The Systematic Beliefs of the Mass Public Estimating Policy Preferences With Survey Data

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Southern Political Science Association

The Systematic Beliefs of the Mass Public: Estimating Policy Preferences with Survey DataAuthor(s): John E. JacksonReviewed work(s):Source: The Journal of Politics, Vol. 45, No. 4 (Nov., 1983), pp. 840-865Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Southern Political Science Association

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The Systematic Beliefsof the Mass Public:Estimating Policy Preferenceswith SurveyData

John E. JacksonUniversity of Michigan

This paper develops and estimates a model that relates individuals' policy preferences tothree basic terms: (1) a common orientation that affects positions on all items in an issue do-main and that explicitly represents the constraint concept; (2) a question-specific term thatrepresents the influence of impacts and interests associated with the explicit policy in ques-tion; and (3) party identifications. Each of these components is hypothesized to vary amongindividuals, based on their social, economic, and demographic characteristics. This model isestimated with the domestic policy items included in the first American National Panel Study(1956-60) using the LISREL statistical method. The results indicate the existence of a largeand stable common orientation that strongly influences positions on the jobs, education aid,and health care items, but that is only weakly related to the power and housing item. Themodel also finds small yet significant policy-specific and partisan effects. The compositionand influence of these components are quite stable over the four years of the study. Thus weconclude that the structure underlying individual preferences exhibits considerable constraintand stability, in contrast to some previous analyses with these data.

he continual study of individual political attitudes is justified by andattests to the critical role of these preferences in democratic theory. (Forexcellent summaries of previous studies, see Converse, 1975; and Kinderand Sears, 1982.) Each additional study hopes to exploit either newdata, time periods, and populations, or more refined statistical pro-cedures in its effort to measure attitudinal structure and stability. Thisstudy is the latter type. It is a reexamination of the domestic issue ques-tions asked during the first American National Panel Study (1956-60),

* This research was supported by grants from Resources for the Future, The NationalScience Foundation, SES-8023332 and the Guggenheim Foundation, none of whom isresponsible for the contents. This research was assisted by the availability of the SRC/CPS1956-60 American Panel Study, available through the ICPSR, University of Michigan.

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SYSTEMATIC BELIEFS OF THE MASS PUBLIC 841and it takes advantage of recently perfected statistical methods toestimate a model of preferences incorporating specific hypothesesdeveloped from current theories about attitude structures.

Reexamination of these data is justified on two grounds. Some authorsargue there were substantial changes in the American electorate in the en-suing decade (Pomper, 1972; Nie, with Anderson, 1974; and Nie, Verba,and Petrocik, 1979). Analysis of the 1956-60 data forms a baseline forassessing any change. The more accurate are our estimates of the natureand structure of these preferences as well as of the preferences of specificrepresentative individuals in 1956, the better we can observe and describechanges in preferences.A more important reason for continued study of these data with newerstatistical tools is their historical importance as the basis for pioneeringwork on individual preferences. This work led to the generallypessimistic conclusion that the mass electorate is unable to hold and tomaintain coherent preferences on a range of widely discussed nationalissues (Converse, 1964; 1970). Our reanalysis of these data develops newresults that expand the earlier findings and conclusions. This is far fromthe first reanalysis of these data (see Pierce and Rose, 1974; Achen, 1975;

Dean and Moran, 1977; Erikson, 1978; 1979), but it is the first to specifyand estimate a model with explicit terms representing the hypothesizedconstructs underlying preferences.Individuals' opinions of specific government policies are systematicallyrelated to three separate measurable influences -a common orientation,a policy-specific component, and party identification. The commonorientation for any year is hypothesized to affect positions on all policiesin that year and explicitly represents the constraint concept. The policy-specific components represent the aspects of preferences that areassociated with the particular characteristics and impacts of each policy.Party identifications capture the cue-taking and leadership effectsassociated with partisanship. Each of these influences is then assumed tovary systematically among respondents based on individual social,demographic, and economic characteristics. Combining these two sets ofrelations permits us to measure individual policy preferences and to assesstheir underlying structure.This paper presents the statistical estimation of this structure for the

domestic policy questions in the 1956-60 American Panel. We evaluatethe various propositions about preferences, including the hypothesis thatthey do not exist in any coherent fashion, from the size and stability of theparameters in this model. This procedure provides both a definitive testof the models of attitudes and estimates of the preferences held by dif-ferent individuals.



