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Peter DeBaugh
October 3, 2021
PS 5155 – Political Behavior
Midterm Exam

Question One: Converse Argues that the majority of responses in survey questions are non-
attitudes. Why does Converse reach this conclusion? Is Converse’s findings still relevant
today? How was the field of public opinion research responded to Converse’s conclusion
about non-attitudes? Make sure to address Zaller’s RAS model and Lodge and Taber’s
Online processing models.

In his work, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” Converse describes his

finding that respondents interviewed at separate points in time have “non-attitudes.” Converse’s

finding has become a central pillar of debate in the field of political science. There have been

several follow-up studies conducted to further his research or try to disprove it.

From the responses Converse concluded several key points. He found that “barely one in

ten Americans comes to politics with an ideology in mind” (Kinder & Kalmoe, 2017). His claim

that “organization (or structure) among the opinions expressed by ordinary citizens was almost

nonexistent” (Kinder & Kalmoe, 2017) led him to formulate the black and white model of

opinion. This model posits that “on any particular issue, the public can be partitioned into one of

just two discontinuous classes: the first made up of citizens who possess genuine opinions and

hold onto them tenaciously; the second composed of citizens who are unacquainted with the

issue and, when pressed, either confess their ignorance outright or, out of embarrassment or

misplaced civic obligation, invent an attitude on the spot” (Kinder & Kalmoe, 2017). This is

where the idea of non-attitudes begins, with the second group who are trying either to avoid

embarrassment or who believe it is their civic duty to come up with an attitude that they will later

forget about because they do not hold onto that attitude firmly. The people that Converse

interviewed over the course of his study fell mostly into the second group, and each time they
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were interviewed their attitudes and responses had changed because (i) they forgot about them,

(ii) an event shaped their view on the subject, or (iii) they did not fully understand the issue they

were being asked about.

Converse’s findings are still highly relevant today. Although his black and white model

is probably not the best model for belief systems in mass publics, it is an important starting point

for others to build off his research and findings. Converse was correct about the public being

split into groups of people with opinions and attitudes, but there are varying degrees to which

individuals are knowledgeable and have attitudes about certain issues rather than being starkly

black and white.

After Converse published his findings regarding non-attitudes, other public opinion

scholars attempted to replicate the findings, disprove his claims, or produce their own models of

how people form attitudes and opinions. Notably, John Zaller introduced the Receive-Accept-

Sample (RAS) model. In his book, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion, Zaller builds on

what Converse found and further details how individuals form opinions and why those opinions

change over time.

The first important part of Zaller’s argument is that he posits that the public is split into

elites and non-elites. He asserts that the elites are the most knowledgeable about politics and

hold their attitudes the most firmly. Those who are not elites have varying degrees of conviction

about their political beliefs. Zaller’s argument that there are elites and non-elites builds off the

black and white model that Converse created. Zaller’s RAS model says that people are

consistently exposed to political information and they do have some considerations, but the non-

elites only have partial considerations and thus are unable to give stable responses each time they

are surveyed.
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The first part of Zaller’s model asserts that the non-elite group get their information from

the elites: through news, television, radio, newspaper, or they know a political elite close to them

– a person who closely follows politics and is able to relay information to other people. Zaller

does say that the most common way non-elites receive information is through mass media. He

says that the non-elite group is very rarely getting, ““just information,” because it is unavoidably

selective and unavoidably enmeshed in stereotypical frames of reference that highlight only a

portion of what is going on” (Zaller, 1992). Zaller concludes that elite discourse, as he calls it,

shapes the way non-elites form opinions and attitudes.

The beginning and a very important part of Zaller’s RAS model is,

People are continuously exposed to a stream of political news and information, much of it
valanced so as to push public opinion in one direction or the other. But, owing to the
generally low levels of attention to politics in this country, most people on most issues
are relatively uncritical about the ideas they internalize… they fill up their minds with
large stores of only partially consistent ideas, arguments, and considerations. When
asked a survey question, they call to mind as many of these ideas as are immediately
accessible in memory and use them to make choices among the options offered to them.
But they make these choices in great haste – typically on the basis of the one or perhaps
two considerations that happen to be at the “top of the head” at the moment of response.
(Zaller, 1992)

Thus, according to Zaller, people are constantly receiving information on politics, but the non-

elites are too busy with their regular everyday lives to pay close enough attention to process the

information they receive on each topic. And when non-elites are asked a question, instead of

thinking of all “considerations,” which Zaller and Kelley define as, “any reason that might

induce an individual to decide on a political issue one way or the other,” they look for the first

couple of items that are most relevant or recent in their brain and give those as a response

(Zaller, 1992).
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Elites share information with non-elites who receive that information. The next step is

whether the non-elite resists the information or accepts the information. Zaller claims that,

“people tend to resist arguments that are inconsistent with their political predispositions, but they

do so only to the extent that they possess the contextual information necessary to perceive a

relationship between the message and their predispositions” (Zaller, 1992). If a person already

knows some information on an issue and can contextualize it with the new information, they are

better equipped to resist or accept the new information. This is very different from Converse’s

model in which he claims that people either have political knowledge or do not; there is no scale

of knowledge in the black and white model.

