Mass-level partisan swings are not driven by ideological shifts in the public

Evidence

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 liberalconservative dimensions of judgment were most farfetched. … 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. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1898

Categorization

• DEFINE: The levels of conceptualization framework — bottom levels vs. group-interest/ideological levels — is being used to locate where actual partisan defection occurred.
• XREF: Connects to elite-vs-mass analysis of ideology elsewhere in political psychology, and to claims about the ‘optical illusion’ of treating elite frames as mass-level behavior. — connects to: Radical minority opinion can become mainstream party doctrine over time — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 520