A comparison of the stucture of elite and mass political attitudes: The dimensionality of American political thinking, 1980-2004

This dissertation examines the structure of Americans' political attitudes among political elites and the mass public. I demonstrate the presence, nature, determinants and dimensionality of political thinking in the United States, or the underlying structure (or lack thereof) that connects constellations of individuals' political issue attitudes. In doing so, I describe and explain the cognitive map that citizens bring to bear to the political world.;This project begins by analyzing the attitudes of political elites, represented by survey responses of delegates to the Democratic and Republican party national conventions from 1980-2004. Although studies show that ideology influences elites' political attitudes, no empirical study has demonstrated that these attitudes share a single structure outside of the context of congressional roll call voting, where agenda setting and party influences potentially conflate behavior with attitudes. I provide evidence that a single underlying dimension, the traditional liberal-conservative continuum, structures elites' issue attitudes. Elites' reliance on "liberal" and "conservative" abstractions to conceptualize the political world produces interrelationships among disparate political issues, reducing attitudes to a single ideological dimension.;Next, I analyze surveys of the mass public over the same time period in order to compare the attitude structure of ordinary citizens to the benchmark of ideological thinking exhibited by elites. Despite elites' pervasive influence on mass attitudes and behavior, only a small percentage of citizens are shown to structure their attitudes similarly to that of the delegates. The consequence of this finding is that intense elite polarization, and, consequently, increasingly ideologically consistent rhetoric and cues, has not led to increased ideological thinking among most members of the mass public. However, I also demonstrate that the extent of ideological thinking varies widely within the mass public, and that this variation is attributable to differences in individuals' level of political sophistication, which I capture with a new measure combining indicators of political interest, involvement and knowledge. Despite the relative paucity of ideological thinking among the mass public, I identify, contrary to prior work, a segment of the mass public whose attitude structure mirrors that of elites.;Finally, I present and test a model of elite and mass spending preferences. The findings support the hypothesis that elite attitudes toward virtually all items in the federal budget conform to a single dimension, indicating that the concept of government spending is a much broader term for elites than it is for the mass public. I further show that differences in individuals' conception of government spending depend crucially upon their level of political sophistication.;Ultimately, this project uncovers the dimensionality of elite and mass political attitudes, as well as the sources and extent of the variability in ideological thinking within the electorate, over a twenty-four year period. The evidence provides resolution to the debate regarding the relationship between political sophistication and attitudinal constraint, as the attitude structures of elites and the most politically sophisticated members of the mass public are constrained to the unidimensional liberal-conservative continuum. The findings also testify to the relatively limited impact of elite polarization on the ideological thinking and attitudinal constraint of the mass public. The results elucidate the "pictures in the heads" of the American people and have implications for our understanding of public opinion and the all-important two-way relationship between elites and the mass public.