The Nature of Belief Systems Reconsidered

Jeffrey Friedman, Shterna Friedman, Jeffrey Friedman, Shterna Friedman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780415696180
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135755355
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In the foundational document of modern public-opinion research, Philip E. Converse's "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics" (1964) established the U.S. public's startling political ignorance. This volume makes Converse's long out-of-print article available again and brings together a variety of scholars, including Converse himself, to reflect on Converse's findings after nearly half a century of further research. Some chapters update findings on public ignorance. Others outline relevant research agendas not only in public-opinion and voter-behavior studies, but in American political development, "state theory," and normative theory. Three chapters grapple with whether voter ignorance is "rational." Several chapters consider the implications of Converse's findings for the democratic ideal of a well-informed public; others focus on the political "elite," who are better informed but quite possibly more dogmatic than members of the general public. Contributors include Scott Althaus, Stephen Earl Bennett, Philip E. Converse, Samuel DeCanio, James S. Fishkin, Jeffrey Friedman, Doris A. Graber, Russell Hardin, Donald Kinder, Arthur Lupia, Samuel L. Popkin, Ilya Somin, and Gregory W. Wawro.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society.

Jeffrey Friedman

DEMOCRATIC COMPETENCE IN NORMATIVE AND POSITIVE THEORY: NEGLECTED IMPLICATIONS OF “THE NATURE OF BELIEF SYSTEMS IN MASS PUBLICS”

The Nature of Belief Systems poses a Hobson’s choice between rule by the politically ignorant masses and rule by the ideologically constrained—which is to say, the doctrinaire—elites. On the one hand, lacking comprehensive cognitive structures, such as ideological “belief systems,” with which to understand politics, most people learn distressingly little about it. On the other hand, a spiral of conviction seems to make it difficult for the highly informed few to see any aspects of politics but those that confirm the cognitive structures that organize their political perceptions. This is a troubling situation for any consequentialist democratic political theory, according to which what is crucial is the electorate’s (and subsidiary decision makers’) ability to make informed policy judgments, not their possession of willful but uninformed political “attitudes.” Any political theorist who does not take democracy to be an end in itself (regardless of its consequences) should be concerned about Converse’s findings.

It is my pleasure to republish in this volume Philip E. Converse’s landmark 1964 paper, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” along with reflections from eminent political scientists, including Converse himself.

With this honor goes the privilege of being able to foist onto the reader my own observations about the attention, and the neglect, that various aspects of Converse’s paper have received. This is not an opportunity I would normally have, since I am not a survey researcher or a political psychologist, and it is primarily those fields that Converse’s work has affected. I am a political theorist, and among such scholars’ ranks, democratic ideals are pretty much taken for granted. In part, this is because political theorists are almost entirely innocent of the research on the ignorant public that Converse inspired. Were they less ignorant of the literature on public ignorance, it would not be so easy for them to be complacent about democratic ideals.

The reflections of our symposium contributors are, fortunately, accessible to nonspecialists, whether theorists, lay students of politics, or scholars in other disciplines. Thus, rather than commenting on their contributions, I see my task as that of inducing outsiders to the post-Converse literature to read the informative chapters published here—by explicating the one that gave rise to them all, “The Nature of Belief Systems” itself. Readers seeking an historical overview of the issues at stake should turn to Stephen Earl Bennett’s chapter in this volume. A thematic treatment of the main lines of scholarly debate “after Converse” is provided by Donald Kinder’s chapter. James Fishkin, Doris Graber, Russell Hardin, Arthur Lupia, and Samuel Popkin argue out some of the normative and theoretical implications that have been derived from Converse. And Scott Althaus, Samuel DeCanio, Ilya Somin, and Gregory Wawro focus, albeit not exclusively, on how “Conversean” ideas can be further applied in political and historical research.

My own approach will be both textual and speculative. I will attempt a close enough reading of “The Nature of Belief Systems” that those who are unfamiliar with this seminal document might come to see its importance. But my aim will not primarily be to determine “what Converse really meant”; indeed, I know for a fact that he disagrees with aspects of my interpretation. Instead, I will develop what I see as some of the most important ramifications of Converse’s paper, which have gone undernoticed—perhaps even by him—and I will state them as provocatively as I can.

IMPLICATIONS OF “THE NATURE OF BELIEF SYSTEMS” FOR NORMATIVE THEORY

Weber ([1904] 1949) famously taught that, if it is not to turn into the production of knowledge for its own sake, empirical scholarship is properly guided by the scholars’ normative “interests.” Although “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics” does not reach normative conclusions, neither it nor the scholarly literature to which it has led is an exercise in the pointless production of knowledge that Weber feared. There are countless and justifiable discussions in this literature about how discouraged we should be by the research that Converse pioneered, and the discouragement in question regards nothing less than the possibility, and the legitimacy, of democratic rule.

