Issue wording without clear winners makes non-ideological citizens answer capriciously

Evidence

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 10.2 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 Blacks 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. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1944

Categorization

• QUESTION: The claim that affect toward ‘big business’ would show stability is an untested proposition worth probing — is there survey evidence on affect stability toward big business vs. abstract policy questions?