Cognition, Vol. 8, No.

1, 1940, pp 125-153

POLITICAL AWARENESS, ELITE OPINION

LEADERSHIP, AND THE MASS
SURVEY RESPONSE
IOHN ZALLER
University of California, Los Angeles

Political affects virtually every aspect of citizens' political attitudes and

awareness

voting behavior. Among its effects are greater attitude stability, greater ideological
consistency, and greater support for a nation's "mainstream" values. Yet there
exists no comprehensive explanation of why political awareness has the pervasive
effects that it has. Nor is there agreement on how the concept of political awareness

should be conceptualized and measured. This article addresses both concerns.

First, it draws on ideas from voting, belief-system, and other studies to develop
a general theory of the effects of awareness. This account centers on how citizens
use cues and other information from
political elites translate their
general value
to

orientations into support for particular polices. Second, the article argues that,
on both theoretical and empirical grounds, political awareness is best measured

by simple tests of factual information about politics.

Political awareness deserves to rank

alongside party identification and
ideology as one of the central constructs in the public opinion field.
Citizens who are more politically aware are more likely to develop
stable attitudes on major political issues (Feldman, 1989), to align
their attitudes on the conventional liberal-conservative continuum
(Chong, McClosky, & Zaller, 1985; Converse, 1964; Stimson, 1975),
and to coordinate their issue preferences with their party attachments
and voting decisions (Belknap & Campbell, 1951-1952). According to
many studies, better-informed persons are more likely to espouse
racial and political tolerance and to support the "mainstream" or "of
ficial" U.S. government line on foreign policy (Chong et al., 1985;
Gamson & Modigliani, 1966; Key, 1961). Finally, political awareness
is a critical determinant of mass attitude change (Converse, 1962;
MacKuen, 1984; Zaller, 1987, 1989).
Notwithstanding all of this, no one has yet explained why political
awareness has such pervasive effects. Several theories have been crafted
to explain effects on a particular outcome or
finding, such as attitude

125
126 ZALLER

constraint, but no one has provided a

comprehensive account of how
one
gets from political awareness to each of its numerous
dependent
effects. The first purpose of this article is to provide such an account.
The second purpose is to determine, from both theoretical and

empirical reasons, how political awareness should be conceptualized

and measured. Variables purporting to measure "political awareness,"
"political expertise," "political sophistication," "cognitive sophisti
cation," "political information," "political involvement," "media ex
posure," and "political interest" appear regularly in the public opinion
literature and are used (along with education) more or less inter

changeably to explain the same general family of dependent variables.

uestions thus arise Are these alternative measures different in any
important ways If so, what are the differences If not, what is the
basic concept of which they are all indicators, and how is this concept
best measured This article will propose answers to these uestions.

A MODEL OF ATTITUDE FORMATION

This section develops a model of how citizens respond to political

news and argumentation and convert their responses into attitude
statements on opinion surveys. The rest of the article w7ill use this
model to explain why political awareness has such wide-ranging effects.
It is necessary to begin with some definitions. First, political awareness
denotes the extent to which individual pavs attention to current
an

political events and understands what he or she has encountered. In

a
phrase, political denotes intellectual (as against merely
awareness

emotional) engagement with public affairs. A person wrho is highlv

aware knows the
major political figures and their policy positions,
understands the norms that govern the political system,
keeps and
current on new
developments.
Because only a minuscule fraction of the public possesses regular,
firsthand experience of politics, political awareness must normally

develop from exposure to the political media. So in a sense, political

awareness denotes the extent to which individuals have encountered
and comprehended media reports of political events, issues, and per
sonages.
A second primitive term in the model is consideration, which is
any reason that might induce an individual to decide
political issue a

one
way or the other. Considerations compound of cognition
are a

and affect that is, a belief concerning an object and an evaluation

of the belief. "The Pentagon wastes a huge amount of
money" is an
example of a consideration that might impel an individual to say, in
response to a
survey uestion, that he or she favors reductions in
POLITICAL AWARENESS 127

defense
spending. The cognitive element in this consideration is the
belief that the
Pentagon wastes money; the implied evaluation of the
belief is
negative. Although more could be said about considerations,
particularly their possible role in guiding perception, the present spare
concept suffices for the tasks of this article.
Finally, there are two types of political communications per
suasive
messages and cueing messages. Persuasive messages are rea
sons tor
taking a position or point of view; if internalized by a person,
they become, by the definition just given, considerations.
Cueing messages consist of claims about the ideological or partisan
implications of a persuasive message. Sometimes a persuasive message
will carry its own cue, as when a
political party promulgates a platform
urging a series of policies. In such cases, almost everyone who en
counters the
original message will become aware of its partisan im
plications. But in other cases, the
partisan implications of a
message
may be obscure, perhaps deliberately so, as when a president urges
a
policy "for the good of the nation." In such cases, individuals may
need a
cueing message to perceive partisan or ideological implications
in the persuasive message.
The axioms of the model may now be stated. Each is stated first
as a
general theoretical posture and then operationalized or elaborated
in more
precise terms.
Al. Reception Axiom. The greater a person's level of attention to an
issue, the more likely he or she is to be exposed to and comprehend in a
word, to receive political messages concerning that issue.
The messages to which people are exposed may be persuasive

messages or cueing messages.

A2. Resistance Axiom. People attempt to integrate incoming political

messages with their other beliefs and values.

Integration, in the context of this model, means resistance to
messages that are recognized as inconsistent with one's values (i.e.,
party attachment, religion, interests). Recognition depends on (1) prior
exposure to a relevant cueing message and (2) availability of the cueing
message in memory at the moment of determining whether to accept
the persuasive message.
So ifmessage is consistent with one's values, it is accepted as
a

a consideration; if it is inconsistent, it may also be accepted, unless

the individual is able to recall information from a cueing message that

enables him to resist the persuasive message.
A3. Recall Axiom. The more
recently a consideration or other political
message has been called to mind or thought about, the less time it takes to
retrieve it from memory and bring it to the top of the head for use.
Conversely, the longer it has been since a consideration or message
has been activated, the less likely that the consideration is accessible
128 ZALLER

at thetop of the head; in the limit,

long-unused consideration may
a

be inaccessible, which is to say, forgotten.

A4. Response Axiom. People normally respond to survey uestions

by averaging across readily available considerations.

A4 indicates that individuals who have been asked a
survey ues
tion do not normally canvass their minds for all considerations relevant
to the given issue; rather, they answer the uestion on the basis of
whatever considerations are
top of the head" (Taylor
available "at the
& Fiske, 1978). If only a single consideration is available, individuals
answer on the basis of that consideration; if two or more considerations

come
uickly to mind, people answer by averaging across available
considerations.