The last stage of Zaller’s model is the sampling of the non-elites. He claims, “Individuals

answer survey questions by averaging across the considerations that are immediately salient or

accessible to them” (Zaller, 1992). This again shows the difference between this model and

Converse’s black and white model, where Converse claims that non-elites do not show any sign

of retrieving salient considerations and answer ignorantly or not at all. Zaller even says,

“individuals do not typically possess ‘true attitudes’ on issues, as conventional theorizing

assumes, but a series of partially independent and often inconsistent ones” (Zaller, 1992). Where

Converse stops directly at “people do not have true attitudes,” Zaller continues the theory by

saying people have at least partial or inconsistent attitudes that inform the responses they give.

Another important piece by Zaller and Feldman rejects the idea that people hold non-

attitudes; “We reject the premise of Converse’s black-and-white model, which is that most

response fluctuation is due to essentially random guessing by people who have no meaningful

opinions. Our claim is that even when people exhibit high levels of response instability, the

opinions they express may still be based on real considerations” (Zaller & Feldman, 1992). They
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say that even when response instability is high, people still have attitudes on the subjects to

which they are responding. The reason they reject Converse’s claim that there are “non-

attitudes” is because individuals are ambivalent most of the time. “Their choices do not, in most

cases, reflect anything that can be described as true attitudes; rather, they reflect the thoughts that

are most accessible in memory at the moment of response” (Zaller & Feldman, 1992). They

concede that most people are not able to form fleshed out responses that make true attitudes, but

they also note that most people do have some pieces of considerations that they use to respond to

questions rather than just simply making up responses, as Converse theorized.

Milton Lodge and Charles Taber also built on Converse’s and Zaller’s “non-attitude” and

uninformed responses theories. They form a dual process model where “System 1 processes are

spontaneous, fast, effortless, and operate below conscious awareness, whereas System 2

processes are slow, deliberative, effortful, and self-aware” (Lodge & Taber, 2013). Just like

Converse and Zaller, Lodge and Taber say that people do not hold true attitudes, even implicitly.

“It is more likely that an implicit response reflects affect stored directly with a memory object…

but these too will be influenced by extraneous factors. It is a mistake to think of one as more

‘true’ than another, and both are subject to bias, though of a different kind” (Lodge & Taber,

2013). They go further with the idea that implicit attitudes can be biased and call it the “mere

exposure effect.”: “Preferences were altered without the objects even being recognized” (Lodge

& Taber, 2013).

Lodge and Taber’s John Q. Public Model is the lengthiest of the three models, in which

people construct an on-line tally of considerations. Each time a person receives new

information, they add it to the tally and store it in long-term memory. “This ‘running’ OL tally,

representing an automatic integration of all prior evaluations of the object, is then restored to
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long-term memory where it is readily available for subsequent evaluations” (Lodge & Taber,

2013; from Cassino and Lodge, 2007). This on-line tally represents attitudes, but Lodge and

Taber assert the tally updates and changes as individuals receive new information. This is

different from Converse’s claim that people do not hold any attitudes when responding to survey

questions.

Converse changed how people think about and study public opinion in 1964. Since the

development of his black and white model and corresponding claim that most people have “non-

attitudes,” other political scientists have theorized other models of attitude formation and

response to political questions. His theory opened the door to further study and ways of thinking

about attitude and opinion formation.

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References:

Cassino, D., Taber, C.S. & Lodge, M. Information processing and public opinion. PVS 48, 205–
220 (2007).

Kinder, Donald R., and Nathan P. Kalmoe. 2017. Neither Liberal Nor CONSERVATIVE:
Ideological Innocence in the American Public. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago
Press.

Lodge, Milton, and Charles S. Taber. 2013. The Rationalizing Voter. Cambridge, MA:
Cambridge University Press.

Zaller, John, and Stanley Feldman. 1992. “A Simple Theory of the Survey Response: Answering
Questions versus Revealing Preferences.” American Journal of Political Science 36(3):
579.

Zaller, John R. 1992. The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion. Cambridge (Inglaterra), MA:
Cambridge University Press.
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Question Two: Political sophistication is important in the study of mass political attitudes.
Explain what scholars mean when referring to political sophistication. Theoretically, why
does political sophistication matter for public opinion? Empirically, how does political
sophistication shape public opinion?

Political sophistication is an important topic in the study of political attitudes and public

opinion because of the way political sophisticates shape information and share that information

with the rest of the public – the unsophisticated masses. Political sophistication and the lack of

political sophistication matters a great deal for public opinion. On an individual level political

sophistication determines the way people make political decisions such as voting and how they

are able to analyze candidates and vote for the individual who would best represent their

interests.

Converse’s black and white model is a great example of political sophistication.

