5
0
2
RALLY
11%
II
9
1
7
11%
11
0
*
1
Low
2 %
4
*
0
High
2 %
1
*
THE
3%
4
1
•
1
ELECTORATE
6%
18
6
3
11
3%
9
1
2
7
Low
2 %
5
2
3
11
*Less than half of 1 percent.
a. Both five-by-five matrices are those employed in Tables 3, 4, and 5. Aside from
rounding error, the proportions entered in each matrix total 100 percent. The table
should be read by observing differences between proportions in the same regions of
the two tables. For example, the three least sophisticated cells in the lower righthand
corner constitute 21 percent of the electorate and 1 percent of a typical rally
audience.
political ideas inevitably falls prey. Yet, even the grass-roots audience
that forms a reference point for the local politician is, we suspect, a
highly self-selected one and quite sophisticated relative to the electorate
as a whole.
Since we have i960 information on the number of political rallies
attended by each of our respondents, we may simulate the "sophistication
composition" of the typical political gathering. "Typical" is loosely
used here, for real gatherings are various in character: A dinner for the
party faithful at $15 a plate obviously attracts a different audience from
the one that comes to the parade and street rally. Nonetheless, the contrast
between the electorate and an hypothetical average rally is instructive
(Table 6). People located in the three upper left-hand corner cells
of the matrix (6 percent of the electorate) form more than 15 percent
of the composition of such rallies, and probably, in terms of further
rally participation (vocal and otherwise), seem to form a still higher
proportion. Yet on election day their vote (even with a 100 percent
turnout) is numerically outweighed by those votes mustered by people
in the single cell at the opposite corner of the table who do not attend
at all.
One of the most intriguing findings on the surface of the matrix is
that strength of party loyalty falls to one of its weakest points in the
upper left-hand corner cell of the matrix. In other words, among the
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Converse•The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics 29
most highly sophisticated, those who consider themselves "independents"
outnumber those who consider themselves "strong" partisans,
despite the fact that the most vigorous political activity, much of it partisan,
is carried on by people falling in this cell. If one moves diagonally
toward the center of the matrix, this balance is immediately redressed
and redressed very sharply, with strong partisans far outnumbering independents.
In general, there is a slight tendency (the most sophisticated
cell excepted) for strength of party loyalty to decline as one moves diagonally
across the table, and the most "independent" cell is that in the
lower right-hand corner.20
This irregularity has two implications. First, we take it to be one
small and special case of our earlier hypothesis that group-objects (here,
the party as group) are likely to have less centrality in the belief system
of the most sophisticated and that the centrality of groups as referents
increases "lower down" in the sophistication ordering. We shall see
more handsome evidence of the same phenomenon later. Second, we
see in this reversal at least a partial explanation for the persistence of
the old assumption that the "independent voter" is relatively informed
and involved. The early cross-section studies by Lazarsfeld and his colleagues
turned up evidence to reverse this equation, suggesting that the
"independent voter" tends instead to be relatively uninformed and uninvolved.
Other studies have added massively to this evidence. Indeed,
in many situations, the evidence seems so strong that it is hard to imagine
how any opposing perceptions could have developed. The perception
is somewhat easier to understand, however, if one can assume that
the discernment of the informed observer takes in only 5,10, or 15 percent
of the most sophisticated people in the public as constituting "the
public." This "visible" or "operative" public is largely made up of people
from the upper left-hand corner of our preceding tables. The illusion
that such people are the full public is one that the democratic sample
survey, for better or for worse, has destroyed.
V. CONSTRAINTS AMONG IDEA-ELEMENTS
In our estimation, the use of such basic dimensions of judgment as the
liberal-conservative continuum betokens a contextual grasp of politics
that permits a wide range of more specific idea-elements to be organized
into more tightly constrained wholes. We feel, furthermore, that
there are many crucial consequences of such organization: With it, for
example, new political events have more meaning, retention of political
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30 Critical Review Vol. 18, Nos. 1-3
information from the past is far more adequate, and political behavior
increasingly approximates that of sophisticated "rational" models, which
assume relatively full information.
It is often argued, however, that abstract dimensions like the liberalconservative
continuum are superficial if not meaningless indicators: All
that they show is that poorly educated people are inarticulate and have
difficulty expressing verbally the more abstract lines along which their
specific political beliefs are organized. To expect these people to be able
to express what they know and feel, the critic goes on, is comparable to
the fallacy of assuming that people can say in an accurate way why they
behave as they do.When it comes down to specific attitudes and behaviors,
the organization is there nonetheless, and it is this organization that
matters, not the capacity for discourse in sophisticated language.
If it were true that such organization does exist for most people,
apart from their capacities to be articulate about it, we would agree out
of hand that the question of articulation is quite trivial. As a cold empirical
matter, however, this claim does not seem to be valid. Indeed, it
is for this reason that we have cast the argument in terms of constraint,
for constraint and organization are very nearly the same thing. Therefore
when we hypothesize that constraint among political idea-elements
begins to lose its range very rapidly once we move from the
most sophisticated few toward the "grass roots," we are contending that
the organization of more specific attitudes into wide-ranging belief
systems is absent as well.
