Only a small educated minority holds ideologically coherent political beliefs

Evidence

As Converse (Reading 10) argued famously, it is only a reasonably small and welleducated percentage of the population that finds it necessary (or desirable or possible) to resolve inconsistencies among political beliefs or to organize their beliefs tightly around scholarly definitions of “left” and “right.” Rather, the vast majority of the population would be hard-pressed to articulate ideological coherence. Since the publication of Converse’s classic article in 1964, the reasons for being skeptical about the coherence of mass belief systems have accumulated. McGuire (1985, pp. 248-249) listed eight specific reasons for doubting that people are ideological: (a) They lack basic knowledge about political issues and tend to mistake the causes of their own preferences; (b) they frequently answer “no opinion” in response to issues of political significance; (c) their attitudes show little or no consistency over time; (d) their opinions differ in response to trivial changes in wording and ordering of items; (e) emotional evaluations correlate very weakly with cognitive judgments; (f) attitudes that are similar in terms of ideological content correlate very weakly with one another; (g) people often adopt positions that are contrary to their own selfor class-interest; and (h) their abstract policy preferences frequently contradict the judgments they make in specific situations. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 123

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The Converse argument inverts the Enlightenment assumption that citizens hold principled ideologies; mass political beliefs are fragmented and situationally unstable, which reshapes how democratic theory must be built.
• XREF: Echoes Zaller’s RAS model and the whole ‘low-information rationality’ tradition; also connects to why motivated reasoning and framing effects are so powerful on ordinary voters. — connects to: Political ignorance reflects lack of opportunity for unhurried reasoning, not low intelligence. — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 1095