Converse’s claim that the public is split into two groups, a small group of elites that are

knowledgeable about political information and the rest of the public who hold “non-attitudes”

shows the incorporation of political sophisticates or political elites into the thinking of mass

political attitudes. In Converse’s politically sophisticated group, “They are comparatively well

educated. They know more about current affairs. In such circles, ideology is relatively common.

Outside such circles, it is exceedingly rare” (Kinder & Kalmoe, 2017). Converse also describes

the politically sophisticated as able to contextualize information. “The development of political

sophistication means that the absorption of contextual information makes clear to him the

connections of the policy area of his initial interest with policy differences in other areas; and

that these broader configurations of policy positions are describable quite economically in the

basic abstractions of ideology” (Converse, 1964). The one part of political sophistication and

mass political attitudes that Converse does not address is whether political sophisticates pass

along their information to the unsophisticated.

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Zaller addresses political sophistication and connects it to mass opinion more directly

than Converse does. Zaller’s RAS model is based on political sophisticates shaping information

that the rest of the public receives and chooses to accept or reject. Zaller’s whole model is

catalyzed by elite discourse and the two ways elites provide messaging to the mass public

through “Persuasive messages” that “are arguments or images providing a reason for taking a

position or point of view” and through “Cueing messages which… consist of ‘contextual

information’ about the ideological or partisan implications of a persuasive message” (Zaller,

1992). The messaging that the unsophisticated masses receive is filtered through the

sophisticates from whom they get their information.

According to Jerit, Barabas, and Bolsen, what they call “political knowledge” is

correlated with education level. “Differences in knowledge that have been attributed to

education become greater in environments in which information is plentiful” (Jerit, Barabas, &

Bolsen, 2006). Thus, what they are concluding is that the better educated a person is, the more

they are able to digest political information and make connections that less educated individuals

might not be able to make. This helps higher educated individuals to understand the political

information they receive. While they do not use the term “political sophisticates,” they make it

clear that the higher the education level, the more political knowledgeable a person will be.

However, it is important to note here that they also say that lower educated individuals benefit

the same amount when television coverage is sizeable. “Increases in television coverage do not

lead to a significant increase in the knowledge gap between low and high-education groups.

Indeed, our results show that the least educated benefit nearly as much as the most educated”

(Jerit, Barabas, & Bolsen, 2006).

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What Jerit, Barabas, and Bolsen are saying is that for less educated individuals, who are

most likely less politically sophisticated, television coverage of politics benefits them just as

much as highly educated individuals and they are able to absorb the information from the

television coverage. However, the people on television reporting news to lower educated

individuals are what Zaller would call “political sophisticates” and they are shaping what the

mass public opinion is on a given news story. In Zaller’s model the better educated people that

Jerit, Barabas, and Bolsen discussed would be quicker to reject dissonant information that they

received through media sources and the less educated people would more readily accept such

information.

Politically unsophisticated individuals make decisions based on less advanced

considerations than the sophisticated do. Rachel Bernhard and Sean Freeder analyze how

unsophisticated voters make voting decisions based on “unverifiable, vague, and irrelevant

considerations” (Bernhard & Freeder, 2018). Bernhard and Freeder posit that sophisticated

voters are better equipped to make rational voting decisions and choose the best candidate to

represent their interests. They concur with Gomez and Wilson in asserting that “sophistication

not only affects the content of voters’ opinions, but how they form those opinions” (Bernhard &

Freeder, 2018). In their study Bernhard and Freeder find that “as political knowledge increases,

one’s propensity to ask irrelevant, unverifiable, and vague questions decreases” (Bernhard &

Freeder, 2018 (citing Gomez & Wilson, 2001)). The more a person is politically sophisticated,

the better able they are to seek relevant information, analyze that information and ask the right

questions about candidates for which they might vote.

Political sophistication clearly affects how people are able to analyze news, how they are

able to accept or reject new information, and how they vote, and determines if they are able to
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form stable attitudes. Public opinion is shaped by political sophisticates who share information

via news or through personal channels. Because most of the public is not able to analyze

political news and events, they rely on the small group of politically sophisticated elites to filter

information to them, and the attitudes and opinions of elites’ shape how that information skews

public opinion. Sophistication can also skew outcomes of elections due to unsophisticated voters

seeking irrelevant or useless information about candidates and eliminating candidates they might

have otherwise voted for had they been more politically sophisticated.
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References:

Bernhard, Rachel, and Sean Freeder. 2018. “The More You Know: Voter Heuristics and the
Information Search.” Political Behavior 42(2): 603–23.

Converse, Philip E. 1964. The nature of belief systems in mass publics. In Ideology and
Discontent, edited by D. E. Apter, 206-61. New York Free Press.

Jerit, Jennifer, Jason Barabas, and Toby Bolsen. 2006. “Citizens, Knowledge, and the
Information Environment.” American Journal of Political Science 50(2): 266–82.

Kinder, Donald R., and Nathan P. Kalmoe. 2017. Neither Liberal Nor CONSERVATIVE:
Ideological Innocence in the American Public. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago
Press.

Zaller, John R. 1992. The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion. Cambridge (Inglaterra), MA:
Cambridge University Press.