Table 7 gives us an opportunity to see the differences in levels of
constraint among beliefs on a range of specific issues in an elite population
and in a mass population. The elite population happens to be candidates
for the United States Congress in the off-year elections of 1958,
and the cross-section sample represents the national electorate in the
same year. The assortment of issues represented is simply a purposive
sampling of some of the more salient political controversies at the time
of the study, covering both domestic and foreign policy. The questions
posed to the two samples were quite comparable, apart from adjustments
necessary in view of the backgrounds of the two populations in-
volved.21
For our purposes, however, the specific elite sampled and the specific
beliefs tested are rather beside the point. We would expect the same
general contrast to appear if the elite had been a set of newspaper editors,
political writers, or any other group that takes an interest in politics.
Similarly, we would expect the same results from any other broad
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Converse•The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics 31
Table 7. Constraint between Specific Issue Beliefs for an Elite Sample
and a Cross-Section Sample, 1958s
DOMESTIC
entoymEmpl
Congressional candidates
Employment
Aid to education
Federal housing
EE.P.C.
Economic aid
Military aid
Isolationism
—
atiorEduc
.62
—
ingHous
•59
.61
—
O
F.E.P.
•35
•53
•47
—
0
Econ
.26
•50
•41
•47
FOREIGN
r
Milit;
.06
.06
- 0 3
.11
•19
—
ionisIsolat
•17
•35
•30
•23
•59
•32
—
erenceprefParty
.68
•55
.68
•34
•25
-.18
.05
Party preference
Cross-Section Sample
Employment — .45
Aid to education —
Federal housing
EE.P.C.
Economic aid
Soldiers abroadb
Isolationism
Party preference
.08
.12
•34
.29
.08
—
-.04
.06
-.06
.24
—
.10
.14
.02
•13
.16
—
—.22
-.17
.07
.02
•33
.21
—
. 2 0
.16
.18
-.04
-.07
.12
- 0 3
a. Entries are tau-gamma coefficients, a statistic proposed by Leo A. Goodman and
William H.Kruskal in "Measures of Association for Cross Classifications,"_/o«ma/ of
theAmericanStatistical Association, 49 (Dec, 1954), No. 268, 749. The coefficient was
chosen because of its sensitivity to constraint of the scalar as well as the correlational
type.
b. For this category, the cross-section sample was asked a question about keeping
American soldiers abroad, rather than about military aidin general.
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32 Critical Review Vol. 18, Nos.1—3
Table 8. Summary of Differences in Level of Constraint within and
between Domains, Public and Elite (based on Table 7)
Elite
Mass
Within
domestic
issues
•53
•23
Average
Between
domestic
and foreign
•25
.11
Coefficients
Within
foreign
issues
•37
•23
Between
issues
and party
•39
.11
sampling of political issues or, for that matter, any sampling of beliefs
from other domains: A set of questions on matters of religious controversy
should show the same pattern between an elite population like
the clergy and the church members who form their mass "public."
What is generically important in comparing the two types of population
is the difference in levels of constraint among belief-elements.
Where constraint is concerned, the absolute value of the coefficients
in Table 7 (rather than their algebraic value) is the significant datum.
The first thing the table conveys is the fact that, for both populations,
there is some falling off of constraint between the domains of domestic
and foreign policy, relative to the high level of constraint within each
domain. This result is to be expected: Such lowered values signify
boundaries between belief systems that are relatively independent. If
we take averages of appropriate sets of coefficients entered in Table 7
however, we see that the strongest constraint within a domain for the
mass public is less than that betweendomestic and foreign domains for
the elite sample. Furthermore, for the public, in sharp contrast to the
elite, party preference seems by and large to be set off in a belief system
of its own, relatively unconnected to issue positions (Table 8).22
It should be remembered throughout, of course, that the masssample
of Tables 7 and 8 does not exclude college-educated people, ideologues,
or the politically sophisticated. These people, with their higher
levels of constraint, are represented in appropriate numbers, and certainly
contribute to such vestige of organization as the mass matrix
evinces. But they are grossly outnumbered, as they are in the active
electorate. The general point is that the matrix of correlations for the
elite sample is of the sort that would be appropriate for factor analysis,
the statistical technique designed to reduce a number of correlated
variables to a more limited set of organizing dimensions. The matrix
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Converse•The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics 33
representing the mass public, however, despite its realistic complement
of ideologues, is exactly the type that textbooks advise against using
for factor analysis on the simple grounds that through inspection it is
clear that there is virtually nothing in the way of organization to be
discovered. Of course, it is the type of broad organizing dimension to
be suggested by factor analysis of specific items that is usually presumed
when observers discuss "ideological postures" of one sort or
another.
Although the beliefs registered in Table 7 are related to topics of
controversy or political cleavage, McClosky has described comparable
differences in levels of constraint among beliefs for an elite sample (delegates
to national party conventions) and a cross-section sample when
the items deal with propositions about democracy and freedom—topics
on which fundamental consensus among Americans is presumed.23
Similarly, Prothro and Grigg, among others, have shown that, while
there is widespread support for statements of culturally familiar principles
of freedom, democracy, and tolerance in a cross-section sample, this
support becomes rapidly obscured when questions turn to specific cases
that elites would see as the most direct applications of these princi-
ples.24
In our estimation, such findings are less a demonstration of cynical
lip service than of the fact that, while both of two inconsistent
opinions are honestly held, the individual lacks the contextual grasp to
understand that the specific case and the general principle belong in the
same belief system: In the absence of such understanding, he maintains
psychologically independent beliefs about both. This is another important
instance of the decline in constraint among beliefs with declining
information.
While an assessment of relative constraint between the matrices rests
only on comparisons of absolute values, the comparative algebraic values
have some interest as well. This interest arises from the sophisticated
observer's almost automatic assumption that whatever beliefs "go together"
in the visible political world (as judged from the attitudes of
elites and the more articulate spectators) must naturally go together in
the same way among mass public. Table 7 makes clear that this assumption
is a very dangerous one, aside from the question of degree of constraint.
For example, the politician who favors federal aid to education
could be predicted to be more, rather than less, favorable to an internationalist
posture in foreign affairs, for these two positions in the 1950s
were generally associated with "liberalism" in American politics. As we
see from Table 7, we would be accurate in this judgment considerably
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34 Critical Review Vol. 18, Nos.1—3
more often than chance alone would permit. On the other hand, were
we to apply the same assumption of constraint to the American public
in the same era, not only would we have been wrong, but we would
actually have come closer to reality by assuming no connection at all.
All the correlations in the elite sample except those that do not depart
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 inaccurate 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
to 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 determi-
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Converse•The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics 35
Figure 1. The Correlation of Occupation and Vote Preference within
Levels of Conceptualization
30-
.2
20IS
10O
d
-* .9
00-
Key
I Ideologues
G Group benefit
T Nature of times
N No issue content
Insufficient cases
II. ll. IllI G T N
(a) Total sample
G T N
(b) Women
G T N
(c) Men
nation 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.25
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 nature of political belief systems captured by our "levels of
conceptualization." If objective locations in the social structure served
to produce behavioral consequences regardless of the presence or absence
of relevant intervening organizations of conscious beliefs, then
we would not expect any particular slope to the progression of bars
within each graph. As Figure 1 (a) shows for a sample of the adult electorate
as a whole, however, the differences in intervening belief organi-
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36 Critical Review Vol. 18, Nos. 1-3
zation 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 i(a) can also be
taken as 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. By their own report,
they are much more likely than the less sophisticated to 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 members 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
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Converse•The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics 37
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 i(c).26
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 i(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.27
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 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 more to the less politically sophisticated in the
society—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 as a function of sophistication or involvement is extremely
large: There are no other discriminating variables that begin to
separate populations so cleanly and sharply as these measures. It is a
general finding in at least two senses. First, it replicates itself handsomely
across time: In every instance within the span of time for which
appropriate data are available, the finding is present where class and partisanship
are concerned. Secondly, it has some incipient claim to generality
where sociostructural terms other than "social class" are concerned:
The same sharp finding emerges, for example, when the
relationship between religion and partisanship (Protestant vs. Catholic)
is examined.
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38 Critical Review Vol. 18, Nos. 1-3
And, of course, if class or religious membership is considered to constitute
one set of idea-elements and the predispositions that lead to particular
partisan preferences and final choice to form another, then the
whole phenomenon takes its place as another large class of special cases
of the decline of constraints and the narrowing of belief systems to
which this paper is devoted.
VI. SOCIAL GROUPINGS AS CENTRAL OBJECTS
IN BELIEF SYSTEMS
While for any unbiased sampling of controversial belief items we
would predict that the relevant elite would show a higher level of internal
constraint among elements than those shown by their publics, we
would predict at the same time that it would be possible to bias a
choice of issues in such a way that the level of constraint in the public
could surpass that among the elites. This possibility exists because of
the role that visible social groupings come to play as objects of high
centrality in the belief systems of the less well informed.29
Such a reversal of the constraint prediction could be attained by
choosing items that made it clear that a particular grouping, within the
population and visible to most respondents, would be helped or hurt by
the alternative in question. Consider, by way of illustration, the following
set of items:
Negroes should be kept out of professional athletics.
The government should see to it that Negroes get fair treatment in
jobs and housing.
The government should cut down on its payments (subsidies) on
peanuts and cotton, which are raised mainly by Negroes in the
South.
The government should give federal aid only to schools that permit
Negroes to attend.
Even though it may hurt the position of the Negro in the South, state
governments should be able to decide who can vote and who can-
not.
If this country has to send money abroad, the government should send
it to places like Africa that need it, and not to countries like Britain
and France.
The strategy here is obvious. The questions are selected so that the
same group is involved in each. In every case but one, this involvement
is explicit. Some American adults would not know that Africa's popula-
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Converse•The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics 39
tion is largely Negro; for these people, the level of constraint between
this item and the others would be relatively low. But the majority
would know this fact, and the total set of items would show a substantial
level of constraint, probably higher than the general level shown by
the "mass" items in Table 7. Furthermore, the items are chosen to cut
across some of those more abstract dimensions of dispute (states' rights,
the strategy of economic development abroad, the role of the federal
government in public education, and so forth) customary for elites,
which means that constraint would be somewhat lowered for them.
The difference between the mass and elite responses would spring
from differences in the nature of the objects taken to be central in the
beliefs represented. For the bulk of the mass public, the object with
highest centrality is the visible, familiar population grouping (Negroes),
rather than questions of abstract relations among parts of government
and the like. Since these latter questions take on meaning only with a
good deal of political information and understanding, the attitude items
given would tend to boil down for many respondents to the same single
question: "Are you sympathetic to Negroes as a group, are you indifferent
to them, or do you dislike them?" The responses would be affected
accordingly.
While we have no direct empirical evidence supporting this illustration,
there are a few fragmentary findings that point in this direction.
For example, following the same format as the issue items included in
Table 7, we asked our cross-section sample an attitude question concerning
the desirability of action on the part of the federal government
in the desegregation of public schools. Since we had also asked the
question concerning fair treatment for Negroes in jobs and housing,
these two items form a natural pair, both of which involve Negroes.
The correlation between the two (in terms comparable to Table 7) is
.57, a figure very substantially greater than the highest of the twentyeight
intercorrelations in the "mass" half of Table 7. It seems more than
coincidence that the only pair of items involving the fortunes of a visible
population grouping should at the same time be a very deviant pair
in its high level of mutual constraint.
A parallel question was asked of the elite sample of Table 7, although
the comparability was not so great as for those items presented in the
table. This question was,"If Congress were to vote to give federal aid to
public schools, do you think this should be given to schools which are
segregated?" While the question was worded in such a manner as to
avoid responses based on attitudes toward federal aid to education, a
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40 Critical Review Vol. 18, Nos.1—3
number of elite respondents insisted on answering in the negative, not
because they were necessarily against desegregation, but rather because
they were against any kind of federal aid to education. (The additional
element of federal aid to schools was not present at all in the item for
the cross-section sample). Setting aside those respondents who gave indications
that they were deviating from the intention of the question (7
percent of the elite sample), the correlation between the desegregation
item and the F.E.P.C. item was nevertheless only .31, or very much to
the low side of the elite intercorrelations on domestic issues, instead of
being uniquely to the highside as it was for the mass sample.
We may summarize this situation in the following manner. Out of
twenty-eight "trials" represented by the intercorrelations in Table 7, in
only three cases did the mass sample show an intercorrelation between
issues that was of the same sign and of greater absolute magnitude than
its counterpart for the elite sample. Two of these "reversals" were completely
trivial (.02 and .04), and the third was not large (.08).With respect
to the only pair of items that explicitly involved the fortunes of a
well-known social grouping, however, there not only was a reversal, but
the reversal was large: The constraint for the mass sample, by a simple
difference of coefficients, is .26 greater. This isolated test certainly provides
some striking initial support for our expectations.
Up to this point, we have discussed two broad classes of findings.
The first, as exemplified by Table 7 and our more recent elaborations
on it, suggests that groups as attitude objects (groups qua groups) have
higher centrality in the belief systems of 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 behavior is sharpest among the most politically involved
and sophisticated third of a mass sample and fades out progressively
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 seem empirically justified. The elite of Table 7 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 percent, 5 percent, or 10 percent of
the graph, as one chose. In the upper reaches of the group centrality
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Converse•The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics 4.1
Figure 2. Political Information and the Centrality of Groups as Objects
in Belief Systems.
Amount of political information Centrality of groups quagroups
_ . — _ , High
. 10% •
20%
• 30% \ —
• 40% —
• 50% •
• 6 0 % •
• 7 0 % •
• 8 0 % •
• 9 0 % •
• Low •
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.
On the other hand, why is it that when we work downward from
the more sophisticated third of the population, the centrality 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 himselfmust 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 individual 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 of 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 cer-
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42 Critical Review Vol. 18, Nos. 1—3
tain 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 do 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.30
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
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Converse•The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics 43
here, as elsewhere, is that 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.31
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 i960 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 population 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 i960 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 therefore upon the character of the linking information at issue
in the special case. Furthermore, if we wished to "tamper," it would not
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44 Critical Review Vol. 18, Nos.1—3
be difficult to supply a poorly informed person with a very tiny increment
of linking information, too small to change his over-all amount
of political information visibly yet 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 in "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 therefore 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
idiosyncratic as we move to less sophisticated people. While
an equally broad range of belief elements might function as an interdependent
whole for an unsophisticated person, we would find little aggregative
patterning of belief combinations in populations of unsophisticated
people, for they would be out 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 involved here in idiosyncratic patterns of belief,
each meaningful to the individual in his own way, then we could
expect that individual responses to the same set of items at different
points in time should show some fundamental stability. They do not.
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
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Converse•The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics 45
the type presented in Table 7 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 elite-mass differences
in levels of constraint among beliefs are mirrored in elite-mass differences
in the temporal stability of belief elements for individuals.
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 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 characterizing even the most stable of the issue items
employed.35
This contrast is particularly ironic, for in theory of course
the party usually has little rationale for its existence save as an instrument
to further particular policy preferences of the sort that show less
stability in Figure 3. The policy is the end, and the party is the means,
and ends are conceived to be more stable and central in belief systems
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46 Critical Review Vol. 18, Nos.1—3
Figure 3. Temporal Stability of Different Belief Elements for Individuals,
i958-6oa
.80 -1
.70 .60
-
.50 .40
-
.30 Party
identification
School desegregation
F.E.P.C.
Guaranteed employment
Isolationism
Federal aid to education
Foreign economic aid
Foreign military aid
Federal housing
.20 - 1
a. The measure of stability is a rank-order correlation (tau-beta) between individuals'positions
in 1958 and in i960 on the same items.
than means. The reversal for the mass public is of course a rather dramatic
special case of one of our primary generalizations: The party and
the affect toward it are more central within the political belief systems
of the mass public than are the policy ends that the parties are designed
to pursue.