Altogether, then, the model consists of very general claims about

how people ac uire ideas from the external environment (in the form
of persuasive arguments and cues) and transform those ideas into

survey responses. The most distinctive feature of the model is its

stipulation that people base attitude reports on what is, in effect, a
small, nonrandom sample of the considerations in their heads; in view
of this, I will, for convenience, refer to it as the sampling model of
opinion formation and change.
Political awareness is central to this model. People who are, in

general, more
politically aware will be generally attentive to politics
and issues, thus bringing Axiom Al into play. A3 also implies awareness
effects because people who are high on political awareness will think
more often about issues,
thereby increasing the availability of con
siderations. If, moreover, more-aware persons have learned a larger
number of cueing messages and have these messages more available
for use in processing incoming messages, it follows from A2 that they
will also be more resistant to messages that are inconsistent with their
values. Framing the model in terms of attentiveness to particular
issues rather than awareness allows individuals who pay attention to
one or two issues of special personal interest to experience the effects
of political awareness.

Subse uent sections of this article explore the deductive impli

cations of these axioms. They will develop a series of deductions,
review existing evidence pertaining to them, and present new evidence
as
necessary and possible to resolve outstanding issues.

STRUCTURE OF POLITICAL ATTITUDE STATEMENTS

The analysis of the implications of the model begins with an empirical

observation for which there is abundant supporting evidence Although
POLITICAL AWARENESS 129

there is a
large amount of individual variability, most individuals
devote little attention
politics (Kinder & Sears, 1985; Luskin, 1987).
to
From this two
things follow. First, if people pay little attention to
politics, they will be unlikely to possess the cueing messages (via Al)
for
selecting critically (via A2) among the persuasive messages they
encounter. Thus,
they will often end up accepting competing or op
posing considerations (Deduction 1 Dl ); in less technical terms, they
will often find themselves ambivalent and unable to decide
firmly
between opposing positions.
Although few surveys are designed to detect the existence of
ambivalence, the available evidence supports Dl. Zaller and Feldman
(1989) found that, when interviewers invited respondents to discuss
the issues in survey uestions as a prelude to answering the
uestions,
well over half of the sample in a national survey raised
conflicting
considerations that is, reasons both to favor and oppose the issue.
Hochschild (1981) provides ualitative evidence of the same phenom
enon.

Dl claims that people will not,

average, be very critical in
on

deciding which of the messages encountered they will accept. Some

persons, however, may have been exposed to few or no persuasive
arguments on some issues; or, because they rarely think about the
arguments they have accepted, they may be unable (via A3) to call

any considerations to mind in the short time they give themselves

for answering survey uestions. Such persons must presumably answer
uestions with "no opinion." Because people who are low on political
awareness would tend to think less about politics than other persons
would, they should be less likely to offer opinion statements or, con

versely, more
likely to offer
responses (D2). Krosnick and
no
opinion
Milburn (this issue) review the considerable evidence supporting this
deduction.
If people are uncritical about the ideas they accept as considerations,
and if their attitude statements depend on whatever ideas happen to
be at the top of the head at the moment of response, we should expect
a fair amount of variability people's responses to survey uestions
in

(D3). This deduction has been strongly confirmed on numerous oc

casions (e.g., Feldman, 1989).
The model also has strong implications for the structure of response
instability. First, given stable environment, one can assume that the
a

balance of positive and negative considerations in people's minds will

remain stable aswell. What varies, according to the model, is the

particular consideration at the top of the head at a given interview.

Hence, should expect to find a fair amount of purely chance
we

variation (D4) around a stable central tendency (D5). There is wide

130 ZALLER

agreement among researchers who have investigated that this ex

pectation is correct (Achen, 1975, Erikson, 1979; Feldman, 1989; udd,
Krosnick, & Milburn, 1981).
The model implies, in addition, that more
politically aware
persons
will exhibit less chance variability in their survey responses (D6), for
two reasons. First, more-aware
persons are more
likely to possess
(via Al) the cueing messages necessary to reject ideas uncongenial
to their values and are more
likely to have these cues available for
use (via A3); this means they will be more selective about the ideas
they internalize, which in turn means that when they select consid
erations for answering uestions, they will be sampling from a more
homogeneous pool. This will increase the chances that they will sample
the same type of consideration leading them to make the same
survey response each time they confront the given issue. Second,
because most people pay little attention to politics, many will have

difficulty calling to mind more than one or two considerations. Yet

some
highly aware persons may have several considerations (via A3)
available at the top of the head; these highly aware persons end up

averaging across multiple considerations, which further reduces chance

variability.
Existing literature provides e uivocal support for D6. Some re
searchers have reported that more politically aware persons exhibit
less random instability (Dean & Moran, 1977; Feldman, 1989) but
others have not (Achen, 1975; Erikson, 1979). This uestion will therefore
be investigated below.

MEASUREMENT AND CONCEPTUALIZATION

OF AWARENESS

There is good reason for finding, if possible, the best measure of

political awareness. Awareness often has interactive effects, so to test
for them, one must either partition one's data on levels of awareness

or use a
multiplicative term of which awareness is one
component.
In these situations, one can
normally test only one
operationalization
at a time. This creates a need to have strong "out of sample" precon
ceptions on how awareness is best measured. One aim of this article
is to establish such preconceptions, both theoreticallv and empirically.
Political awareness is most appropriately conceptualized in light
of the role it plays in the sampling model. As has become apparent,
awareness is
important to the model because it is associated (via Al)
POLITICAL AWARENESS 131

with reception of political messages and (via A3) with the availability
of these
messages in memory.
Past research has used education, level of
political participation,
level of political interest, media to
exposure and
politics, political
information of On a priori grounds,
as measures
political awareness.
each would seem to havestrengths and weaknesses.
For example,
people who develop the abstract learning skills that
are
supposedly imparted by education would seem likely, by that
account, to be more skilled at
comprehending the political messages
they encounter. Yet education is correlated with media exposure (as
measured below) at the level of
only .37, which suggests that many
educated people have little interest in
politics and may therefore fail
to develop much political awareness. Meanwhile, there are
probably
some
people who regularly scan the newspaper and watch the television
news but who lack the skills to fully absorb the ideas they
cognitive
encounter. Similarly, it is easy to
imagine that some individuals describe
themselves as "interested" in politics because they are fascinated by
the glitter of politics rather than because they understand much about
it. Thus, neither education nor interest nor media exposure would
seem ideal measures ofpolitical awareness.
Political participation has similar weaknesses as a measure of
awareness. Besides
having the weaknesses of self-report measures,
there exist practical difficulties a city garbage collector who must
contribute work or money to the party machine in order to keep his
job would be indistinguishable on most political participation measures
from an activist in an issue-oriented political club, even though their
differences in political awareness (as defined here) could be very great.
It is, moreover, easily possible for a person to achieve very high levels
of political awareness without ever giving money to candidates, working
for parties, or otherwise participating in politics.
This brings us to political information, a measure that, to a greater
extent than any of the others, captures political learning that has

actually occurred that is, political ideas that have been encountered
and comprehended and remain available for use. This is exactly what,
according to the model, we should be trying to measure.
Information is preferable on other theoretical grounds as well.
Alone among the five rival measures of awareness, tests of political
information are relatively immune to social desirability response set.
Tests of information are probably relatively immune to response effects,
such as Bishop, Oldendick, & Tuchfarber's (1984) demonstration that

expressed levels of political interest are readily affected by the context

in which uestions are asked. Finally, unlike political interest and
132 ZALLER

media use, information tests do not re uire respondents to estimate

subjective behaviors or inner states.