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842 THE JOURNAL OF POLITICS, VOL. 45, 1983MODELING PREFERENCES AND THE SURVEY RESPONSE

The complete model developed and estimated in this paper consists ofthree separately identifiable parts. The first describes people's positionson specific policy items and is derived from current hypotheses aboutpreference formation.' These hypotheses are the core of our model andcontain the systematic aspects of preferences referred to in the previoussection. The second part relates the different systematic terms to a set ofsocial and demographic variables describing each respondent. Thesevariables assess different individuals' preferences and identify whateverpreference changes may have occurred during the panel study. The finalpart of the model specifies the relationship between these systematic partsand the survey response. (A formal presentation of the model is given inthe Appendix.) The roles of the three systematic terms and their relation-ship to the social and demographic variables (parts one and two) aredepicted in figure 1. The boxes in the center of the figure represent thepreferences of a given person, on a specific policy item, in each year of thestudy.The Systematic Preference Components

Individual's positions on the specific policies in each year of this studyare functions of the person's party identification and common orientationthat year (shown at the top of the figure), and of his/her policy-specificdeterminations (indicated by the boxes along the bottom of the figure).Party Identification. Numerous studies relate a person's party iden-tification to his or her position on specific issues (see Sears et al., 1980, fortheoretical arguments; and see Jackson, 1975a; Page and Jones, 1979;

Converse and Markus, 1979, for empirical support). This partisanshipinfluence could arise from the individual's need for cues about what posi-tions to adopt, from the influence derived from being part of a politicalcoalition, or from some other psychological force developed from thenature of party identification. It is less important for our model todiscuss the causal reasons for any partisan influence than to estimate suchinfluence on preferences.An important implication of a large partisanship influence is that par-ties are responsible for the development of preferences of the Americanpublic and thus should be evaluated in light of this influence. Thepresence of this influence also means that parties are not just responsive to

I The questions are the four domestic policy items from the 1956-60 American PanelStudy: jobs, education aid, health care, and power and housing. The variables are coded sothat 0.0 indicates strong opposition to federal government provision of services, 1.0 indicatessupport for the particular actions, and 0.5 indicates no opinion or don't know.



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SYSTEMATIC BELIEFS OF THE MASS PUBLIC 843FIGURE 1

SCHEMATIC REPRESENTATION

SOCIO- DEMOGRAPHIC SOCIO- DEMOGRAPHIC SOCIO- DEMOGRAPHIC

COMMON PARTY COMMON PARTY COMMON PARTY1956 956 958 1958 960 960

rJOBS I ED.AID IIPOWER IIHEALTH I IJOBS I ED. AID IIPOWER I IJOBS I ED. AID IIPOWER IIHEALTHI

EDUCATION P| OWS HEALTHJOBS ~~AID HOUSING CR

SOCIO - DEMOGRAPHIC

and aggregations of the distribution of policy preferences of the electoratein the hierarchical manner of the formal spatial models. Parties helpdetermine this distribution by their actions, and so make the electoralprocess nonrecursive.

Common Orientations. Recent work (Sears et al., 1979; Kinder andKiewiet, 1979; and Sears et al., 1980) depicts policy preferences as de-rived from an individual's broad symbolic or ideological orientation.There are several explanations offered as the basis of this component,derived from references to ideologies about the federal government's rolein providing services, to statements about people's fundamental valuessuch as a concern for greater equality, and to respondent's identificationwith the interests of specific social groups. (For a very clear descriptionof these different derivations, see Kinder and Sears, 1982.) We are not ina position to discriminate among these alternative sources for a commonorientation, but we are able to assess its influence on each particularpolicy position.



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844 THE JOURNAL OF POLITICS, VOL. 45, 1983Individual's orientations, such as the desire for the federal governmentto provide services that redistribute income, should motivate complimen-tary positions on a range of specific policy items. The common orienta-tion term explicitly models the constraint concept. Originally, constraintmeant the presence of an underlying orientation from which positions ona range of specific policies were derived. This is a much more specific,and theoretically more interesting, concept than its operationalization asthe simple bivariate correlation among preferences on pairs of issues.Such correlations may also arise from other sources, such as a similarity ofself-interested motives or the effects of party identification onpreferences, instead of from the important presence of a common basis for

preferences.Policy-Specific Considerations. These components assess people's pro-pensity independently to develop their positions on specific policies. Thepolicy-specific terms are shown at the bottom of figure 1. There are anumber of arguments for these terms. Sears et al. (1980) develop theseinfluences from the personal impact of a given policy, such as the in-dividual's being unemployed or eligible for a government health care pro-gram. Other reasons for such a derivation of policy-specific preferencesexist as well. Musgrave and Musgrave (1976), for example, argue that in-dividuals may want policies that subsidize other people's consumption ofcertain commodities, such as health care, housing, or education, but notones that redistribute income per se. In this case there is no commonstructure to preferences; specific policies are supported or opposed on thebasis of one's feeling about other people's consumption of certain servicesand how those services should be provided. Again, our model cannotdiscriminate among these explanations, but it can assess the presence and

importance of policy-specific considerations.Modeling Common and Policy-Specific Components

The second part of the model relates positions on the common orienta-tion and policy-specific terms to the individual characteristics shown intable 1 so that we can evaluate the preferences of different respondents.This part of the model appears in figure 1 as the links from the socio-demographic boxes to the other components. The coefficients in theseequations permit us to predict the positions of particular individuals andin what manner party identifications, common orientations, and specificconsiderations, and thus preferences, vary with income, race, religion,etc.There is, unfortunately, little hard theory to guide the selection of theindividual variables in the underlying models. The objective is to pick



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SYSTEMATICELIEFSFTHEMASS UBLIC 845TABLE 1