Figure 3 also shows that, within the set of issues, the items that stand
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Converse•The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics 47
out as most stable are those that have obvious bearing on the welfare of
a population grouping—the Negroes—although the item concerning
federal job guarantees is very nearly as stable. In general, we may say
that stability declines as the referents of the attitude items become increasingly
remote, from jobs, which are significant objects to all, and
Negroes, who are attitude objects for most, to items involving ways and
means of handling foreign policy.
Although most of the less stable items involve foreign policy, the
greatest instability is shown for a domestic issue concerning the relative
role of government and private enterprise in areas like those of housing
and utilities. Interestingly enough, this issue would probably be chosen
by sophisticated judges as the most classically "ideological" item in the
set, and indeed Table 7 shows that the counterpart for this question in
the elite sample is central to the primary organizing dimension visible
in the matrix. Since the item refers to visible population groupings—
"government" and "private business"—we might ask why it is not
geared into more stable affect toward these groups.We do believe that
measures of affect toward something like "private business" (or better,
perhaps, "big business") as an object would show reasonable stability for
a mass public, although probably less than those for more clearly
bounded and visible groups like Negroes and Catholics. The question,
however, is not worded in a way that makes clear which party—government
or private business—will profit from which arrangement.
Lacking such cues, the citizen innocent of "ideology" is likely to make
rather capricious constructions, since the issue is probably one that he
has never thought about before and will never think about again except
when being interviewed.
In short, all these longitudinal data offer eloquent proof that signs of
low constraint among belief elements in the mass public are not products
of well knit but highly idiosyncratic belief systems, for these beliefs
are extremely labile for individuals over time. Great instability in itself is
prima facie evidence that the belief has extremely low centrality for the
believer. Furthermore, it is apparent that any instability characterizing
one belief sets an upper limit on the degree of orderly constraint that
could be expected to emerge in static measurement between this unstable
belief and another, even a perfectly stable one.While an aggregate
might thus show high stability despite low constraint, the fact of low
stability virtually ensures that constraint must also be low. This kind of
relationship between stability and constraint means that an understand-
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48 Critical Review Vol. 18, Nos. 1-3
Figure 4. Pattern of Turnover Correlations between Different Time
Points
ing of what underlies high instability is at the same time an understanding
of what underlies low constraint.
The fact that we have asked these questions at more than two points
in time provides a good deal of leverage in analyzing the processes of
change that generate aggregate instability and helps us to illuminate the
character of this instability.36
For example, in Figure 4 we discover, in
comparing our indicators of the degree of instability associated with
any particular belief as they register between t2 and t.3 with the same
figures for tj and t2, 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 t$ 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.
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 of an issue from the one they had selected at the preceding
measurement. It would 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 rightish alternative two years later,
the leftish again two years after that, and 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
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Converse•The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics 49
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. For the remainder of the population, response
sequences over time 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
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
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50 Critical Review Vol. 18, Nos. 1—3
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.39
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 significant 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 tj to an opposing but equally genuine opinion at 13.
This "third force" is small, and the dominant phenomenon remains the
two segments of the population, within one of which opinions are random
and within the other of which opinions have perfect stability.
Nevertheless, the presence of any third force suffices to disrupt the fit
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Converse•The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics 51
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.41
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-a-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 solelyin 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, beginning to approach the levels of
stability shown for party identification (see Figure 3). Once again, the
evidence seemed clear that extreme instability is associated with absence
of information, or at least of interest, and that item reliability is adequate
for people with pre-existing concern about any given matter.42
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 con-
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52 Critical Review Vol. 18, Nos. 1-3
troversy 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 single dimension is concerned, very substantial
portions of the public simply do not belong on the dimension at
all. They should be set aside as not forming any part of that 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 percent 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
structure 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 Guttman's sense. That is, the
picture might show that, if a person fell within the bounds of one fairly
narrow issue public embracing only 20 percent of the population, then
he would be nearly certain to fall within some other related issue public
encompassing 40 percent of the population.
The reality does not approach such neatness, however. Memberships
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Converse•The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics 53
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 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 intercorrelations parallel to those of Table 7 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, lie 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 into
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54 Critical Review Vol. 18, Nos.1—3
relatively narrow and fragmented issue publics, the feeble levels of constraint
registered among specific belief elements of any range, and the
absence of recognition or understanding of overarching ideological
frames of reference that served as our point of departure. For the truly
involved citizen, the development of political sophistication means that
the absorption of contextual information makes clear to him the connections
of the policy area of his initial interest with policy differences
in other areas; and that these broader configurations of policy positions
are describable quite economically in the basic abstractions of ideology.
Most members of the mass public, however, fail to proceed so far. Certain
rather concrete issues may capture their respective 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 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
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Converse•The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics 55
chosen, this strategy has a number of strengths, and a "good" choice of
threads is likely to involve visible and competing population groupings,
for reasons sketched above.
This latter strategy is essentially that employed by Lipset in tracing
the imprint of social class upon mass political behavior across time and
nationality in Political Man. His choice of threads is good, in part because
of the ubiquity of social-class differences historically and crossnationally
and in 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 ideological relevance most visible and persistent, it
undoubtedly would be related to social class.