OPERATIONAL MEASURES OF AWARENESS

There are, then, both practical measurement and theoretical reasons

for expecting political information to be the best available indicator

of political awareness. Toprovide empirical tests of this expectation,
I use data from the 1,320 respondents in the 1972-1974-1976 panel

study of the National Election Studies (NES). A special advantage of

this dataset is that, over its three waves, it contains multiple, redundant
indicators of the rival measures of awareness, thereby enabling the
construction of more reliable measures than can be achieved in most

surveys.
The items used to operationalize the five measures of awareness
in this dataset are briefly summarized below; fuller descriptions may
be found in the Appendix.
Political Information. The 1972 component of the panel study carries
a sufficiently rich selection of information tests that there is no need

to data from other years. Included are a series of direct information

use

tests (e.g., which party controls Congress, the term of office of a U.S.

senator), ability to evaluate variety of somewhat obscure political

a

figures (e.g., Henry ackson), ability to recall the names of Congressional

candidates, and ability to locate accurately the policy positions of
prominent individuals and groups. Of these several tests, only the
last re uires comment.
Since 1968, the NES has routinely asked respondents to place
both themselves and certain politicians and groups on 7-point policy
scales. It is easy to convert these measures to tests of political infor
mation. For most partisan issues, Democratic politicians, the Democratic

party, and "liberals" should be placed to the left of most Republican

politicians, the Republican party, and "conservatives." The analyst
must, to be sure, exercise some discretion, but there are numerous

cases in which the correct

comparative placements are obvious to any
informed observer.
The 1972 survey has two forms, and separate scales were built
in each form, then standardized and combined; their
alpha reliabilities
are .86 and .87.
Political
Participation. The participation scale includes virtually every
item in the study tapping self-reports of political behavior. The items
cover such matters as
attending rallies, donating money, and belonging
to political organizations. The only omitted
activity items are the reg-
POLITICAL AWARENESS 133

istration and voting items, which were set aside as criterion variables.
Altogether, the scale has 22 items, all scored 0-1, and an alpha reliability
of .81. The measure is
highly skewed, with 20 of the sample scoring
0 and 5
scoring 10 or more of a possible 22 points.
Media Exjiosure. This index measures use of media newspapers,
newsmagazines, TV, and radio that carry political information. Items
were culled from all waves of the panel study. Altogether, the index
has 16 items and an
alpha reliability of .86.
Interest Politics. This scale contains five items but attains
in
only
an
alpha reliability of .811 There are two kinds of items, one asking
whether the respondent
generally follows politics (all waves) and the
other asking about attention to the recent
campaign (presidential years
only). The scale has marked skew, one third of the
a with about sample
scoring 13 higher scale sixth
or on a
15-point and only one scoring 5
or below.
Education. Scored as years in school, education has a retest reliability
of .95.
Note that all five measures of awareness have high and roughly
comparable alpha reliabilities. This will make it difficult to attribute
large differences in performance to differences in reliabilities. High
levels of alpha reliability can, however, be very misleading. If some
persons exaggerate their levels of interest, media exposure, or par
ticipation across all items, and others are just as consistently modest
in these matters, it would produce misleadingly high levels of alpha
reliability. Similarly, large cross-individual differences in standards of
judgment would artificially inflate measured levels of alpha reliability.
To ensure that the five measures of awareness
capture more than
correlated error, each was
separately tested for its ability to predict
voter turnout, a variable that was measured in 1976 from official
records, thereby eliminating the possibility of overstated reports by
respondents. A probit regression was performed in which this be
havioral measure of political involvement was the dependent variable
and the given awareness measure was an independent variable (in
addition to controls for age, race, and region of residence). All estimated
awareness relationships were statistically significant. Coefficients from
to calculate the turnout rates
these regressions were then used shown
in Table 1. As the table shows, all five awareness variables have large
effects on turnout. The effect is strongest for participation, a result
that should be expected, because turnout is similar to other behaviors
measured in the participation scale. More interestingly, interest and
media exposure also outperform information as predictors of turnout.
Because the sampling model has no implications for voting turnout,
the data in Table 1 indicate nothing about the comparative performance
134 ZALLER

TABLE 1
Political Awareness and Vote Turnout

PERCENTILE SCORE ON AWARENESS SCALE

5th 20th 83rd 95th 20 to 95 DIFF.

Information 48 60 82 86 26 pts
Education 50 61 81 86 25 pts
a

Participation 58 85 93 36 pts
Media exposure 49 59 85 90 31 pts
Interest in politics 44 60 84 87 27 pts

Note Cell entries are estimated percentage of respondents who voted in the 1976 election, as

validated by NES.
a209r of all respondents scored in the lowest participation category; hence there exists no 5th

percentile on this scale

of the five measures in the model. Table 1 has been included only as

a
reliability check on the rival measures. The conclusion to draw from
it is that, despite the concern over correlated error, the measures of
interest, media exposure, and participation are measuring something
uitereal. Thus if, as anticipated, information performs in later tests
as the best measure of political awareness, the results in Table 1 will
make it difficult to claim that information's success is due to the
weakness of the competing measures.

ATTITUDE CRYSTALLIZATION

As shown, the model implies that more politically aware persons will
be more likely to express opinions (D2) and more likelv to be stable
in their attitude reports (D6). In these particular senses, more-aware

persons should have more crystallized attitudes.

A test of this expectation has been conducted as follows For each
of seven attitude scales that were carried on the 1974-1976 portion
of the panel, the original policy scale was recoded to a 3-point scale
(two polar positions and a middle position) plus "no opinion." Re
spondents who changed positions on a 3-point scale between 1974
and 1976, or gave no opinion in either wave, were coded as 0 (i.e.,

having uncrystallized attitudes). Respondents giving the same sub

stantive opinion on both waves were coded as 1. The seven 0-1

crystallization variables created in this fashion were aggregated into

a
summary index, giving an overall measure of "stable opinionation"
across seven issues. This index was regressed on the five measures
POLITICAL AWARENESS 135

of awareness to of the effects of the rival

produce a multivariate test
measures on a
single criterion variable.
The standardized coefficients from this test indicate information
is the single .225,
most important determinant of crystallization ((3
p .01), though interest (p .116, p .01) and education (f3 .118,
p .01) also have effects. If one
s uares the coefficients to obtain a
of variance information is approximately 3.6 times
measure
explained,
more
important than its nearest competitor.
The model also
implies that people's attitude statements should
vary randomly around a stable central tendency and that the amount
of this chance variation will be lower for more aware
persons (D5, 6).
The Wiley-Wiley (1970) measurement model for three-wave panel
data permits testing of these That is, it
expectations. permits separation
of "error variance" from changes in the central tendency of people's
responses. One can, in addition, estimate the effect of political awareness

on error variance by estimating the Wiley-Wiley model separately

within both high- and low-awareness groups. The advantage of this
procedure is that, in contrast to the crystallization test, it produces

separate measures for error

stability of the underlying
variance and for
attitude. A disadvantage is that it does not permit direct multivariate
testing; another is that it accommodates only persons who offer opinions
on all three waves of the panel, a form of selective inclusion that is

likely to lead to underestimates of the overall effect of awareness.

The estimated error variances from the Wiley-Wiley tests are
shown in Table 2 for the six attitude items that were carried full-

sample the three-wave NES survey. The estimates are shown sep
on

for respondents in the lower third and upper third of each

arately
awareness scale. As can be seen, persons scoring in the bottom third

of the several awareness scales had higher error variances on all six
issues that did persons scoring in the top third of these scales.
As expected, information outperformed the other measures of
awareness in the sense that it produced larger high-low differences
in response variability than did any other measure. Education was,
however, very close second, producing an average reduction in error
a

variance of 46 compared to 49 for information. These effects in

reducing error variance easily achieve statistical significance, as does
the effect of participation. Media exposure and interest do not have
a statistically significant tendency to reduce error variance.

Comparative performance of the five measures was tested via

the following model

Error Var. A0 A Info.) A2(Dum x ALT)

B3(Dum) B4( ob) B8(Bus)
. . .
 00 (N 00 (N

O O 1-1

uj O

U
o

c
o
3
ns
C
&
"33 (0 o
0)
I

01

S3

it
T5
0)

60 It1 j
C
C
in O
3
)

O ofj 2 M
o o
-

I o l oo x l jI
U c2 3

136
POLITICAL AWARENESS 137

where ALT is the alternative measure of awareness and where Dum

takes the value of 0 for information and 1 for the alternative measure.
The dependent variable consists of 36 error variances (6 issues x 3
awareness levels x 2 awareness measures). The expectation is that
the sign B3 that the for the
on will be negative, indicating slope
alternative measure is less than that for information. This interaction
was obtained and achieved statistical
significance for separate tests
of information
against participation, interest, and media exposure
(t 3.0 in all three models,
s
.01). The effect ran in the
df 30, p
expected direction for education but did not approach statistical sig
nificance.
From D5, the model
implies that, despite the large effects of
awareness on chance
variability, awareness should have no association
with systematic change in the central tendencies of attitude statements.2
This expectation is also supported. The
path coefficients describing
attitude stability average about 0.9 (where 1.0 would indicate perfect

stability) and show no significant tendency to vary linearly by political

awareness. In the case of information,
stability coefficients average
.91 in the low-awareness group and .89 in the high-awareness group.

Altogether, then, these results uphold the sampling model on a

point on which prior evidence has been unclear awareness is associated
with a statistically significant reduction in random variance on typical
attitude items. The results also favor information over alternative
measures of awareness, though the margin of information over ed
ucation is somewhat unclear it is large in the multivariate crystallization
test but modest in serial tests in Table 2.
The discussion of this section has focused on
phenomena that
are sometimes considered methodological artifacts. The next section
broadens the range of the model by showing that it can also explain
the substance of people's attitudes.

SUBSTANCE OF POLITICAL ATTITUDES THE

MAINSTREAM AND POLARIZATION EFFECTS

As indicated below, there is evidence that political elites in the United

States sometimes achieve a consensus in support of particular "main
stream" policies. What, one may ask, would be the expected effect
on public opinion of such an elite consensus Or, to ask the same
of the model What would be the effect on
uestion in the language
all of the persuasive messages carried in
public opinion if virtually
political media on a particular policy were favorable to that policy and
138 ZALLER

if there cueing
messages to alert that the
were no
people policy was

inconsistent with their values

Axiom Al suggests, first of all, that higher levels of awareness

will be associated with levels of exposure to

higher persuasive messages
favoring the mainstream issue. Also, if all of the cueing messages on
the issue were favorable, no one would have any basis via A2 for
resisting it. From this we can deduce that the greater a person's level
of political awareness, the greater the number of pro-mainstream
messages the person would internalize in the form of considerations
and hence, all else e ual, the greater the person's level of expressed

support for the mainstream policy on

surveys (D7).
The notion that exposure to elite discourse automatically increases

support for mainstream policies obviously cannot apply to every type

of policy issue. Many policies are
heatedly contested by elites, so that
no mainstream exists.
The model, however, leads us to expect uite different patterns
of mass attitudes for cases in which policies are contested. To see

why, let us assume a situation in which elites are

roughlv evenly
divided partisan
on a issue, with
partisan camp sponsoring per
one

suasive and cueing messages favoring the liberal position and the
other sponsoring messages in support of the conservative position.

Among liberals in the general public, increases in awareness will

lead to increased exposure to persuasive messages favoring both the
liberal and the conservative position (from Al) and also increased

exposure to cueing messages concerning the issue. Reception of the

cueing messages will enable politically aware liberals (via A2 and A3)
to reject conservative arguments on the issue but will not impede
their internalization of liberal messages. Less politicallv aware liberals,
on the other hand, will be
exposed to few persuasive messages and,
owing to their low exposure to and the availabilitv of cueing messages,
will be unselective about the persuasive messages thev internalize.
Asresult of all this, the most aware liberals will fill up their
a

minds with a large number of considerations that are, on balance,

favorable to the liberal side of the issue. Less-aware liberals, for their
part, will form a small number of considerations, and these consid
erations will not consistently favor the liberal side of the issue. Thus,
with increases in political awareness, the ratio of ideologically consistent
considerations to ideologically inconsistent ones should increase (D8).
Zaller and Feldman (1989), using the open-ended data of the ideas
underlying people's attitude statements, have reported support for
this deduction for the three issues they examine (federal job guarantees,
level of government services, and aid to blacks).
 139
POLITICAL AWARENESS

One may expect that an increasing ratio of ideologically consistent

to
ideologically inconsistent considerations should translate into dif
ferences in people's attitude statements more-aware liberals will be
favorable to the liberal
more
likely to call to mind considerations
position and hence will be more likely to support it. Less-aware liberals
will be less
likely to call to mind considerations of any kind, which
will lead to
higher no-opinion rates, and less likely to endorse the
liberal position when
they do offer an opinion. The logic of this argument
applies e ually to conservatives; that is, increases in awareness make
mass conservatives
increasingly likely to make conservative attitude
statements when asked about the issue.
Thus, in the case of partisan elite, the effect of political
a divided
awareness is to
promote the polarization of attitude reports, as more-
aware liberals and conservatives
gravitate more reliably to the con
ventional liberal and conservative poles (D9).
The data in Figure 1 illustrate both the mainstream and polarization
effects of political awareness. When, in 1964, American elites nearly
the Vietnam War, increases in led nonelite
all supported awareness

FIGURE 1
An illustration of the mainstream and polarization models.