If the picture painted in “The Nature of Belief Systems” is accurate, there may be no hope that popular government can exist; or that, to the extent that it does, it can produce desirable results.

Converse used interview data generated by the University of Michigan’s Survey Research Center (SRC) to show what had long been suspected by anecdotal observers of public opinion, such as Walter Lippmann ([1922] 1949) and Joseph A. Schumpeter (1950): that the public is abysmally unschooled in almost everything connected to politics. This conclusion was already apparent in the portrait of The American Voter (1960) that Converse and his Michigan colleagues Angus Campbell, Warren E. Miller, and Donald E. Stokes had painted four years before Converse’s paper appeared (again drawing on SRC data). As Christopher Achen (1975, 1218) conceded in the introduction to his noteworthy, and much noted, critique of Converse:

The sophisticated electorates postulated by some of the more enthusiastic democratic theorists do not exist, even in the best educated modern societies.

The public opinion surveys reported by the University of Michigan Survey Research Center (SRC) have powerfully supported the bleakest views of voter sophistication. … The predominant impression these studies yield is that the average citizen has little understanding of political matters. Voters are said to be little influenced by “ideology,” to cast their votes with far more regard to their party identification than to the issues in a campaign, and often to be ignorant of even the names of the candidates for Congress in their district. Needless to say, the impact of these conclusions on democratic theory is enormously destructive.

Subsequent research,¹ inspired by the work of the Michigan school, has amply borne out its “bleak” findings. Whether the question is what the government does, what it is constitutionally authorized to do, what new policies are being proposed, or what reasons are being offered for them, most people have no idea how to answer accurately (e.g., Page and Shapiro 1992, 10–11; Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996; Hochschild 2001, 320; Bishop 2005).

Most of this scholarship establishes that the public lacks the most elementary political information. It is paradoxical, then, that nothing more dramatically brought public ignorance home to public-opinion scholars than Converse’s paper, which focused on the public’s ignorance of relatively esoteric knowledge: knowledge of political ideology.

Converse (chapter 2, 107 n13) confined to an end note such indicators of the public’s basic political ignorance as the fact that “at the height of the Berlin crisis, 63 percent of the American public did not know that the city was encircled by hostile troops,” and that “70 percent is a good estimate of the proportion of the public that does not know which party controls Congress.” Instead of exploring ignorance of such fundamental factual information, Converse investigated the public’s ignorance of the liberal or conservative worldviews that surely undergirded the political perceptions of (most of) his readers, whose knowledge of politics was far more sophisticated than that of the average voter.

Political observers of the sort for whom Converse was writing tend to attribute electoral outcomes to the shifting fortunes of the liberal or conservative agenda of the moment. Converse showed that such analysis is wildly unrealistic: far from grasping what is at stake in the debates among liberals and conservatives that are ongoing at any given time, most members of the public do not even know what liberalism and conservatism mean.

Having been confronted with page after page of painstaking statistical analysis to that effect, no reader of “The Nature of Belief Systems” can come away unimpressed by the public’s ignorance of ideology. On what basis, then, does the public make its political decisions? Converse (chapter 2, pp. 78, 56) found that most people vote on the basis of their feelings about members of “visible social groupings”; or by unreflectively crediting or blaming incumbents for “the nature of the times” (e.g., a prosperous economy or the progress of a war); or by means of blind partisan loyalty, unenlightened by knowledge of one’s own party’s policy positions or of the overarching rationale for them.

Descriptively, the “take-away” point of “The Nature of Belief Systems” is that the public is far more ignorant than academic and journalistic observers of politics realize. The chief prescriptive implication is, I believe, that the will of the people is so woefully uninformed that one might wonder about the propriety of enacting that will into law.

The Neglected Problem of Ideologues

Related to the paradoxical way that Converse demonstrated the public’s political ignorance is a curiosity of the subsequent literature, right down to the present day. So great was the impact of “The Nature of Belief Systems” that its topic, ignorance of ideology, has often been equated with political ignorance tout court. As a result, much of the research seems to take it for granted that if only average members of the public acted more like the ideological elites, the normative concerns stirred up by Converse would be stilled.