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" thread in mass American politics in
the past decade, the scope of our statement should not be overestimated.
Given 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 percent 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.44
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 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 atten-
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56 Critical Review Vol.18, Nos. 1-3
tion on other more gripping controversies and have frequently attempted
to deflate the clerical question as a "phony" issue.45
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 politics.
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 supported leftist parties and movements.
These facts have further bearing on a number of asymmetries in political
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 strata 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 that the elites of leftist parties enjoy a "natural"
numerical superiority, yet they are cursed with a clientele that is less dependable
or solidary in its support. The rightist elite has a natural clientele
that is more limited but more dependable.
Asymmetrical elite strategies therefore emerge. They are best
summed up perhaps in terms of an increasingly overtstress on group
loyalty and cohesion per se as one moves from right to left across party
spectra in most political systems. This difference has a great number of
concrete manifestations. For example, where political institutions encourage
multiparty development, there is likely to be less party fragmentation
on the left than on the right. Where political institutions
permit interparty differences in the stringency 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. At an
electoral level, rightist candidates are more likely to run as individual
notables, dissociating themselves from party per se or claiming positions
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Converse•The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics 57
"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 parties. 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 functional imperative. 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 the population.We shall close by applying
these propositions to historical cases.
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$8 Critical Review Vol. 18, Nos. 1-3
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 i860. 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 attracted by the
American Anti-Slavery Society in the seven short years after 1833 and
the truly remarkable sales of Uncle Tom'sCabinin 1852 and 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 to between 3 and 4 percent of the adult population
outside of the South at that time.46
Against what we have considered
to be the commonly "visible" part of the political public (5 to
15 percent of the total adult public), this figure does indeed represent a
vigorous development of antislavery sentiment. What interests us instead
is the gap between the figure of 4 percent indicative of a sturdy
ideological movement, and the 46 percent of the nonsouthern popular
presidential vote 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 as less plausible than abolition. Panics, the promise of free land in the
West, 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.
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Converse•The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics 59
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 nonsoutherner in 1855 would have had reason
to be concerned about the plight of his "black brother" in a land
several days'journey away—certainly 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 percent 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 well.47
In the 1952
presidential campaign, the Republican charges against the 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 in elite minds as the principal struggle of its period.48
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.49
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 let-
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60 Critical Review Vol. 18, Nos. 1-3
ters 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 disruption 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.50
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 them 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 nonsouthern
white out of ten qualifying at the same level. It 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 i860. 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 Republican Party had indeed felt some deep humanitarian con-
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Converse•The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics 61
cern 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 in the 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" American Party, the patterns were somewhat
different. In 1856 the largest northeastern centers (excluding all but
the potentially abolitionist North),51
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 important discontinuity between the intransigent abolitionism
associated with the Republican Party at an elite level in its early
phases and its early mass successes. How great this discontinuity was we
do not and doubtless shall not ever know, although we have some confidence
that, if the truth were known, the discontinuity would be large
enough to shock many students of documents 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 occurred
when it did and was interpreted as it was by political elites in both
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62 Critical Review Vol. 18, Nos. 1-3
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 discontinuities can occur.
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
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 1932.53
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 iV% million adults who had failed to vote in 1928.
These figures for new voters are exclusive of the estimated 1,760,000
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Converse•The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics 63
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.54
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.55
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
nonvoters, the young and the peasantry.
Of course, chronic nonvoters would lie at the bottom of any scale of
political sophistication or ideological comprehension. In a matrix constructed
after the fashion of Table 3, there 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.56
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.57
In sum, it seems safe to conclude that the mass
base of the Nazi movement represented one of the more unrelievedly
ill-informed clienteles that a major political party has assembled in a
modern state.
Heberle, who was anxious to show that Nazi popularity in
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.58
Heberle concluded that
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64 Critical Review Vol. 18, Nos.1—3
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.60
To the farmers in particular, the Nazis promised a moratorium on,
if not an abolition of, all debts.61
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.
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Converse•The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics 65
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 formed that
seems reasonable to the analyst, having to do with one or another set 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 percent of the American population with college degrees
or the 20 percent 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 disconfirmed
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.62
In this paper, we have attempted to make some systematic comments
on this kind of phenomenon that seem crucial to any understanding of
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66 Critical Review Vol. 18,Nos. 1-3
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 direct participation in this history of ideas and the behavior it
shapes, the mass is remarkably innocent.We do not 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 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, for that matter, the world) would provide a jumbled cluster
of pyramids or a mountain range, with sharp delineation and differentiation
in beliefs from 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 andUtopia (NewYork, 1946), especially pp. 39 ff.
2. Minar has compiled a useful if discouraging survey of this diversity. See David
W. Minar, "Ideology and Political Behavior," MidwestJournalof Political Science,
V (November, 1961),No.4, 317-31.
3. Garner uses the term "constraint" to mean "the amount of interrelatedness 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.We 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 perceived 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.
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Converse •The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics 67
7. See A. Campbell, P. E. Converse, W. Miller, and D. Stokes, TheAmerican Voter
(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. Abelson,
and Jack W. Brehm, Attitude Organization and Change, Yale Studies in Attitude
and Communication, 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
andDrinking Patterns (New York, 1962).
10. Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory ofDemocracy (New York, 1957),p.79.