1964
Conservatives
80
Liberals
Percent
70
Supporting
-

American
Involvement go -

In Vietnam

50

1970
Conservatives

Level ol Political Awareness

86 179 153
140 ZALLER

liberals and conservatives to become more

supportive of the mainstream
war Yet when, in 1970, American elites had become deeply
policy.
divided about the war, increases in awareness are associated with

greater polarization of the attitudes of mass liberals and conservatives.4

(In Figure 1, awareness has been measured by simple tests of factual
information. Liberals and conservatives are
persons who rated liberals
higherthan conservatives, or vice versa, on
100-point feeling ther
mometers. Persons supporting American involvement are those who
said either that the United States should "keep troops in Vietnam but

try to end the fighting," which was the administration position Gelb
with Betts, 1979 , or that the United States should take a
stronger
stand by invading North Vietnam.)
The key idea here is that political awareness has different effects
on mass attitudes, depending on whether elites are united on a main
stream policy or divided over
partisan policies. To test this idea more

systematically, I selected items from the 1972-1974-1976 survey that

seemed, on their face, to exemplify mainstream policies and partisan
policies of the early 1970s.
The five mainstream issues were whether the United States should
actively involve itself in the world affairs or
keep to itself
(v291),
whether China should be a member of the United Nations (v62),
whether farmers and business should be allowed to trade with Com
munist nations (v55), whether the government should support the
right of blacks to go to any hotel or restaurant they can afford (vllO),
and whether women should have an e ual role with men (v232). The

partisan issues were whether children should be bused to schools

outside theirneighborhoods to achieve racial integration (v202), whether
the government in Washington should see to it that every person has
a
job and a good standard of living (vl72), and whether the United
States did the right thing insetting into the fighting in Vietnam (v50).
Selection of the items was based on my judgment of the positions
of liberal and conservative elites, political party elites, and the mass
media at the time of the NES study. To partially check these
judgments,
I asked a research assistant to read the platforms of the Democratic
and Republican parties in 1972 and to rate each party on each issue.

Party platforms were used not because they were assumed to be the
most important source of elite cues on these issues but because
they
a convenient means of
represented measuring the extent of elite agree
ment or disagreement on issues. The research assistant was unaware
of my expectations and did the ratings on the basis of instructions
that were conveyed in writing. I expected that both
parties would
explicitly endorse the policies I had identified as mainstream policies
and would take sharply opposing positions on policies I had
judged
POLITICAL AWARENESS 141

as
partisan policies. These expectations were largely confirmed. The
one
exception involved an item about whether the federal government
should guarantee blacks the treatment in hotels and
right e ual to
restaurants. A provision accommodations was a key part of
e ual on
1964 Civil
RightsAct, which, Senator Barry Goldwater notwithstanding,
passed the Congress with majority support from both the Democratic
and Republican
parties. The Democratic platform, as expected, explicitly
endorsed this
policy, but the Republican party, although expressing
general support for e ual rights, made no direct reference to it. I
continue, in light of the bipartisan
history of the Civil Rights Act, to
consider e ual accommodations in hotels and restaurants a mainstream
government policy.
The model used to estimate the effect of awareness on each of
these items is

Prob.(Lib. Response) Prob. (Opinionation) x

Prob.(Lib. Opinionation)
That is, the probability of a liberal response is the probability of offering
any opinion at all, times the probability of making a liberal response,
given that opinion has been offered. The two parts of the model
an

have been estimated separately.

The probability of a liberal opinion, given that an opinion statement
has been made, has been modeled as a
logit function of awareness,
ideological self-designation (7-point scale), party identification (5-point
scale), and standard demographic variables (race, age, income, and
residence in a Southern state). In addition to these variables, the initial

specification of each e uation contained an interaction term for

Awareness x
Ideology and Awareness x
Party. This e uation was

estimated separately by nonlinear least s uares for each of the five

mainstream issues and three partisan issues. To maximize comparability
of results different item formats, each item was recoded to a
across

3-point scale running from 0 to 0.5 to 1.0; in doing the recoding, I

attempted to e ualize variance across the several dependent variables.

The expectation from the model is that for partisan policies, the
two Awareness Values interaction terms will be strong but that for
x

mainstream policies these interactions will be anemic or zero. The

second expectation is that awareness will have an important positive
effect on support for mainstream policies.
When information is used as the measure of awareness, the first

expectation strongly
is confirmed. The Ideology Awareness term
x

is strongly and significantly positive for the busing, job guarantees,

and Vietnam items but nonsignificant in the other e uations. The
142 ZALLER

Party x Awareness interaction is not

significant for any of the partisan
issues, but this would not seem to damage the model. It indicates
only that ideology is the better measure of the political values that
affect policy preferences.
The substantive import of these Awareness x Ideology interactions
is best conveyed by means of graphical analvsis, as shown for the
three partisan issues in the top half of Figure 2. (The coefficient estimates
cannot be published for reasons of space but are available from the

author.)
expectation, concerning the effect of awareness on
The second
support for mainstream policies, was difficult to confirm because of
the presence of multicollinearity. For all five mainstream policies, the
estimated coefficient for awareness was correlated with the estimated
coefficient for Awareness Ideology at the level of .95 or higher.
x

Because of this, neither awareness, ideology, nor their interaction

achieved statistical significance in several e uations. Howrever, mul

ticollinearity can greatly reduce the precision of estimates even when

the true effect of one of the collinear variables is zero (Hanushek &
ackson, 1977; Rao & Miller, 1971). To test whether the Awareness x

Value interaction terms had a

significant effect on the mainstream
policies, I reestimated each e uation without the interaction terms

FIGURE 2
The effect of awareness on
political attitudes.

