Mass Political Attitudes and the Survey Response

American Political Science Review

Volumn 69, Issue 4, 1975, Pages 1218-1231

  Achen, Christopher H ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84976176370     PISSN: 00030554     EISSN: 15375943     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/1955282     Document Type: Article

References (18)

1. For detailed arguments on this point, see Robert A. Dahl, After the Revolution? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 40-56; and Bertrand de Jouvenal, “The Chairman's Problem, ” American Political Science Review, 55 (June, 1961), 368–72.
2. A helpful discussion of the many versions of “representation” is Hanna Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967).
3. Even a constituent choosing a legislator in the Burkean tradition requires some political opinions, lest he have no means of evaluating the candidate's political judgment.
4. See especially Angus Campbell et al., The Voter Decides (Evanston: Row, Peterson, 1954); Angus Campbell et al., The American Voter (New York: Wiley, 1960); Angus Campbell et al., Elections and the Political Order (New York: Wiley, 1966); Philip E. Converse et gl., “Electoral Myth and Reality: The 1964 Election, ” American Political Science Review, 59 (June, 1965), 321–336.
5. “Campbell et al.”, The American Voter, pp. 227–234.
6. Campbell et al., The American Voter, ch. 5. A comprehensive review of related literature is Peter B. Natchez, “Images of Voting: The Social Psychologists, ” Public Policy, 18 (Summer, 1970), 553–88. Analyses of voting that give less weight to party identification include David E. RePass, “Issue Salience and Party Choice, ” American Political Science Review, 65 (June, 1971), 389-100; and Richard W. Boyd, “Popular Control of Public Policy: A Normal Vote Analysis of the 1968 Election, ” American Political Science Review, 66 (June, 1972), 429–449.
7. Donald Stokes and Warren Miller, “Party Government and Saliency of Congress, ” in Campbell et al., Elections and the Political Order, p. 204.
8. Philip Converse, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics, ” Ideology and Discontent, ed. David E. Apter (New York: Free Press, 1964), pp. 206–261. See also Philip E. Converse, “Attitudes and Non-Attitudes: Continuation of a Dialogue, ” The Quantitative Analysis of Social Problems, ed. Edward R. Tufte (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1970), pp. 168–89.
9. Robert Axelrod, “The Structure of Public Opinion on Policy Issues, ” Public Opinion Quarterly, 31 (Spring, 1967), 51-60; Edward C. Dreyer, “Change and Stability in Party Identification, ” Journal of Politics, 35 (August, 1973), 712-22; and Donald D. Searing et al., “The Structuring Principle: Political Socialization and Belief Systems, ” American Political Science Review, 67 (June, 1973), 415–32. See also Herbert McClosky, “Consensus and Ideology in American Politics, ” American Political Science Review, 58 (June, 1964), 361–82. For contrary views on related matters, see Norman R. Luttbeg, “The Structure of Beliefs among Leaders and the Public, ” Public Opinion Quarterly, 32 (Fall, 1968), 398-409; and Gerald M. Pomper, “From Confusion to Clarity: Issues and American Voters, 1956-1968, ” American Political Science Review, 66 (June, 1972), 415–28.
10. Steven R. Brown, “Consistency and the Persistence of Ideology: Some Experimental Results, ” Public Opinion Quarterly, 34 (Spring, 1970), 60–68. Since this article was written, John C. Pierce and Douglas D. Rose have published “Nonattitudes and American Public Opinion: The Examination of a Thesis, ” American Political Science Review, 68 (June, 1974), 626–49, which is also an interesting reexamination of Converse's findings. Its idiosyncratic statistical methods and restrictive assumptions, however, make possible several different interpretations of some of its key results, not all of them favorable to the authors' thesis. Many of these difficulties are pointed out by Converse in his powerful reply, pp. 650–60, in the same issue. (See also the rejoinder by Rose and Pierce, pp. 661-66.)
11. Two useful reviews of the individual choice literature that discuss stochastic choice and the evidence for it are Ward Edwards, “The Theory of Decision Making, ” Psychological Bulletin, 51 (1954), 380–417, and Ward Edwards, “Behavioral Decision Theory, ” Annual Review of Psychology, 12 (1961), 473–98. Both are reprinted in Decision Making, ed. Ward Edwards and Amos Tversky (Baltimore: Penguin, 1967), which also includes other discussions of the same topic.
12. C. H. Coombs, A Theory of Data (New York: Wiley, 1964), pp. 106–18. Reprinted in Edwards and Tversky, pp. 319–333.
13. For examples of the detection of interviewer bias, see Michael J. Shapiro, “Discovering Interviewer Bias in Open-Ended Survey Responses, ” and W. Andrew Collins, “Interviewers' Verbal Idiosyncrasies as a Source of Bias, ” both in Public Opinion Quarterly, 34 (Fall, 1970), 412–415 and 416–22, respectively.
14. See, for example, Frederick M. Lord and Melvin R. Novick, Statistical Theories of Mental Test Scores (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1968). The approach set out in the text also bears a resemblance to that developed in David E. Wiley and James A. Wiley, “The Estimation of Measurement Error in Panel Data, ” in Causal Models in the Social Sciences, H. M. Blalock (Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, 1971), pp. 364–374. The models were developed independently, however, and for different purposes; the Wileys have ratio scale data and their results depend on the existence of a meaningful zero point, while we have ordinal or interval level information only. The assumptions and computations involved are therefore somewhat different. The Wileys' article is also important for its statistical critique of David R. Heise, “Separating Reliability and Stability in Test-Retest Correlation, ” American Sociological Review, 34 (February, 1969), 93–101, which is reprinted in the Blalock volume, pp. 348–63.
15. See Robert P. Abelson and John W. Tukey, “Efficient Conversion of Non-Metric Information into Metric Information, ” in Tufte, ed., The Quantitative Analysis of Social Problems, pp. 407–417. For exact statements of the attitude questions, see Converse, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics, ” footnote 21.
16. Converse, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics, ” pp. 228–229.
17. See W. Lance Bennett, “Political Attitudes and Social Life” (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1974), who argues that uninformed citizens may develop stable opinions precisely because of their lack of information: they become subject to symbolic appeals by political leaders.
18. Two interesting attempts along these lines, using Markov chains, are James S. Coleman, Models of Change and Response Uncertainty (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1964); and Ralph B. Ginsberg, “Critique of Probabilistic Models: Application of the Semi-Markov Model to Migration” and “Incorporating Causal Structure and Exogenous Information with Probabilistic Models: With Special Reference to Choice, Gravity, Migration, and Markov Chains, ” Journal of Mathematical Sociology, 2 (January, 1972), 63–82 and 83–103, respectively.