EXOGENOUS DEMOGRAPHIC VARIABLESAge (in tens of years) Education (in tens of years of schooling)cRace College DegreeCatholic UnionJewish Income (in tens of thousands of 1960 dollars)Easta Father's Party Identification-DemocratdSouthb Father's Party Identification - IndependentdCentral City Born prior to 1910 (entered the electorate prior to 1932)dRural

a New England, N.Y., N.J., Pa., Del., Md., W.Va., and Washington, D.C.b Va., N.C., S.C., Ga., Fla., Ala., Miss., La., Ark., Tenn., Tex.c Included in exponential form.d Included only in the party identification equation.

variables from the survey that are strongly related to people's ideologicalorientations toward the federal government's role in our society, to theirevaluations of specific domestic policy's impacts, and to their groupassociations. In most cases, these considerations lead to overlapping setsof variables. For example, education, age, and income differences arerelated to different ideological views, and they are simultaneouslyassociated with the expected impact of jobs, education, and health pro-grams. Similarly, variables such as race and religion may be associatedwith group associations and identifications, or they may indicate dif-ferences in basic orientations and ideologies. Fortunately, these con-siderations are not crucial for the purposes both of estimating the size andinfluence of the three underlying components and of comparing thepreferences of different individuals across issues and over time. Conse-quently we resolve the dilemma by including all the variables in table 1for each underlying component, except as noted in the party ID equa-tions. The most important consideration is to make sure we have in-cluded variables that systematically vary with preferences. The mannerin which they vary will help us to identify and estimate the characteristicsand influence of the underlying components.The relations between preferences and the socio-demographic variableshave several important functions in the model. Besides permitting us toascertain the preferences of different respondents, correlations betweenthese variables and the responses to each of the specific policy questionscontain statistical information with which to identify the common orien-tation and policy-specific components and to estimate their influence onpreferences. For example, similar covariance patterns between the socio-demographic variables and responses to different policy questions in-dicate an important common orientation.



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846 THE JOURNAL OF POLITICS, VOL. 45, 1983The relationship between the underlying components and the socio-demographic variables includes a stochastic term representing the part ofpeople's preferences not explained by the socio-demographic variables.

Although stochastic, such terms represent important parts of ourpreference structure. The stochastic element for the common orienta-tions and policy-specific terms contains any aspect of an individual'sunderlying components arising from personal experiences, such as healthproblems, or from contextual circumstances, such as the wealth andstability of the local economy, not measured by the individual variables.Model Structure and Interpretation

The structure just described contains most of the commonly proposedpreference models, and the relative prominence of the different modelswill be determined by the size and stability of the various parameters inthe structure. There are four major comparisons:1. Constraint is measured by the magnitude both of the coefficients re-lating common orientations to preferences and of those relating orien-tations to the individual characteristics. Furthermore, if the compo-sition and influence of the common orientations are stable, the resultwill be coherent, stable preferences.2. If differences on the policy-specific components are large, stable, andinfluential, relative to the common orientations, we will have stablepreferences but with little constraint.3. If variations in party identifications are large, and the sole determi-nants of preferences, the proposition that preferences are strictlyderived from the cues and structure provided by individual partyidentifications will be supported.4. If the coefficients in the models for common orientations and policy-specific terms and the coefficients relating these terms and partyidentifications to specific policy preferences are small and insignifi-cant, we will reject the hypothesis that preferences have any system-atic structure to them. This last result will be the strongest evidencefor the argument that members of the electorate do not have struc-tured preferences on public policy issues.

Our statistical objective is to estimate the various parameters as ac-curately as possible in order to examine these different propositions.Temporal Preference Changes

The model has two explanations for temporal preference changes. Thefirst is change in an individual's position on any of the underlying com-ponents. For whatever reasons, people's views of the federal govern-



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SYSTEMATIC BELIEFS OF THE MASS PUBLIC 847ment's role in providing social services, that is, their common orientation;their evaluations of individual services and personal impacts, that is, thepolicy-specific term; and/or their party identifications may shift. (Thepolicy-specific components are assumed to be stable over time in the basicmodel, but this assumption is tested and altered for specific policies.)These shifts may occur for only some people, resulting in different rela-tionships between positions and our exogenous variables. For example,differences in preferences related to income may change but those relatedto race, education, or region may remain the same. Thus, contrary toprevious studies that assumed any changes are equally likely for all people(Achen, 1975; Erikson, 1978; 1979), or are nonexistent (Converse, 1964;1970; Pierce and Rose, 1974), this model relates changes to social anddemographic characteristics, and thus permits changes to differ amongrespondents. Changes in the omitted effects are assessed by the temporalcorrelations of the stochastic terms.Positions on specific policies may also shift because of changes in therelative influence of the common, policy-specific, and party identificationcomponents. Increased common orientation influence relative to that ofthe policy-specific term means both greater differences among peoplewhose ideologies differ and reduced variation among people whosepolicy-specific considerations differ. An increased common influencewill produce higher correlations among positions on all items, and so willlead to observations of more ideological politics and greater constraint.Increased party influences result in greater differences amongRepublicans and Democrats on specific policies. If such shifts occur onall topics, the result will be a greater partisan character to the distributionof preferences and the appearance of party-derived constraint among theelectorate.The Survey Response