11. It should be understood that our information dimension is not so perfectly correlated
with formal education as this statement implies. Since educational strata
have a more ready intuitive meaning, however, we shall use them occasionally as
convenient ways of measuring off levels in the population. In such cases, the
reader may keep in mind 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 stratum 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 the fact that surveys showing ignorance of
crucial political facts are much more likely to run in a range from 40-80 percent
"unaware." At the height of the 1958 Berlin crisis, 63 percent of the
American public did not know that the city was encircled by hostile troops. A
figure closer to 70 percent 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 the 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 perceived 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
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 to-
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68 Critical Review Vol. 18, Nos. 1-3
ward 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 al., op. cit.,
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 percent of the former category
had previously judged the Democrats to be more conservative than the Republicans.
Among those giving less elevated "best answers," 14 percent 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 percent 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 candor, it should probably be mentioned that a teacher grading papers
would be unlikely to give passing marks to more than 20 percent of the attempted
definitions (or to 10 percent 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, are as follows:
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Converse•The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics 69
Employment."The government in Washington ought to see to it that
everybody who wants to work can find ajob.""Do you think the federal
government ought to sponsor programs such as large public works in
order to maintain full employment, or do you think that problems of
economic readjustment ought to be left more to private industry or state
and local government?"
Aid to Education. "If cities and towns around the country need help to
build more schools, the government in Washington ought to give them
the money they need." "Do you think the government should provide
grants to the states for the construction and operation of public schools,
or do you think the support of public education should be left entirely to
the state and local government?"
Federal Housing. "The government should leave things like electric power
and housing for private businessmen to handle.""Do you approve the use
of federal funds for public housing, or do you generally feel that housing
can be taken care of better by private effort?"
F.E.P.C. "If Negroes are not getting fair treatment in jobs and housing,
the government should see to it that they do.""Do you think the federal
government should establish a fair employment practices commission to
prevent discrimination in employment?"
Economic Aid. "The United States should give economic help to the
poorer countries of the world even if those countries can't pay for it."
"First, on the foreign economic aid program, would you generally favor
expanding the program, reducing it, or maintaining it about the way it
is?"
Military Aid. "The United States should keep soldiers overseas where they
can help countries that are against Communism." "How about the foreign
military aid program? Should this be expanded, reduced, or maintained
about as it is?"
Isolationism. "This country would be better off if we just stayed home
and did not concern ourselves with problems in other parts of the
world.""Speaking very generally, do you think that in the years ahead the
United States should maintain or reduce its commitments around the
world?"
22. We are aware that drawing an average of these coefficients has little interpretation
from a statistical point of view. The averages are presented merely as a
crude way of capturing the flavor of the larger table in summary form. More
generally, it could be argued that the coefficients might be squared in any
event, an operation that would do no more than heighten the intuitive sense of
contrast between the two publics. In this format, for example, the elite-mass
difference in the domestic-issue column of Table VIII would shift from .53 vs.
.23 to .28 vs. .05.Similarly, that in the party column would become .15 vs. .01.
23. Herbert McClosky, "Consensus and Ideology in American Politics," American
PoliticalScience Review, LVIII (June, 1964), No. 2.
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70 Critical Review Vol. 18, Nos. 1—3
24. James W. Prothro and C. W. Grigg, "Fundamental Principles of Democracy:
Bases of Agreement and Disagreement,"Journal of Politics, 22 (May, 1960), No.
2, 276-94.
25. There is unquestionably a class of social behaviors for which this description is
more rather than less apt, although one need not have recourse to mystical or
unexplained terms to understand the processes involved. In any social system,
some beliefs and behavior patterns are learned by the young in such a way that
there is no awareness of the possibility of alternatives.Where beliefs are concerned,
a phrase like "unspoken cultural assumptions" provides an appropriate
description, and there are analogues in socially learned behaviors. Most of politics,
however, involves competition between explicit alternatives, which means
that conscious belief systems and conscious behavior choices have an important
influence—which is notto say that these belief systems are not often better understood
if one takes account of the sociostructural position of the actor who
holds them. It is to say that, whether or not they are present is not a matter of
indifference for the course of behavior, as we shall see.
26. The reader is cautioned, in comparing Figures 1(b) and 1(c), that women
classed (for example) as "no issue content" are not necessarily the wives of husbands
who are also "no issue content." Indeed, the point of the comparison is
that wives tend themselves to be qualified at less elevated levels than their husbands
but organize their behavior in terms of their husband's "opinion leader-
ship."
27. It should be remembered in assessing Figure 1(c) that the complete absence of
this kind of opinion-leading would not produce a graph with a single tall bar
at the left and an absence of height for the three other bars. That is, opinionleading
quite aside, we should expect some kind of slope, albeit a steep one,
since people represented by the second and (to a fainter degree) the third bars
have cruder versions of the intervening images of politics that we are arguing
have key behavioral importance. It is only the people represented by the fourth
bar who give no evidence of this type of intervening organization at all.
28. The empirical base for this argument becomes even more dramatic than is
shown by Figure 1 if we consider all the psychological terms that a class orientation
in voting presupposes. That is, Figure 1 treats the relationship between
objective status and vote. To the degree that there are ideologues whose class
identifications are not what their objective statuses would lead us to expect,
they lower the degree of the association. Figure 13-3 of Campbell, et al.,op. cit.,
p. 352,which is conceptually parallel to Figure I of this paper, shows that ideologues
with reported awareness of their social classes have a towering monopoly
on the association of subjective status and vote partisanship.
