Policy Mood and Political Sophistication: Why Everybody Moves Mood

British Journal of Political Science

Volumn 38, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 433-454

  Enns, Peter K ^a   Kellstedt, Paul M ^b  

^a Department of Obstetrics Gynecology   (United States)

^b TEXAS A AND M UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 69649107902     PISSN: 00071234     EISSN: 14692112     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0007123408000227     Document Type: Article

References (47)

1. Philip E. Converse, ‘The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics’, in David E. Apter, ed., Ideology and Discontent (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964), pp. 206-61; Michael X. Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter, What Americans Know About Politics and Why It Matters (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996); Robert S. Erikson, Michael B. MacKuen and James A. Stimson, The Macro Polity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Benjamin I. Page and Robert Y. Shapiro, The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in Americans’ Policy Preferences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
2. Benjamin I. Page and Robert Y. Shapiro, ‘Effects of Public Opinion on Policy’, American Political Science Review, 77 (1983), 175-90; Page and Shapiro, The Rational Public; James A. Stimson, Michael B. MacKuen and Robert S. Erikson, ‘Dynamic Representation’, American Political Science Review, 89 (1995), 543-65; Erikson, MacKuen and Stimson, The Macro Polity.
3. Erikson, MacKuen and Stimson, The Macro Polity; James A. Stimson, Public Opinion in America: Moods, Cycles, and Swings (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1991 and 1999).
4. Erikson, MacKuen and Stimson, The Macro Polity, pp. 212-19; James A. Stimson, ‘The Micro Foundations of Mood’, in James H. Kuklinski, ed., Thinking about Political Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 253-80.
5. Erikson, MacKuen and Stimson, The Macro Polity, p. 219.
6. Erikson, MacKuen and Stimson, The Macro Polity, p. 5.
7. Erikson, MacKuen and Stimson, The Macro Polity, p. 219.
8. Page and Shapiro, The Rational Public, p. 316.
9. Toke S. Aidt, ‘Economic Voting and Information’, Electoral Studies, 19 (2000), 349-62; George A. Krause and Jim Granato, ‘Fooling Some of the People Some of the Time?ATest of Weak Rationality with Heterogeneous Information Levels’, Public Opinion Quarterly, 62 (1998), 135-51.
10. Angus Campbell, Philip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller and Donald E. Stokes, The American Voter (New York: Wiley, 1960); Converse, ‘The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics'; Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Bernard R. Berelson and Hazel Gaudet, People's Choice: How the Voter Makes Up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign, 1st edn (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948).
11. E.g. Larry M. Bartels, ‘The American Public's Defense Spending Preferences in the Post-Cold War Era’, Public Opinion Quarterly, 58 (1994), 479-508; Philip E. Converse, ‘Assessing the Capacity of Mass Electorates’, Annual Review of Political Science, 3 (2000), 331-54; Delli Carpini and Keeter, What Americans Know About Politics and Why It Matters; James N. Druckman, ‘Does Political Information Matter’, Political Communication, 22 (2005), 515-19; Saundra A. Schneider and William G. Jacoby, ‘Elite Discourse and American Public Opinion: The Case of Welfare Spending’, Political Research Quarterly, 58 (2005), 367-79; Paul M. Sniderman, ‘The New Look of Public Opinion Research’, in Ada W. Finifter, ed., Political Science: The State of the Discipline II (Washington, D.C.: The American Political Science Association, 1993), pp. 219-45; Paul M. Sniderman and John Bullock, ‘A Consistency Theory of Public Opinion and Political Choice: The Hypothesis of Menu Dependence’, in William E. Saris and Paul M. Sniderman, eds, Studies in Public Opinion (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 337-57; Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion.
12. Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion.
13. Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion, p. 148.
14. Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion, p. 16.
15. It is important to note that in the rare instance when political messages are easy and ubiquitous-presidential elections may provide this type of message environment (see Philip E. Converse, ‘Information Flow and the Stability of Partisan Attitudes’, Public Opinion Quarterly, 26 (1962), 578-99; John Zaller, ‘Floating Voters in U.S. Presidential Elections, 1948-2000’, in Saris Willem E. and Paul M. Sniderman, eds, Studies in Public Opinion: Attitudes, Nonattitudes, Measurement Error, and Change (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004))-the RAS model predicts that the least informed will demonstrate the most responsiveness.
16. Erikson, MacKuen and Stimson, The Macro Polity; Page and Shapiro, The Rational Public.
17. Philip E. Converse, ‘Popular Representation and the Distribution of Information’, in John A. Ferejohn and James H. Kuklinski, eds, Information and Democratic Processes (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990), pp. 369-88, at p. 382.
18. Erikson, MacKuen and Stimson, The Macro Polity, p. 428-9.
19. Page and Shapiro, The Rational Public; Erikson, MacKuen and Stimson, The Macro Polity.
20. Robert H. Durr, ‘What Moves Policy Sentiment?’ American Political Science Review, 87 (1993), 158-70; Erikson, MacKuen and Stimson, The Macro Polity.
21. Aidt, ‘Economic Voting and Information'; Pamela Johnston Conover, Stanley Feldman and Kathleen Knight, ‘The Personal and Political Underpinnings of Economic Forecasts’, American Journal of Political Science, 31 (1987), 559-83; Raymond M. Duch, Harvey D. Palmer and Christopher Anderson, ‘Heterogeneity in Perceptions of National Economic Conditions’, American Journal of Political Science, 44 (2000), 635-52; Thomas M. Holbrook and James C. Garand, ‘Homo Economus? Economic Information and Economic Voting’, Political Research Quarterly, 49 (1996), 351-75.
22. Conover, Feldman and Knight, ‘The Personal and Political Underpinnings of Economic Forecasts'; George A. Krause, ‘Voters, Information Heterogeneity, and the Dynamics of Aggregate Economic Expectations’, American Journal of Political Science, 41 (1997); 1170-200; George A. Krause and Jim Granato, ‘Fooling Some of the People Some of the Time? A Test of Weak Rationality with Heterogeneous Information Levels’, Public Opinion Quarterly, 62 (1998), 135-51.
23. Erikson, MacKuen and Stimson, The Macro Polity, p. 447.
24. In Rolling Nowhere, Ted Conover describes ‘Steamtrain’ Maury Graham, who claimed to be able to tell how the nation's economy was doing by the length of the cigarette butts he found on the sidewalk (see Ted Conover, Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America's Hoboes (New York: Viking Press 1984), p. 9).
25. Suzanna DeBoef and Paul M. Kellstedt, ‘The Political (and Economic) Origins of Consumer Confidence’, American Journal of Political Science, 48 (2004), 633-49.
26. Pamela Johnston Conover, Stanley Feldman and Kathleen Knight, ‘Judging Inflation and Unemployment: The Origins of Retrospective Evaluations’, Journal of Politics, 48 (1986), 565-88; Evan Parker-Stephen and Michael B. MacKuen, ‘Class Competence in the American Public’ (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, 2005).
27. Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion; John Zaller and Stanley Feldman, ‘A Simple Theory of the Survey Response: Answering Questions and Revealing Preferences’, American Journal of Political Science, 36 (1992), 579-616.
28. E.g. Converse, ‘The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics’.
29. Page and Shapiro, The Rational Public; Erikson, MacKuen and Stimson, The Macro Polity.
30. Erikson, MacKuen and Stimson, The Macro Polity; Stimson, ‘The Micro Foundations of Mood’.
31. The database has been augmented since the 1999 publication date; Stimson, Public Opinion in America. These numbers refer to the most recent publicly available dataset, dated 21 June 2004.
32. Because the vocabulary test was not administered in every year, analyses based on this criterion will span the years 1974-2004.
33. Converse, ‘Popular Representation and the Distribution of Information'; Page and Shapiro, The Rational Public; Erikson, MacKuen and Stimson, The Macro Polity.
34. Converse, ‘Popular Representation and the Distribution of Information’, p. 382.
35. Stimson, Public Opinion in America, p. 71; Erikson, MacKuen and Stimson, The Macro Polity, p. 208. The eleven question items asked in less than fifteen years follow the same first and second dimension patterns but, as we would expect, the shorter series show much more variability. Four items have similar coefficients across sophistication levels, matching the pattern in the top section of Table 3. For four items the coefficients of the middle and highest sophistication levels load differently from the least sophisticated and for three of the items the least and middle sophistication levels load similarly, and the most sophisticated are distinct.
36. Delli Carpini and Keeter, What Americans Know About Politics and Why It Matters.
37. Erikson, MacKuen and Stimson, The Macro Polity, chap. 6.
38. Parker-Stephen and MacKuen, ‘Class Competence in the American Public’.
39. Erikson, MacKuen and Stimson, The Macro Polity, Table 6.4. Because the hypotheses posit directional predictions we use one-tailed tests.
40. Tests for stationarity on these time series were inconclusive. In particular, when using the Augmented Dickey-Fuller test, we are unable to reject the null of a unit root; by contrast, when using the Kwiatkowski, Phillips, Schmidt and Shin test, we are unable to reject the null of level stationarity (see Denis Kwiatkowski, Peter C. B. Phillips, Peter Schmidt and Yongcheol Shin, ‘Testing the Null Hypothesis of Stationarity against the Alternative of a Unit Root’, Journal of Econometrics, 54 (1992), 159-78). Such findings should not be surprising with time-series as short as these, as both the ADF and KPSS tests have low power against the alternative hypothesis. In the face of such contradictory results, we opt to treat the series as stationary, which is the way that all previous analysts, including Erikson, MacKuen and Stimson (The Macro Polity), have treated these series.
41. Arnold Zellner, ‘An Efficient Method of Estimating Seemingly Unrelated Regressions and Tests for Aggregation Bias’, Journal of the American Statistical Association, 57 (1962), 348-68; Arnold Zellner, ‘Estimators for Seemingly Unrelated Regression Equations: Some Exact Finite Sample Results’, Journal of the American Statistical Association, 58 (1963), 977-92.
42. Philip E. Converse, ‘Assessing the Capacity of Mass Electorates’, Annual Review of Political Science, 3 (2000), 331-54, p. 387.
43. Erikson, MacKuen and Stimson, The Macro Polity.
44. Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion; Bartels, ‘The American Public's Defense Spending Preferences in the Post-Cold War Era'; Converse, ‘Popular Representation and the Distribution of Information'; Converse, ‘Assessing the Capacity of Mass Electorates'; Erikson, MacKuen and Stimson The Macro Polity.
45. Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion.
46. Page and Shapiro, The Rational Public.
47. Stimson, MacKuen and Erikson, ‘Dynamic Representation'; Erikson, MacKuen and Stimson, The Macro Polity, chap. 8.