The last part of the statistical model describes the relationship betweenpreferences and the response to the survey questions. The response modelincludes a random element unique for each response and presumablyunrelated to systematic preferences.2 This term measures the deviationof any measured preference from that described by the three components.These deviations derive from measurement errors associated with thesurvey instrument, from deviations induced by respondent randomness,from the effects of omitted variables, or from whatever error sources are

2 We use random to denote the unspecified part of the survey response model. This willdistinguish it from the unspecified parts of the common orientation and issue-specific com-ponents, referred to as stochastic terms. Both terms are stochastic, however, in that they arerandomly and independently drawn from some distribution for each respondent.



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848 THE JOURNAL OF POLITICS, VOL. 45, 1983represented by the stochastic term in any linear model. Our point is thatwe cannot distinguish statistically among these sources of randomness;moreover, it is much more important to estimate the systematic parts ofthe model and to base our inferences about individual preferences onthese estimates. The sole concern here is to recognize the presence of therandom terms and to estimate their variance at the same time that weestimate the components in the systematic part of people's preferences inorder to get accurate estimates of the entire structure.The model of the survey response estimated here also includes asystematic response bias, such as an agree or do not know, regardless ofthe person's actual expected response. This systematic measurementerror exists in addition to the previously described preference structureand random terms. Its presence, if not removed, seriously biases anymeasure of stability or constraint. If the response biases to the same ques-tion at different waves or to different questions in the same waves aresimilar, these measures will be overestimated. Thus, it is important toremove the effects of the biasing terms.Previous analysis of the 1956-60 panel data (Jackson, 1979) finds asignificant negative relationship between education level and the prob-ability of giving a biased response. These probabilities vary by questionand year, but generally range from 0.3 for people with an eighth gradeeducation to nearly zero for those with a college education. This analysisuses the results of that study to purge responses of any expected systematicerrors. Our resulting measures of constraint and stability should belower than those found by Achen and Erikson, and the estimated struc-ture should better describe true preferences.Empirical Estimation

The statistical model is a combination of a factor analysis and a hierar-chical set of regression equations (see Appendix). The common orienta-tions and the policy-specific components are latent, unobserved con-structs, as are the components in a factor analysis, and the responses to theissue and party identification questions are the observed variables. Asshown in figure 1, this model differs from the more common factoranalysis in two ways. First, each observed variable is related to only asmall and prespecified set of the latent variables rather than to all latentfactors.3 For example, preferences on a particular policy in a given yearare unaffected by party identifications and common orientations in otheryears and by the other policy-specific components. Second, this model

3This use of the factor analytic model corresponds to Joreskog's confirmatory factoranalysis model, rather than to the traditional use, which he labels the exploratory modelJoreskog, 1969).



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SYSTEMATIC BELIEFS OF THE MASS PUBLIC 849specifies that the latent variables are functions of the observed socio-demographic variables. Thus the common orientations, policy-specificcomponents, and party identifications are cast as intervening variables ina hierarchical system, with the individual characteristic variables treatedas exogenous and the observed survey responses considered to be theresulting endogenous variables.The individual equations relating positions on specific policy questions(purged of the systematic response bias) to the common orientation,policy-specific, and party identification components, and those relatingthese components to the socio-demographic variables are linear regressionequations. The coefficients in these equations measure the expected dif-ference in positions for different orientations, question-specific consid-erations, and party identifications, and the expected component differ-ences for various individual characteristics.This structure, with the purged responses, conforms to the linear struc-tural equation systems described by Joreskog (1973). The programdeveloped by Joreskog and Sorbom (1976), referred to as LISREL, can beused to estimate the full structure, using all the questions in the panelstudy, once the response biases are removed. (For a brief discussion ofLISREL, see Hanushek and Jackson, 1977, ch. 10.)Party identifications are measured by the seven-point CPS scale andvary from zero for strong Republicans to one for strong Democrats. Theyare treated as endogenous variables to eliminate biases that might resultfrom the effects of preferences on identifications. (We do not estimatethese reciprocal effects, however.) This treatment is accomplished byrelating party identifications to the full set of exogenous variables, in-cluding the variables presumed to relate to identifications and not topreferences - father's identification and whether the person reachedvoting age prior to 1932. This procedure parallels that of traditionaltwo-stage least squares. The equations relating party identification in agiven year to the exogenous variables are comparable to the reduced formequation in the first stage of the two-stage procedure.

ESTIMATED PREFERENCE STRUCTURE AND SURVEY RESPONSE MODELThe statistical results provide an excellent fit to the observed responsesand indicate both the presence of sizable systematic influences on in-

dividual preferences and that these influences create considerable con-straint and stability.4 The common orientations are large relative to thepolicy-specific terms, and exert a substantial and stable influence on jobs,4The chi-squared statistic measuring the goodness of fit is 98.4 with 105 degrees offreedom, which has a significance level of 0.666. Thus we cannot reject our estimated modelas being the true model, since we could get a worse fit by chance two-thirds of the time.



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850 THE JOURNAL OF POLITICS, VOL. 45, 1983education aid, and health care preferences. The common orientation in-fluence on preferences about the federal government's role in providingpower and housing is small but stable. The policy-specific components,although smaller than the common orientation, are important nonethelessand exhibit some interesting differences among policy items. The mostsignificant variations concern the power and housing question, where thecomposition of people's policy-specific evaluation changes each electionyear. This variation contrasts strongly with that in the other policyareas, where the composition of the specific term remains constant, ashypothesized in the basic model. Finally, party identifications exert animportant but far from dominant influence on policy preferences. Themost substantial determinants of preferences, however, are variations inthe exogenous variables related to an individual's common orientations.Policy Preference Equations

The coefficients assessing the influence of party identifications, com-mon orientations, and policy-specific terms on policy preferences areshown in table 2. (All but the education aid-specific coefficients arestatistically significant at the 0.001 level.) Each row in the table cor-responds to the coefficients in a simple regression model relatingpreferences on the specific policy in a particular year to the underlyingcomponents.5 Interpretation of the size and composition of the commonand specific components, and thus of how fully to interpret the coeffi-cients in table 2, is given in the following section. The important pointhere is to compare the relative size of these coefficients for each policy andtheir stability for different years.Differences in people's common policy orientations producecorresponding and nearly equal variations in responses to the jobs, healthcare, and education aid questions, but not to the power and housing ques-tion, where the resulting differences are a third as large. These relation-ships indicate considerable constraint among the former issues, but notfor pairs involving the power and housing question. These effects arequite stable in magnitude, except for education aid in 1958.

5 These coefficients are analogous to regression coefficients and are interpreted as the ex-pected difference in policy preferences for a unit difference in people's latent components orparty identifications. Thus for education aid in 1956, we expect two people whose differencein common orientations equals one to differ in their support of federal education programs by0.84. Similarly, the party identification coefficient of 0.21 in the same equation indicates theexpected difference in support between a strong Republican and a strong Democrat. Certaincoefficients have been set equal to 1.0 in order to scale the unobserved components. Thisspecification determines the absolute size of the component and its coefficients in the otherequations, but leaves the relative size of all the coefficients unchanged.



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SYSTEMATIC BELIEFS OF THE MASS PUBLIC 851TABLE 2

ESTIMATED PREFERENCES EQUATIONS

COMMON POLICY PARTYPOLICY - YEAR ORIENTATION SPECIFIC IDENTIFICATIONJobs 1956 1.OOa 1.0Oa 0.191958 1.00a 1.74 0.151960 1.00a 1.22 0.22Education - 1956 0.84 1.00a 0.151958 1.18 0.45 0.22

1960 0.84 -1.77 0.21Health - 1956 0.99 1.00a 0.241960 0.95 1.74 0.30Power & Housing - 1956 0.39 1.00a 0.221958 0.34 1.12 0.241960 0.32 1.02 0.22

Coefficients set to one to scale structural components.The policy-specific effects are statistically significant, indicating thatpreferences are influenced by considerations related only to that par-ticular policy. These effects are not as stable as those of the commonpolicy orientations. This instability is particularly evident with educa-tion aid preferences, where the directional effect is reversed in 1960, andwith opinions about public power and housing, where the structure of thecomponent changes every year. The instability of the education aid com-ponent effects prompted a test of whether the composition of this term

changed in 1960, as did the power and housing component. The resultsof the test were negative, leading to the conclusion that only the effects ofthis component changed between 1958 and 1960.6 The effects of thepolicy-specific terms are statistically significant, indicating thatpreferences are influenced by considerations related only to that par-ticular policy.The party identification effects are about 0.2, with the exception of1960 health care preferences. Thus the likelihood of a strong Democratagreeing with the policy proposition is about 0.2 greater than that of astrong Republican. The party influences increase slightly, by about 0.05,6 Subsequent analysis shows that education aid preferences are related to a common civilrights orientation, which does change between 1958 and 1960. This omitted influence likelyaccounts for the dramatic coefficient change noted here, which disappears in the expandedmodel.



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852 THE JOURNAL OF POLITICS, VOL. 45, 1983between 1956 and 1960 for all but the power andhousingquestion. Whenwe compare these influences with those of the individual exogenousvariablesdiscussed n the next section, we see thatparty is one of the mostinfluential single variables, although the combinedeffect of all the socio-demographic variables and of common orientations is greaterfor mosttypical individuals.CommonOrientationand Policy-SpecificComponents

The relationsamong the common orientationandpolicy-specific ermsand the socio-demographic variables provide important informationabout the compositionof the components and the relative positions ofeach respondenton these underlyingdimensions. Each component isrelated to the separate social and demographicvariablesto estimate theexpected differencesin position on these underlying componentsof in-dividuals whose characteristicsdiffer, e.g., people of differentincomes,race, etc. The magnitude of these individualdifferencesdetermines herelative size of each component, which is summarized or our sample ofindividualsby the varianceof the differentcomponents. The larger theequation'scoefficients, the morepeople differ in their orientationsor intheir specific evaluations, and consequently the greater the samplevariancein these terms. Whenthis information s combinedwith the in-formationin table 2, which concerns the effect of each component onpreferences,we can then infer the relative importanceof common andspecificconsiderations.In table 3 we presentthe standarddeviationsfor both the total compo-nent and the stochastic term of the different components and the dif-ferencesin the expectedvalues of the basic componentsof two represen-tative but quite differentrespondents.7 RespondentA is assumedto befifty-five, college educated, white, Protestant,earning $20,000 per year(in 1960), and living in a midwesternsuburb. RespondentB is twenty-five, black, with an eighth gradeeducation, earning$5,000 per year, andliving in an easterncentralcity.The components'standard deviation indicates there are much greaterdifferencesamong people'scommonorientationsthan there are in theirpolicy-specificevaluations by a factor of two in the casesof jobs, educa-tion aid, and health care. Only the power and housing specific com-ponentshavevariationsthat approachthoseof the commonorientations.

7We express these variations by their standard deviations, rather than by their variances,because the ratio of the standard deviations of two components can be compared to the ratioof their coefficients in the preference equations shown in table 2. Comparisons of such ratiosare perfectly analogous to comparisons of standardized regression coefficients. An appendixwith the estimated coefficients is available on request from the author.



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STANDARD DEVIATIONS OF COMPONENTS AND DIFFERENCESFOR Two CHARACTERISTIC RESPONDENTS

DIFFERENCE"STANDARDDEVIATION BETWEENPERSONSCOMPONENT TOTAL STOCHASTIC A AND BCommon Orientation1956 0.228 0.202 0.5171958 0.230 0.202 0.5721960 0.230 0.212 0.434Policy SpecificJobs 0.118 0.095 -0.050Education-Systematic 0.084 0.077 -0.076Education-Stochastic Only - 0.183HealthCare 0.130 0.109 0.042Power & Housing1956 0.167 0.155 -0.0911958 0.195 0.155 -0.0341960 0.170 0.155 -0.077PartyIdentification1956 0.339 0.283 0.4161958 0.343 0.277 0.4831960 0.343 0.283 0.520

a Expected differences n values of each component for representativendividualsde-scribed n the text. Entries ndicatehow muchmorepersonB supports ederalgovernmentsocialprograms nd identifieswith the Democrats handoespersonA.

These standard deviations are specific to this sample, but when takenwith the coefficients in table 2 indicate that among these respondentslikely differences in common orientations are more important in deter-mining preference variations than are differences in policy-specificevaluations and in party identifications. (The easiest way to make thesecomparisons is to multiply the coefficients in table 2 by the standarddeviation of the appropriate component.)A better way to compare the differences among people on theseunderlying components is by the expected values for representative in-dividuals. For our two individuals described above, the differences intheir positions are shown in the third column of table 3. The differencesin expected party identifications and common orientations are quitelarge, while those for the policy-specific evaluations are much smaller.Person A, the older, wealthier white, is much less likely to favor any formof federal government programs and is more likely to be a Republican



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854 THE JOURNAL OF POLITICS, VOL. 45, 1983than is person B, the younger, poorer, central city black. These underly-ing differences translate into substantial differences in positions onspecific policy issues. According to the coefficients from the equation forthe 1956 positions on whether the government should provide jobs, for ex-ample (the first line table 2), the expected difference in these two persons'positions is 0.546, with person B being much more supportive of govern-ment efforts to provide jobs. Most of this difference is accounted for bythe difference in the two individuals' positions on the common orientation(1.00*0.517). We see from comparing these two individuals an exampleof what was noted above, that individual differences in common orienta-tions are very important in accounting for differences in people's positionson government policies.Only for power and housing preferences are issue-specific considera-tions equally important in determining individual positions. The in-dividual variation in the specific components is large relative to that forthe other policy-specific evaluations, and the policy-specific concerns playan important part in determining individual positions (as seen in the coef-ficients in table 2). Furthermore, the power and housing specific compo-nent exhibits little stability between elections in contrast to those for theother policies.8 We conclude that positions on the power and housingquestion are determined more by an unstable policy-specific componentthan by the common orientations that are influential in positions on thejobs, education aid, and health care policies.The second comparison concerns the relations among the underlyingcomponents, and particularly the year-to-year correlations of the com-mon orientations. These correlations, shown in table 4, determine thestability and coherence of specific policy preferences. By far the largestsystematic relations are among the three common orientations, whichhave correlations between 0.7 and 0.8 for the two-year intervals andalmost 0.7 for the four-year interval. Thus we find that the commonorientation is both large and stable. This result, combined with its largeand relatively stable influence, produces a set of preferences with con-siderable constraint and stability for the jobs, education, and health ques-tions.The policy-specific components are relatively independent of the com-mon policy orientations. This results, in part, from the specification thatthe stochastic terms in the specific components are independent of thestochastic terms in the common policy orientations. However, even the

8 The correlations among the systematic parts of the power and housing-specific compo-nent illustrate this instability. The 1956 and 1958 parts have correlations of 0.53, while the1960 part's correlations are -0.21 and 0.10 with 1956 and 1958 respectively. Statistical testsreject the null hypothesis of no difference in the systematic parts of the component at the 0.01level.



