Political Attitudes And Behavior Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Political attitudes are mental positions about political objects, such as political leaders and parties, policies and proposals, or political groups and institutions. They are relative, enduring evaluations containing a cognitive and an affective component. The study of political attitudes engages with themes like political ideology, egalitarianism, support for democratic values, political tolerance, racism, political efficacy and political alienation, political trust, nationalism, and patriotism. It also involves the study of dispositions like political information and party identification, which lead to political behaviors.

The study of political behavior, on the other hand, focuses on actions or intentions of action and also covers a large span of activities: from passive acts, such as staying informed about politics and media attentiveness, to citizen engagement activities, such as working to solve community problems or raising money for charity. Political behaviors can be conventional political participation activities that occur near election time, like voting, donating money to a candidate, fundraising, or even running for public office, but they can also be nonconventional activities like attending a public protest or demonstration, or boycotting commercial products.

Significant Debates In Research

Behaviorism dominated the analysis of political attitudes in the 1960s, proposing a stimulus-response model of political behavior, while the cognitive revolution dominated the analysis in the 1980s, focusing on information processing and the structure of cognitive systems. As David Sears and his colleagues explain, social cognition studies using self-reports and thought listing find that, while some attitudes are generated from cognitive elaborative processes, others are created without much thinking, but rather rely on affective processes.

While research on political attitudes is, at heart, concerned with the process of decision making, research on political behavior is mostly interested in predicting its outcomes, particularly voter turnout. The act of voting is often used as a proxy for other political behaviors, and organizational membership provides evidence of involvement with no electoral groups. In addition, new domains, such as consumer activism and cyberspace, provide opportunities to record novel political activities.

Political attitudes are studied to understand how the attitudes change systematically or randomly over time and through different contexts. Since attitudes are not directly observable, scholars turn to their qualities. Attitude accessibility indicates the speed or easiness by which an attitude can be brought from memory or, in other words, its response latency. Attitude strength research finds that strong attitudes demonstrate persistence and stability over long periods of time, resistance to opposing arguments, and impact on cognitive processes and behavior or behavioral intentions. Attitude strength is often confused with another feature of attitudes, their extremity. An extreme attitude is positioned at a high distance from the midpoint, either toward the very positive or the very negative end of the attitude continuum. On the other hand, attitude ambivalence generates on the basis of positive and negative evaluations of the same attitude object, which are independent of each other. In addition, uncertainty denotes how confident or sure individuals are about their attitudes. Finally, salience, or importance, is the degree of personal significance of the object under evaluation.

One of the central debates in political attitudes research is that of their stability, which was raised by Philip Converse in 1964 after examining the American National Election panel data from 1956 to 1960. He suggested that the majority of citizens do not hold stable ideological attitudes, but seem to provide opinions at random on the basis of the considerations that are salient at that point in time. These opinions were labeled nonattitudes and were shown to be prevalent among the nonsophisticated segments of the electorate.

Converse’s work on belief systems is now a classic segment of the political attitudes’ research, as it generated serious concerns on the public’s political abilities. His controversial conclusions set in motion a series of studies during the next forty years that offered methodological or historical counterexplanations to his original pessimistic findings of nonattitudes in the United States. Revisionist scholars blamed the inadequate measures rather than the citizens. Others argued that social modernization generated higher levels of sophistication. This contextual explanation aligns with Western European studies showing that the ideological positions of citizens are more stable. As Russell Dalton and Hans-Dieter Klingermann show, European publics appear overall more consistent in their political attitudes. The jury is still out, and some studies show the glass half empty while others show it half full, often drawing on the same data sets.

Political schema, a related controversy, provides an alternative conceptualization of the way citizens think about politics. Schema scholars argue that people use abstract categories like religion, social class, or race to make sense of the complex political world. James Kuklinski and his colleagues assert that citizens handle information via these organized and interconnected memory structures that allow for efficient and economic processing, but also introduce biases in citizens’ judgment processes.

John Zaller, who was interested in how attitudes are made, also challenged the ideal of a fully informed and rational citizenry. Zaller argues that citizens construct attitudes on the basis of a sample of considerations that are available in their memory at that point in time. When they are tasked with providing a judgment, people recall what they like and dislike, and on the basis of these considerations, they provide an answer. However, not everyone agrees. The online model proposed by Milton Lodge and Charles Taber argues that evaluations form automatically when new information is received, and they are stored in memory as a running tally of the target object. When citizens are asked to provide a favorable or unfavorable evaluation, they are able to do so, despite the fact that they often have forgotten the pieces of evidence that made up its cognitive content.

Measurement Approaches And Data

Surely, the study of attitudes does not send a single message, and as in most matters, no model or study is a cure-all, particularly in such an interdisciplinary and data-rich field. The World Values Survey (WVS), the International Social Survey Program (ISSP), and the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) provide globe wide, cross-national survey questions on political attitudes and behavior. Regional surveys like the Afrobarometer, East Asian Barometer, Latinobarometer, and the New Europe Barometer include a large number of countries. In addition, comparative data are available from the Eurobarometer survey, which includes all member states of the European Union (EU). Scholars in search of measurement instruments can consult the Measures of Political Attitudes series, edited by John Robinson, Phillip Shaver, and Lawrence Wrightsman, which contains reviews of about 150 attitude measures.

The Complex Attitude-Behavior Relationship

The investigation of the relationship between attitudes and behaviors is not without its own caveats. First, researchers cannot directly observe attitudes, and must rely on self-reported measures that contain some form of interference. As James Kuklinski notes, when people are asked to express themselves, “pure” attitudes do not exist. Survey researchers often experience citizens offering “improvised” positions when trying to relay their attitudes toward public matters.

While most behaviors are observable physical things, limitations similar to those with attitudes occur when measuring intentions of behavior. Intentions might not truthfully reflect behaviors when social desirability concerns are in place. Citizens are motivated to appear virtuous and report having engaged in desirable behaviors, even when they have not done so, or done so less often. Characteristically, voting turnout in surveys is consistently over reported by ten to fifteen percentage points.

Relying on memory and recall also creates problems, particularly when a behavior occurred a long time period before the measure is taken. An additional complication is that several attitudes might drive a particular behavior, and political researchers have to identify which is the right one. Another acknowledged limitation is the reciprocal causal relationship between attitudes and behaviors, with attitudes determining the behaviors, and behaviors influencing the attitudes.

Scholars will continue to debate these issues and seek solutions. The expansion of theoretical and empirical knowledge toward new fields like neuroscience, genetics, evolutionary psychology, and research on political emotions offers rich opportunities for exploring exciting puzzles and new debates on political attitudes and behavior.

Bibliography:

Converse, Philip E. “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics. In Ideology and Discontent, edited by D. E. Apter. New York: Free Press, 1964.
Dalton, Russel J., and Hans-Dieter Klingermann. The Oxford Handbook of Political Behavior. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Kuklinski, James H., ed. Citizens and Politics: Perspectives from Political Psychology. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Kuklinski, James H., Robert C. Luskin, and John Bolland. “Where Is the Schema? Going Beyond the ‘S’Word in Political Psychology.” American Political Science Review, 85, no. 4 (1991): 1341–1356.
Lodge, Milton, and Charles Taber. “Three Steps toward a Theory of Motivated Political Reasoning.” In Elements of Reason: Cognition, Choice, and the Bounds of Rationality, edited by A. Lupia, M. McCubbins, and S. Popkin, 183–213. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Robinson, John H., Phillip R. Schaver, and Lawrence S.Wrightsman, eds. Measures of Political Attitudes. San Diego, Calif.: Academic Press, 1999.
Sears, David O., Leonie Huddy, and Robert Jervis, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Zaller, John. The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

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