Gov't Guaranteed obs Busing for Integration

Wrong on Vietnam

Liberals

Probability 0 50
-

ol Liberal
Response

Political Awarness

Admit China to UN Role ol Women E ual Accommodations

Liberal
Liberals Liberals

Probability
ol Liberal
Response

Political Awareness

Note Slopes based on regression coetlicients. as described in text

POLITICAL AWARENESS 143

and did F-test to effect

an see if the omissions had a significant on

the residual sum of

s uares. For anti-isolationism, women's rights,
trade with Communist nations, and admission of China to the UN,
the F-test indicated that the interaction terms had no
importance.
Moreover, with the interactions omitted, awareness took on a statistically

significant positive coefficient in all four cases, as expected. In the

fifth case,
e ual accommodations, the Party x Awareness coefficient
remained significant, but with the
nonsignificant Ideology x Awareness
term omitted, awareness had the
expected positive effect on support
for this mainstream race
policy.5
The bottom half of
Figure 2 graphically illustrates the results for
the mainstream issues. Two mainstream issues anti-isolationism and
trade with Communist nations are not shown in Figure 2 but very

closely resemble the results for the item on admission of China to the
United Nations, shown in the
figure.
Of the mainstream issues,
only the women's role item poses any
problem for the model, which is that, despite the mainstream norm,
ideology clearly has
important effect on people's attitudes. Note,
an

however, that awareness does significantly increase support for e ual

rights, as it is expected to do, and that, in contrast with the partisan
issues, it functions to dampen rather than to magnify differences
between liberals and conservatives, thereby increasing consensus among
the most-aware segments of society.

Altogether, then, the mainstream results, along with those for

the three partisan issues, support the two basic deductions of the
model (D7,9) concerning the effects of a divided elite and of a united
elite on mass
opinion.6
Information was used as the measure of awareness in the tests
in Figure 2 because preliminary investigation showed that it specified
the effects of better than any of the alternative measures.
awareness

That is, the direct effects of awareness on support for the mainstream
issues, and the interactive effects of awareness on the partisan issues,
were larger when an information scale was used than when other
measures were used.
To construct a test of the statistical significance of these performance
differences, I reasoned as follows If information has the same true
effect as given
a alternative measure, the residual sums of s uares
from the eight e uations should be roughly e ually large, whether
one is using information or an alternative measure of awareness. This
will be the null hypothesis. In light of the theoretical reasons adduced
earlier, the alternative hypothesis will be that the residual sums of
s uares are smaller across the eight
issue e uations when information
is used as the measure of awareness. Assuming independence across
144 ZALLER

the eight items, simple t test can be used to decide between the
a

null and alternative hypotheses. For serial tests of information against

participation, interest, and media exposure, it was possible to reject

the null hypothesis of no difference at the .01 level of confidence. For
the test of information against education, the null hypothesis could
be rejected at the level of .05. Thus here, as in the case of response

stability, information appears to be somewhat more effective than

education and clearly more effective than participation, interest, and
media exposure.
The dynamic that gives rise to the polarization of mass liberals
and conservatives in cases of elite division can also explain the ap

pearance of attitude constraint that is, the tendency for persons who
are liberal (or conservative) on one issue to be similarly liberal (or

conservative) on a whole range of other issues. In fact, the logic of

the polarization effect is identical to Converse's (1964) account of
attitude constraint.

According to Converse (1964), ideologies originate among a "min

uscule" number of "creative elites" and subse uently diffuse through
the public. Converse argues, however, that the diffusion of elite-
created belief systems is highly imperfect. Only the politically aware

pay enough attention to elite discourse to find out the ideological

implications of different policies in Converse's terms, to learn "what
goes with what." As a result, attitude constraint of the conventional
liberal-conservative type develops mainly among the more politically
aware strata.

Compare this argument to the representation of the polarization

model in Figures 1 and 2 Highly aware liberals and conservatives (or
Democrats and Republicans) look to appropriate partisan elites to

ac uire "cueing messages" concerning "what goes with what." Having

ac uired this information, they are able to become consistently liberal
or
consistently conservative across a range of issues. The less-aware,
as shown in these
figures, are less likely to ac uire the attitude that
is conventionally appropriate to their partisan orientation and hence
less likely to develop "attitude constraint" across issues. The typical

finding of belief-systems studies that average interitem correlations

among issues are higher among more aware citizens is just a gen
eralization of this pattern to a cluster of ideologically charged issues.
Thus, the existence of consistency across issues, and the well-docu
mented tendency for consistency to become stronger with increases
in awareness, can both be explained by the sampling model (D10,ll).
Two additional inferences can be drawn from the
polarization
effect. First, suppose that more-aware persons are, by some means,
given extra time to think about their time, that
survey responses
POLITICAL AWARENESS 145

is, to call to the "top of the head" a larger than usual number of
considerations and to form their survey response by averaging across
thislarger set of ideas. Given that, as the polarization argument con
tends, they are sampling from a fairly ideologically homogeneous
pool, the effect
ought to be to make their attitude reports more reliable
indicators of their underlying ideology because multi-element samples
have less random variance than one-element
samples. The effect of
extra time on the attitudes of less-aware
persons, however, should
be different. Because less-aware the
persons possess, according to
model, an ideologically heterogeneous pool of considerations, averaging
should not make their
responses more ideologically reliable.
Extra time to form
survey responses, in sum, should make the
attitude statements of
politically aware persons more ideologically
consistent but should have less effect on attitude consistency among
the less-aware (D12).
This deduction from the model has been confirmed in two ex

periments. One is the study by udd and Downing in this volume.

Greater practice in thinking about the relations among different issues
was used to
experimentally induce greater attitude consistency, but
the effect registered only among the more politically aware subjects.
The other confirmation is in Zaller and Feldman (1989). In a national
survey, they experimentally asked half of the sample to say what
came to mind when they thought about a standard issue uestion
and then to answer the uestion; controls answered the uestion in
the usual way. Among highly aware persons, the effect of this "stop
and think" treatment was to increase the correlation between the
attitude statement and a measure of the
person's ideology; among
less-aware persons, the treatment did not increase this correlation.
The notion that individuals form attitude statements on the basis
of ideas that are at the tops of their heads can
explain one other well-
established empirical regularity. It has often been shown that the
order in which uestions are asked can affect responses (Schuman &
Presser, 1981). This may be explained by A3, which holds that the
more recently a consideration has been activated, the more available

it is for use in answering uestions. Different uestion orders bring

different considerations to the tops of people's heads, thereby changing
the responses given (D13).