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CORRELATIONS AMONG STRUCTURE COMPONENTS

COMMON POuCY ISSUE SPECIFC POWER1956 1958 1960 Jobs Health School 1956 1958 19601.00 0.80 0.66 0.11 0.08 -0.14 -0.09 - -1.00 0.74 0.03 0.01 -0.10 - -0.06 -1.00 -0.01 -0.02 -0.03 - - -0.021.00 0.29 -0.13 -0.18 -0.13 0.071.00 -0.11 -0.16 -0.12 0.031.00 0.12 0.09 -0.05

correlations among systematic parts, exclusive of the stochastic terms, arestill not very strong, which suggests that the policy-specific componentsmeasure an aspect of preferences that is relatively independent of thecommon policy orientations. The specific components for the jobs andhealth questions are moderately positively correlated (0.3), but theothers, including the three power and housing terms, are generallyunrelated to each other, further validating our view of these evaluationsas policy specific.Coherenceand Stability

We can easily summarize these findings about the structure of in-dividual preferences by the across question and over time correlations ofrespondents' positions. These correlations, shown in table 5, are based onthe systematic components and exclude the random term. They holdonly for the individuals included in the study and would differ for dif-ferent samples, but they do give an idea of the relative coherence andstability among these people's preferences.The relatively high over time correlations confirm our observationsabout the stability of the components and about their influence onpreferences. These two-year correlations vary from 0.85 to 0.90 and areabout 0.80 for the entire four-year interval, with the exception of educa-tion aid in 1958-60 and 1956-60, which is attributable to the changing in-fluence of the issue-specific component. These correlations are about 0.1lower than those estimated by Erikson and by Achen.

The cross issue correlations confirm the earlier observations that thejobs, education aid, and health care issues compose a fairly consistent andcohesive group and that positions on the question about who should pro-vide power and housing are only weakly related to these otherpreferences. The correlations among the first set range, with one excep-tion, between 0.6 and 0.7, while the correlations of the power and hous-



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856 THE JOURNAL OF POLITICS, VOL. 45, 1983TABLE 5

SAMPLE CORRELATIONS AMONG PREFERENCES

OvEnTIME1956-58 1958-60 1956-60

Jobs 0.87 0.84 0.79Education 0.86 0.74 0.63Health - - 0.81Power 0.91 0.85 0.87

AcRoss QUESTIONS1956 1958 1960

Health-Jobs 0.86 - 0.72Education-Jobs 0.61 0.63 0.61Education-Health 0.59 - 0.52Power-Jobs 0.35 0.22 0.42Power-Health 0.36 - 0.37Power-Education 0.33 0.32 0.33

ing responses with the other preferences are between 0.3 and 0.4. Theseresults illustrate in a different way the observations made earlier. Thereis a noticeable constraint among preferences on the first three domesticissues, accounted for by the large size and influence of the common orien-tation component, but this constraint does not extend to responses to thequestion about public provision of power and housing, which are onlyweakly related to the common orientation.TheRandom Term

The third part of our statistical model relates the systematic aspect ofindividual preferences just described to the survey response for thespecific questions used in the study. This equation contains both asystematic error response bias term and the conventional random term.(For results estimating the likelihood and direction of any response biassee Jackson, 1979.) The random term, which is unique to each questionin each interview, is completely independent of the common policy orien-tation, the policy-specific component, and the party effects. This ran-dom term includes any randomness in respondents' preferences, allmeasurement errors, and other contributions to deviations from thesystematic relations shown in table 2. Our interest is in the variance ofthese terms and in what that variance indicates about the reliability of



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SYSTEMATIC BELIEFS OF THE MASS PUBLIC 857survey responses as measures of the systematic aspects of individualpreferences.The striking result is the high proportion of the variance that is totallyunique to each question each time it is asked. Proportions are near 0.50indicating a large nonsystematic term. The exceptions are health careand education aid in 1960, with proportions close to 0.35, and allresponses to the power and housing question, where the proportions areconsistently about 0.70. These results are close to those of Achen andErikson in order of magnitude. As suggested previously, it is virtuallyimpossible to interpret substantively these variances because of the manyfactors they represent.

