Saris and

IN THE STUDY of politics and political choice there are long-running streams of studies, proceeding along a common channel, with the later studies drawing out and testing the implications of the earlier. Broadly, these works have followed one of two opposing strategies—pushing one argument to its limit or pulling together apparently irreconcilable arguments. Mancur Olson’s work on collective choice and the problem of the “free rider” exemplifies the first strategy;1 Philip Converse’s seminal work on the nature of belief systems in mass publics exemplifies the second.2 The first of Converse’s master themes is the now famous “nonattitudes” hypothesis. Very briefly, and therefore roughly, the idea is that large numbers of the public do not hold any view on major issues of the day, but when asked their opinion, they express one anyway. These counterfeit attitudes are made up on the spot to avoid the embarrassment of appearing ignorant or the shame of seeming negligent. Converse dubbed these counterfeit responses “nonattitudes” and presented evidence suggesting that they are a pervasive feature of the political thinking of mass publics. The second theme is the role of political sophistication. Two points have long been agreed upon. First, citizens are distributed along a gradient of awareness and understanding of politics. Second, the distribution of citizens along this gradient is skewed to the right: only a small proportion fall toward the tail of engagement with politics and political sophistication while a very high proportion fall toward the tail of political ignorance and inattentiveness. Converse drove home the lesson that the character of citizens’ thinking about politics—the articulation of their positions on the major issues, their grip on fundamental political abstractions, even the stability of their opinions over time—is conditional on their level of political awareness and sophistication. These two master themes—the pervasiveness of nonattitudes and the conditioning role of political sophistication—need not logically butt heads with one another: indeed, their conjunction yields the standard prediction that the likelihood of nonattitudes is inversely related to the level of political infor© Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher.