A political label’s informational value depends on the actor’s understanding and actual system constraint

Evidence

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. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1881

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to information theory and to how expertise in any domain works — a term is only as informative as the knowledge the receiver brings.