Explaining election swings assumes elite-level ideology mirrors in the mass public

Evidence

Such an account presumes, once again, that constraints visible at an elite level are mirrored in the mass public and that a person choosing to vote Republican after a decade or two of Democratic voting saw himself in some sense or other as giving up a more liberal choice in favor of a more conservative one. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1883

Categorization

• QUESTION: The explicit doubt here about whether mass voters see party choices in ideological terms is the seed of the author’s later findings on low levels of ideological constraint in the public.
• SEED: Angle: the myth of the ‘swing’ voter — how pundits read ideology into mass voting that voters themselves don’t intend.
• XREF: connects to: Learned elites, not centralization alone, determine whether a party can read an electorate — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past: The…, 834; Crisis paralysis reflects ordinary voters’ own disavowed desires, not merely elite ideology — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1422