29. Much of the ensuing passage can be read as a slight restatement of Herbert
Hyman's insights concerning "reference groups." If we add anything at all, it is
to suggest some of the circumstances under which groups quagroups are more
or less likely to be central in individual belief systems (more or less potent as
points of reference), as opposed to other kinds of belief object.
30. Florian Znaniecki, ModemNationalities (Urbana, 1952),pp. 81-2.
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Converse•The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics 71
31. Even in the modern United States, there are scattered pockets of the population
that are rather vague about national identity.We encounter respondents, for
example, who when asked if they were born in the United States, answer "No,
I was born in Georgia," in what is clearly ignorance rather than a throwback to
secession or kittenish state pride.
32. McClosky observes more generally:"Members of the active minority" [the political
elite sample] "are far better able than the ordinary voter to name reference
groups that fit both their party affiliation and their doctrinal orientation.
. . . Clearly the political stratum has a much better idea than the public has of
where its political sympathies lie and who its ideological friends and enemies
are.The ability to recognize favorable or unfavorable reference groups is, on the
whole, poorly developed in the populace at large."McClosky, op. cit.
33. With regard to the postwar increase in relevance of social class, see Philip E.
Converse, "The Shifting Role of Class in Political Attitudes and Behavior," in
E. L. Maccoby, T.W. Newcomb, and E. E. Hartley, eds., Readings in Social Psychology
(New York, 1958),p.388.
34. The items portrayed in Figure 3 are the same as those in Table VII and are described
at that point.
35. We regret that we did not get measures of pure affect for other groupings in
the population, for all population members. A copious literature on intergroup
attitudes in social psychology contains, however, much presumptive evidence of
extreme stability in these attitudes over time.
36. Unfortunately we lack the longitudinal data for elites that would permit the
following analysis to be comparative. Let us keep in mind, however, that the relatively
high constraint among belief elements already demonstrated for elites is
almost certain proof of high stability of these elements over time as well. The
phenomenon we are analyzing is thus a mass not an elite phenomenon.
37. More technically, such a configuration is mathematically incompatible with the
assumption based on simple Markov chain theory that a single matrix of transition
probabilities can account for the change process. For the benefit of the
nontechnical reader, we use the phrase "change process" in the singular to denote
a single specified matrix of transition probabilities.
38. This model has been discussed as a hypothetical case in Lee M. Wiggins,
"Mathematical Models for the Interpretation of Attitude and Behavior
Change: The Analysis of Multi-Wave Panels" (Unpublished doctoral dissertation,
Columbia University, 1955).
39. The logic of the test is rather simple. If the model pertains, then any respondents
who change sides of an issue between t1 and t2 are from the random part of the
population, while those who do not change sides are a mixture in known proportions
of perfectly stable people and random people who happened to have
chosen the same side twice by chance. If we divide the population into these two
parts on the basis of their t1-t2 patterns and if the model is appropriate to the situation,
then the turnover correlations between t2 and t3 for each of the two divisions
of the population are determinate. The purely random group should show
a correlation of .00 between t2 and t3; the adulterated stable group should show a
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72 Critical Review Vol. 18, Nos.1—3
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 t2 and t3 of .00 and .47, if themodel 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 at .50-.50. In such cases, it could be assumed that slight rewording of
the item, making it "harder" or "easier" in a Guttman 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 item 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
Guttman 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.
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 other hand, for those issues where it is necessary to posit some small "third
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Converse •The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics 73
force" undergoing conversion on the issue, these people are inadvertently overlooked.
Nonetheless, these two contingents appear to be small, and the issuepublic
boundaries are thus roughly accurate.
44. And if we take as a goal the explanation of political changes touched off 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 almost nil, for the ideological class voters were least likely to have
contributed to these changes by corresponding changes in their voting pat-
terns.
45. P. E. Converse and G. Dupeux, "Politicization of the Electorate in France and
the United States," Public OpinionQuarterly, 26 (Spring, 1962). For complementary
evidence covering an earlier period, see Duncan MacRae, "Religious and
Socioeconomic Factors in the French Vote, 1945-1956,"AmericanJournal ofSociology,
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 CivilLiberties (New York, 1955).
48. Campbell, et al.,op.cit.,pp. 50-51.
49. In 1954,the average circulation of daily newspapers amounted to about 20 percent
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 1852 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. Reinhard Bendix, "Social Stratification and Political Power," in Bendix and S.
M. Lipset, eds., Class, Status andPower (New York, 1953),pp. 596-609.
54. Bendix, ibid., 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 al., op. cit., Chap. 15. The above remarks on the Nazi movement
are a condensation of a case study originally written as part of this chap-
ter.
57. The most extreme shifts to the Nazis, arriving at a peak of between 80 and 100
percent of the votes in some hamlets, occurred in the central zone of
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74 Critical Review Vol. 18,Nos. 1—3
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 asbeing "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 appeal for
villagers and rural people living in simple gemeinschaft societies because it demanded
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 Parry in its urban and rural segments seemed
to share, in addition to a desperate desire for a change that would 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., pp. 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.Veroff, 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 Weberian hy-
pothesis.
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