Thus, post-Converse public-opinion research has frequently sought to show that while the masses may be ignorant of ideology, their individual or aggregate behavior is similar to that of the ideologically sophisticated minority. At the micro level, post-Converse scholars have both explored and celebrated people’s use of such proxies for ideological expertise as candidate endorsements by political parties or “public-interest” groups (e.g., Aldrich 1995; Lupia and McCubbins 1998). At the macro level, it has been pointed out that if the opinions of the ignorant many are randomly distributed on a given issue, the opinions of the highly informed few will decide the issue (Page and Shapiro 1992), through “the miracle of aggregation” (Converse 1990, 383).

As empirical research, this literature is not only unobjectionable; it is crucially important in filling out our understanding of what goes on, individually and collectively, among the members of a mass polity. But as a normative theorist, I wonder whether such findings shouldn’t aggravate the very worries to which Converse’s 1964 article give rise.

It has not been widely enough recognized that Converse demonstrated only that ideological elites are more informed than most members of the general public. This does not make them well informed in any absolute sense (Kuklinski and Quirk 2000, 155). A statistical distribution of knowledge (of any subject) will always produce an “elite,” of some size, that is more knowledgeable than average. What matters, then, is how well informed in an absolute sense—and how large—the knowledgeable “elite” is. Converse found that only about 2.5 percent of the public (as of 1956) was passably knowledgeable about the meaning of liberalism and conservatism, the “belief systems” that structured, and still structure, most political debate and public policymaking. That would be bad enough; but surely knowing what the dominant belief systems “mean” isn’t sufficient to make well-informed political decisions.

Consider the most reviled pundit on the other side of the political spectrum from yourself. To liberal ears, a Rush Limbaugh or a Sean Hannity, while well informed about which policies are advocated by conservatives and liberals, will seem appallingly ignorant of the arguments and evidence for liberal positions. The same goes in reverse for a Frank Rich or a Paul Krugman, whose knowledge of the “basics” of liberalism and conservatism will seem, in the eyes of a conservative, to be matched by grave misunderstandings of the rationales for conservative policies. If Limbaugh, Rich, et al., turn out to exemplify the “cognitive elite,” we are in serious trouble.

Converse, I believe, showed just that.

Converse’s political elites are particularly well informed about what it means to be a conservative or a liberal, and their reasoning about politics is structured by this knowledge. But Converse’s findings suggest, I think, that their relatively high levels of ideological knowledge are due to their being conservative or liberal ideologues: closed-minded partisans of one point of view. Should the leadership of public opinion by such people be a source of relief—or a cause for anxiety?

Converse (chapter 2, p. 43) defined ideology as attitudinal constraint. This is not necessarily a matter of ideological extremism or of undesirable emotional traits, as the usual use of the term ideologue might misleadingly suggest.² But Converse’s unusual usage aside, the “belief systems” addressed by his paper are “ideologies” in the usual sense; and the net result of the influence exercised by these ideologies on their believers, as wonderfully but disturbingly described in section II of the 1964 paper (pp. 45–51 here), is precisely the trait that is usually seen to best characterize the “ideologue”: dogmatism.

Ideological constraint is a form of determination. Converse equated it with “the success we would have in predicting, given initial knowledge that an individual holds a specified attitude, that he holds certain further ideas and attitudes.” There would be nothing worrisome about such determination if people’s political attitudes were being constrained by logic or evidence. But Converse made it abundantly clear that that is not the type of constraint he had in mind.

“Whatever may be learned through the use of strict logic as a type of constraint,” Converse (chapter 2, p. 46) writes, “it seems obvious that few belief systems of any range at all depend for their constraint upon logic.” Ideologies are only “apparently logical wholes,” and the appearance is skin deep (ibid., 48, emphasis added).

If it is not logic that constrains the ideologue, could it be empirical evidence? Converse answers this question more elliptically but, I think, just as decisively, in his brief remarks about the ideology par excellence, Marxism. Officially at least, the claims of Marxism are solely empirical. Marxists take Marx to have demonstrated certain empirical tendencies of capitalism, from which follow certain historical results. Converse asserts, however, that even if they were “made to resemble a structure of logical propositions,” that is not what would give the claims of Marxism their hold on the political “attitudes” of Marxists (ibid., 47). It is not the force of the facts, any more than the force of logic, that makes the opinions of ideologues predictable.

For Converse (chapter 2, p. 47, emphasis original), “what is important is that the elites familiar with the total shapes of these belief systems have experienced them as logically constrained clusters of ideas.” But this experience does not stem from the ideologue’s astute reasoning or her keen investigation of reality. Her views are, instead, determined by the political belief system she has been taught. This worldview, in turn, has been concocted by a “creative synthesizer” of that belief system.

Only a “minuscule proportion of any population” is capable of such ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1. Introduction: Democratic Competence in Normative and Positive Theory: Neglected Implications of “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics”
• Research
• Symposium
• Reply
• References
• Index