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Reasoning Chains: Causal Models of Policy Reasoning in Mass Publics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Paul M. Sniderman ,
Michael G. Hagen ,
Philip E. Tetlock  and
Henry E. Brady
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Extract

Citizens do not choose sides on issues like busing or abortion whimsically. They have reasons for their preferences – certainly they can give reasons for them. But how is this possible? Citizens as a rule pay little attention to politics, indeed take only a modest interest in it even during election campaigns when their interest in politics is at its height. And since they pay little attention to politics, it is hardly surprising that they know little about it. Many, in fact, are quite ignorant of basic facts of political life – such as the identity of the party that controls Congress or indeed the name of the congressman who represents them. Which, of course, raises a question of some interest: how do citizens figure out what they think about political issues, given how little they commonly know about them?

Type
Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 16 , Issue 4 , October 1986 , pp. 405 - 430
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1986

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References

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9 The data were made available by the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research. The Center for Political Studies of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan collected the data for the 1972 National Election Study under a grant from the National Science Foundation. Neither the consortium nor the original collectors of the data bear any responsibility for the analyses reported here.

10 We rely upon data from 1972, rather than from a more recent National Election Study, because subsequent NES surveys have not included all of the items required for our analysis.

11 For each item used to assess preferences on racial policy, respondents who said that they were not interested in the issue or who said ‘don't know’ were rescored to the centre of the scale for that item.

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18 This analysis also produced a second component with an eigenvalue slightly greater than the conventional critical value of 1·0. The eigenvalue of the first component, however, was substantially larger than that of the second, while the eigenvalue of the second component was only slightly larger than those of the third and fourth. Again, the eigenvalues declined gradually from there. Only the first component was employed in our analysis. A principal factors solution yielded almost identical results.

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25 These calculations are based upon information from Figure 1 and Table 4.

26 Note that our measures of racial policy preferences and of explanations for racial inequality are both computed from scores based on our principal components analyses. Thus the units of the two scales are similar and the unstandardized estimates of their effects on one another are comparable. Note as well that the two measures have standard deviations that are approximately equal.

27 Evidence of robustness can be found by comparing Figure 2 to the estimates for the well educated in Figure 3.

28 We should admit that we ourselves are surprised at this result for the well educated, for it is the well educated that we expected to find most prone to reason from general principle to specific policy preference. To discover why it is that even the well educated give so much weight to their racial policy preferences in arriving at their explanations for racial inequality is an important task for future research.

29 It is the lack of a connection between our instrument – ideology – and policy preferences among the poorly educated that is responsible for grossly inflating the standard error of the estimated effect of policy preferences on explanations for inequality.

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