ALTERNATIVE E PLANATIONS

There are, to be sure, alternative explanations for the empirical reg

ularities noted in this article, but these explanations tend to focus
146 ZALLER

narrowly on
particular substantive example, Stouffer
problems. For
(1954) argues that better-educated persons are more supportive of
civil liberties because they are more likely to give a "sober second

thought" to freedom issues; Allport (1954) cites the greater personal

security of educated persons as an explanation for their greater racial
liberalism; Bobo and Licari (1989) contend that education promotes
political tolerance because it is associated with "more sophisticated
modes of reasoning"; (1968) and Hahn (1970) suggest
and Hamilton
that higher levels of support for the Vietnam War among educated

persons may be due to "upper-middle class authoritarianism" (Ham

ilton, p. 446). Each of these arguments is perhaps plausible on its
face, but none generalizes easily to other issues. The more parsimonious
explanation of the sampling model would be that better-educated

persons had in each case been more heavily exposed to mainstream

elite values.
In a careful of work, ackman (1978) notes that education
piece
is associated with liberalism on some race items (e.g., "strict segregation"
of the races) but not on others (e.g., busing). She concludes from this
that, contrary to much past research, education promotes onlv "su
perficial" learning of democratic values rather than genuine commitment
to them. The alternative argument of this article, of course, is that
the first type of item taps a mainstream policy and the second a

partisan policy.
There also exist alternative explanations for attitude constraint.
Most stress the internal sources of attitude constraint that is, as

sociations that develop within the mind as a result of thought about

issues. These explanations also stress that more politically aware persons
are more
ideologically consistent than are less-aware persons because
they think more about politics (Fiske & Kinder, 1981; udd & Krosnick,
1989; see also Luskin, 1987).
Though not denying theimportance of intrapsvchic connections
and the individual's own
thought in developing them, the sampling
model manages to explain attitude consistency' without referring to
such mental organization. It instead stresses external sources of con
straint, namely, the pattern of elite division or nondivision on the
given issue. In maintaining this focus on external rather than internal
sources of constraint, the sampling model is able to explain the uite
different effects that awareness has in different contexts, as in Figures
1 and 2.
In sum, scholars haveproposed numerous alternative explanations
for the empirical regularities explained by the sampling model, but
each applies to only one or perhaps two phenomena rather than to
the range of phenomena covered by the sampling model.
POLITICAL AWARENESS 147

SUMMARY AND DISCUSSION

This article has tried to do two

things first, to show that a simple
model that affords a central
place to political awareness can explain
a wide
range of empirical regularities, and second, to establish that
political awareness is best measured by tests of political information.

MEASUREMENT AND CONCEPTUALIZATION

OF AWARENESS

One is politically to the that

aware
degree one
chronically exposes
oneself to and comprehends media reports of political events, issues,
and personages. It has been
argued that political awareness, understood
in this way, is best measured
by tests of political information. Infor
mation is preferable theoretical
on
grounds because, alone among the
rival measures of awareness, it captures political ideas that have
actually
gotten into people's heads while being, at the same time, relatively
immune to social desirability response set and individual differences
in standards of self-description. Information is preferable on empirical

grounds because it specifies, better than alternative measures can,

relationships that political awareness ought to specify. The performance
advantage for information is not always large, but it shows up across
three uite different types of tests and achieves statistical significance
in two of the cases.

THE SAMPLING MODEL

The strengths of the sampling model are breadth and

parsimony. The
model consists of four axioms that are at least modestly plausible,
and it is able to explain 13 varied empirical regularities, many of which
are well established in the research literature. These include attitude
constraint, response stability, support for mainstream policies such
as internationalism and racial e uality, and uestion order effects,
among others. Additional deductions from the four basic axioms have
been developed elsewhere (Zaller, 1990; Zaller & Feldman, 1989),

including priming effects, generational differences in persuasibility,

and certain nonobvious patterns of attitude change.
In my opinion, the greatest weakness of the political psychology
field is that it has proliferated theoretical mechanisms that are crafted
while neglecting develop mech
to particular empirical problems to

anisms that span multiple domains. Researchers focus on the single

148 ZALLER

problem that interests them while ignoring links between seemingly

similar phenomena (e.g., racial and political tolerance, or response

instability and uestion order effects). The greatest value of the sampling
model, I believe, is that it takes concrete steps toward redressing this
dominant practice.
The model, however, has the vice of its virtues Breadth and

parsimony have been achieved at the expense of oversimplification.

It ispossible toargue, with justice, that each of the axioms fails to
capture fully what actually occurs. Let me review some of the most

important difficulties.
The assertion in Al that greater attention to an issue is associated
with greater reception of messages concerning that issue would seem

initially unexceptionable. Yet what is it to which people are exposed

Almost certainly, different people can be exposed to the same message
and yet receive uite different messages, or perhaps no intelligible
message, depending on their prior knowledge. For example, suppose
the Air Force stages an elaborate spectacle for the maiden flight of
the B2, its new flying-wing bomber, to show that the plane really
works; some members of the public may then receive this message,
but others may "see" in the staged spectacle a "batmobile" that is

"obviously useless." Such presumed differences in reception (given

e ual attentiveness to the same message) will depend on people's
previously existing schema, which may differ both in content and
degree of development across individuals (Fiske & Kinder, 1981). Yet
the sampling model, as presently constituted, makes no allowance
for schema effects of this type.
Consider next the limitations of the resistance axiom, A2, which
claims that people can resist persuasion only to the extent that they
have ac uired an
message. It is not clear that
appropriate cueing
resistance to a message is separate from reception of the message.
For example, someone who "sees" in the maiden flight of the B2 a
comical Batmobile and who sees this, incidentally, because he or
she is an avowed pacifist does not need to engage in a separate
evaluation to see whether the message should be internalized as a
pro-B2 consideration. Perception and evaluation may constitute a
single,
schema-driven step.
The response axiom, which claims that individuals answer
survey
uestions by averaging across considerations recalled from memory,
is at firstglance the most contestable of the axioms. It is openly at
odds with aconsiderable research literature, which argues that, instead
of making "memory-based" judgments from available ideas, as in A4,
people's judgments are normally made at the point of initial processing
of incoming information (Hastie & Park, 1986; Lichtenstein & Srull,
POLITICAL AWARENESS 149

1987; Lodge, McGraw, & Stroh, 1989; McGraw & Pinney, this issue).
That is,
people update their evaluations "on line" as they encounter
new
information, storing the updated evaluation in long-term memory
but
discarding most of the information that was used for the update.
When asked to
express an attitude, people simply retrieve their updated
evaluation and report it. As Hastie and Park maintain, on-line attitude
formation is the norm in social
cognition.
Notwithstanding all of this, the response axiom used here is
defensible as a first
approximation of how political attitude statements
are made. First, researchers do not contend that on-line
judgments
occur
automatically; they occur
only when a
person is personally
involved in a
subject and interested in forming attitudes about it. The
uestion thus arises how important is it to most citizens to maintain
updated attitudes on the extensive range of subjects on which pollsters
routinely in uire To judge by what leading political researchers say
about the centrality of politics in the public mind, it would seem not
very likely (Kinder & Sears, 1985). The attitudes of most people on
most political issues almost
certainly fall into a category of personal
unimportance a category to which the on-line model is not especially
applicable.
Second, the impetus to the current emphasis on on-line processing
was the
repeated disappointment in finding negligible or even negative
correlations between what people could recall from memory at the
moment of judgment and the judgments actually expressed. This and
other evidence caused researchers to conclude that people were for
getting most of the information on which judgments were made, so
that what was later remembered bore no particular relation to the
attitude. But, contrary to this general pattern, correlations between
attitude statements and recalled ideas in the domain of political attitudes
are neither
negative nor negligible. According to the available evidence,
they range between about .40 and about .80, depending on how
they are assessed (Zaller & Feldman, 1989).
But although the memory-based judgment process embodied in
A4 is defensible, it is defensible only as a first approximation of what
must actually occur. It seems likely that people engage in what might
be called bounded on-line processing of political information; that is,
they make on-line evaluations of limited subjects but do not integrate
each updated evaluation into a fresh global evaluation. So if, for
example, people encounter information about third-generation welfare
families, they make an on-line update of their judgment of the value
of social spending for the alleviation of poverty. If, sometime later,
they encounter information about the needs of homeless persons,
they update their judgment on the unmet welfare needs of the nation.
150 ZALLER

But what they do not do, unless called to do so by an unusual event,

is to update their global attitudes on welfare spending. So, when
asked to make a global evaluation of the welfare system in a survey,

they will have no up-to-date global evaluation to retrieve but will

instead have to make an on-the-spot judgment from the (updated)
considerations that come most readily to mind. By this account, A4
is not so much wrong as underspecified memory-based evaluation
occurs, but so, at another level, does on-line processing.
In view of these and no doubt other limitations, the sampling
model must be considered provisional. It performs useful work in
forging theoretical links between diverse research problems, but it is
far from giving a complete account of how political attitudes form
and change. Future work should attempt to retain the range and

simplicity of the present model while amending it to be in closer

agreement with our best understanding of reality.

A draft of this article presented at the Third Annual Meetings of the Political
was

Methodology Society. gratefully acknowledge helpful comments on this research by

I

oel Aberbach, Larry Bartels, Stanely Feldman, Barbara Geddes, ohn ackson, Robert
Luskin, Dwaine Marvick, ohn Petrocik, on Krosnick, and Lee Sigelman. I would also
like to thank Hiroaki Minato and Matt Lyons for excellent research assistance. I alone
am
responsible for any errors the article may contain. Data for the article were originally
collected by the National Election Studies and were made available through the Inter-

University Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan
and the Institute for Social Research at UCLA. Correspondence should be addressed
to ohn Zaller, Department of Political Science, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA 90024.

NOTES

1. Variables measuring concern with election outcomes scale poorly with the interest
items and are too few to form their own scale. Hence, I do not analvze them.

2. The model has very strong implications about the effect of awareness on attitude
change for cases in which thepolitical environment is unstable. This effect, however,
is strongly nonlinear and so cannot be captured bv the stabilitv coefficients in the

Wiley-Wiley (1970) model. Space precludes the examination of these effects in the
present article.
3. For the interest and participation measures, there unexpectedlv strong tendency'
was an

for the middle awareness

groups to have the highest stability coefficients. The tendency
did not achieve statistical significance in either case with a two-tailed test, as is appropriate
for unexpected results, but was close to significance. I can think of no simple theory

to account for this effect.

4. To validate these claims concerning elite and division, I asked my research

consensus

assistant to classify cover stories on Vietnam in Newsweek and Time. In 1964, prowar
POLITICAL AWARENESS 151

cover stones outnumber antiwar 10 to 1; in 1970,

ones
by a
margin of approximately
the ratio was about 1 to 1.

5. It is not because
permissible to do a
parallel test omitting the direct awareness term

awareness must be in the if Awareness is included.

e uation x
Ideology
6.
Although theoretical vocabularies differ from that used here, Gamson and Modigliani
(1966) and Chong et al. (1985) also provide empirical support for D7, 9.

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APPENDI

AWARENESS MEASURES

Information Scale. The panel information scale contains several tests of

respondents' ability to correctly locate candidates or groups on a 7-point policy
scale. Each test is based on a combination of three variables an initial 7-point

policy self-placement scale and two variables asking the respondent to place
a
group or candidate on the same scale. In order to be counted correct, a
POLITICAL AWARENESS 153

respondent must state an opinion and also locate the two candidates or groups
in
appropriate left- right order.
The location tests common to both forms are McGovern Nixon on pro
gressive tax scale (vl79 and vl80, or v662 and v663, depending on form of
interview); McGovern Wallace on aid to minorities (v632 and v631); Democrats
Republicans school busing (v207 and v206); McGovern Nixon on job guar
on

antees (v614 and v615, or vl73 and vl74); McGovern Nixon on rights of
accommodation (v622 and v623); McGovern Nixon on Vietnam (vl85 and
vl86, or v591 and v592); McGovern Nixon on liberal-conservative scale (v653
and v654); Wallace Democrats on liberalism- conservatism (v655 and v656).
On the last three tests,
respondents had to place the candidates at least two
unitsapart in order to receive credit for a correct answer.
The additional Form I items are of (i.e., willingness to rate)
recognition
Henry "Scoop" ackson (v259) and Pete McClosky (v263) (dk 0, else 1);
which party is more conservative (v500); how times a
president can be
many
reelected (v943); terms of U.S. senator and representative (v944 and v949);
party control of Congress prior to and after recent election (v950, v951); recall
names of House candidates (based on v945 and v946). The additional Form

II items were China's form of government (v59) and China's UN status (v60);

Democrats Republicans on Vietnam (vl89 and vl88); liberals conservatives

on student unrest (v685 and v684).

The final scales were created by adding up all 0-1 variables, averaging
across
missing data in the standard way.
Participation Scale. The variables are v392, v396, v468 through v472, v474,
v475; v2195 through v2199; v3529, v3530, v3532 through v3535, v3537, v3538.
Media Exposure Scale. The media exposure scale contains 16 items, each
coded to a 0-3 range. All but three of these items are based on two separate
variables the first asking whether an individual attends to a particular medium,
and the second, asked only of those replying affirmatively to the first, in uiring
how much attention is paid to that medium. The item pairs are v456 and v457;
v459 and v460; v461 and v462; v463 and v464; v2036 and v2037; v2046 and
each of v2050, v2053, v2056; v3600 and v3601; v3602 and v3603; v3604 and
v3605; v3606 and v3607; v3639 and v3646. The following items were used
individually v2031, v3648, and v3651.
Political Interest Scale. The variables are vl63, v476, v2027, v3031, v3599.