Ordinary citizens lack the organized belief systems scholars once assumed they possess

Evidence

It is often argued, however, that abstract dimensions like the liberal-conservative continuum are superficial if not meaningless indicators: All that they show is that poorly educated people are inarticulate and have difficulty expressing verbally the more abstract lines along which their specific political beliefs are organized. To expect these people to be able to express what they know and feel, the critic goes on, is comparable to the fallacy of assuming that people can say in an accurate way why they behave as they do. When it comes down to specific attitudes and behaviors, the organization is there nonetheless, and it is this organization that matters, not the capacity for discourse in sophisticated language. … If it were true that such organization does exist for most people, apart from their capacities to be articulate about it, we would agree out of hand that the question of articulation is quite trivial. As a cold empirical matter, however, this claim does not seem to be valid. Indeed, it is for this reason that we have cast the argument in terms of constraint, for constraint and organization are very nearly the same thing. Therefore when we hypothesize that constraint among political idea-elements begins to lose its range very rapidly once we move from the most sophisticated few toward the “grass roots,” we are contending that the organization of more specific attitudes into wide-ranging belief systems is absent as well. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1912

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Converse’s famous ‘The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics’ thesis, and to the broader literature on political sophistication and attitude constraint.