Structure and Consistency in Public Opinion: the Role of Core Beliefs and Values

1988/05/01 by Stanley Feldman · 23 citations
Social Sciences · Business, Management and Accounting · #Electoral Systems and Political Participation #Political Influence and Corporate Strategies #Culture, Economy, and Development Studies

paper · doi:10.2307/2111130

Abstract

Research in public opinion and mass belief systems has provided numerous insights into the organization of political attitudes and beliefs and levels of political sophistication in the public. However, having found that most people do not structure their beliefs ideologically, this literature is of limited usefulness in understanding how people do form their political attitudes and beliefs. Another large body of literature suggests that specific attitudes and beliefs are in part a reflection of people's core beliefs and values. This paper examines the role of three core beliefs-support for equality of opportunity, economic individualism, and the free enterprise system-in structuring political beliefs and evaluations.

Cited by

• Source Cues, Partisan Identities, and Political Value Expression
• Electoral Choices and Core Value Change: The 1992 Presidential Campaign
• More than a partisan pandemic: Worldview and COVID ‐19 response in the United States
• ‘The Economy is Rigged’: Inequality Narratives, Fairness, and Support for Redistribution in Six Countries
• Expertise and the Ideological Consequences of the Authoritarian Predisposition
• Belief Network Analysis: A Relational Approach to Understanding the Structure of Attitudes
• Group identity as a source of threat and means of compensation: Establishing personal control through group identification and ideology
• A Change of Heart? Why Individual-Level Public Opinion Shifted Against Trump’s “Muslim Ban”
• Affluence and the Demand-side for Policy Improvements: Exploring Elite Beliefs About Vulnerability to Societal Problems
• The Social Dimension of Political Values
• Voter ignorance and the democratic ideal
• Partisanship, Deservingness, and the Attitudinal Policy Feedback Process for Social Policy
• The Depoliticization of Inequality and Redistribution: Explaining the Decline of Class Voting
• Cultural and Institutional Factors Driving Severe Repetitive Flood Losses: Insights From the Jersey Shore
• Predicting political beliefs with polygenic scores for cognitive performance and educational attainment
• The Curious Case of Black “Conservatives”: Assessing the Validity of the Liberal-Conservative Scale among Black Americans
• The freedom to believe in free will: evidence from an adoption study against the first law of behavioral genetics
• The Conditional Role of Ideology in Workplace Injury Causal Attribution
• Talking About Public Health: Developing America’s “Second Language”
• The impact of public opinion on voting and policymaking
• From political to democratic sophistication—A critical reappraisal
• Ideology at the Water’s Edge: Explaining Variation in Public Support for Foreign Aid
• Personal Efficacy, the Information Environment, and Attitudes Toward Global Warming and Climate Change in the United States

Related

• Core Principles and Policy Reasoning in Mass Publics: A Test of Two Theories
• The nature of belief systems in mass publics (1964)
• Belief Network Analysis: A Relational Approach to Understanding the Structure of Attitudes
• Democratic competence in normative and positive theory: Neglected implications of “the nature of belief systems in mass publics”
• What Explains Country-Level Differences in Political Belief System Coherence?