CONCLUSIONSOur findings about the systematic parts of individual preferences haveseveral implications for discussions of individual and collective politicalbehavior on both substantive and methodological topics. The mostsignificant result is the observed presence of a large, stable, and influen-tial common orientation that accounts for a substantial part of people'spreferences on the domestic policy items of government-provided jobs,

education aid, and health care. Thus, contrary to some earlier inter-pretations of these data, but consistent with the hypothesis of Sears et al.(1980), we find the existence of a common component that people use todevelop their positions on a number of specific issues. For the policies in-cluded here, this dimension seems to be the question of government provi-sion of services. However, opinions about who is best at providing powerand housing, thought to be the most representative measure of thisideology, are only weakly related to the common orientation. Therefore,earlier analyses using this question to explore the hypothesis of whetherthe American people had any ideological content to their positions wereunfortunate in selecting what now turns out to be a poor measure of thiscomponent and of the public's ideological structure.9People's issue preferences are not totally a function of the commonorientation, however. Preferences on all four items are related to a com-ponent specific to each policy. The policy-specific terms' size andinfluence are smaller and more varied than those of the common orienta-tion, but they are important nonetheless. This result implies that posi-

9 This result is particularly important for Nie (1974) and Nie et al. (1979) who claim thatpreference constraint among the American public increased significantly between 1960 and1964. Their pre-1964 measures of constraint on issue pairs involving domestic policy arebased on average correlations that include the power and housing responses, which are onlyweakly related to the issue dimension being estimated. This attenuation of estimnatedcon-straint is in addition to that caused by the large random components of these responses.



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858 THE JOURNAL OF POLITICS, VOL. 45, 1983tions on any issue and responses to any policy question are influenced byconcerns specific to that policy and that no single question can be used toassess the existence of and positions on the common orientation.A substantively important question is whether circumstances related toa campaign or to events surrounding an election affect the relative in-fluence of these policy-specific components. For example, will a reces-sion, as we had in 1958, increase the influence of the jobs-specific compo-nent, as we observe for 1958? Or, will extensive emphasis during thecampaign on one particular policy and the way that policy is character-ized, e.g., in personal impact terms rather than ideological ways, increasethe influence of the issue-specific component? We have too few issues,circumstances, and campaigns to address systematically these hypotheses,but they are substantively important and warrant investigation with com-parable structural models for other issue areas and during other cam-paigns.The evidence of a systematic structure to individual preferences has im-plications for the many efforts to estimate the relationship of policypreferences to other aspects of political behavior, such as party identifica-tion and voting decisions. Research based on correlation and regressionanalyses using the observed responses to these policy questions shows littleinfluence of preferences on behavior (Nie et al., 1979, p. 34; Schulmanand Pomper, 1975). These analyses treat the observed responses, whichinclude the response bias and random terms as well as the systematicstructure, as the true measure of preferences. More recent work usingalternative statistical techniques (Jackson, 1975a; 1975b; Page and Jones,1979; Markus and Converse, 1979; and Franklin and Jackson, 1983) basesestimates of these influences on the relation between measures of behaviorand the systematic structure described here, and find much larger rela-tionships.10 Hanushek and Jackson, for example, show a doubling of thecoefficients assessing the influence of preferences on party identificationand voting decisions in the 1964 election (0.44 to 0.77 and 0.39 to 0.90respectively) using two-stage least squares rather than ordinary regression(see Hanushek and Jackson, 1977, pp. 246 and 271). The results showinglarger influences of preferences on political behavior suggest that thepresence of the random term in the observed responses attenuates thestatistical relationship and obscures the true effect of preferences. Thusearlier studies giving policy preferences a minor role in determiningvarious political behaviors may have seriously underestimated these ef-fects because of the choice of statistical procedures and the implicit

10 The alternative structural equation techniques, such as two-stage and three-stage leastsquares, are appropriate if one wants to purge observed explanatory variables of any randomelements that obscure the true values of those variables. See Hanushek and Jackson, 1977,pp. 288-89.



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SYSTEMATIC BELIEFS OF THE MASS PUBLIC 859assumptions that the random term present in the preference measure wasan integral part of individual preferences.Finally, the observed coherence and stability of individual preferenceshave implications for discussions of the stability of aggregate electoralbehavior. The preference stability observed in table 5 approaches thestability estimated for party identifications during this period. (Estimatesof individual party identification stability range from 0.85 [Converse,1964] to 0.92 [Asher, 1974], depending upon the measure used and theassumptions made about the size of the random component in measures ofparty identification.) These two studies, which relate systematicpreferences and relative party positions to individuals' party identifica-tions, combined with our observations about the stability of domesticpolicy preferences between 1956-60, imply that the relative stability inparty identifications observed with both survey and aggregate data dur-ing this period is the result of stable preferences and relatively unchangingparty positions. With preferences and identifications beingsimultaneously related and exhibiting high and nearly equal levels ofstability we have the picture of an electoral system in relative equilibriumduring the late fifties. Were individual preferences or the relative partypositions to change, this equilibrium would be upset, and we wouldobserve changes in party identification and voting choices.Findings of a relatively coherent and stable systematic component topolicy preferences, strongly related to positions on a common orientation,are different from earlier interpretations of these data. These results in-dicate that we were correct not to reject completely the null hypotheses ofconstraint and stability, in spite of the earlier studies. They also show thepower of more sophisticated statistical methods to provide greaterdiscrimination among the various influences on preferences. However,we have only examined one set of policies, in one rather short time period.In addition, given the prominent role of these policies in our politicalculture and the relatively stable positions advocated by each party sincethe New Deal, we can argue that if constraint and stability of preferenceswere to exist, they would effect these policies during this period. We thushave the easiest test for those arguing for structural and coherentpreferences. More difficult tests await.

APPENDIX

This appendix describes in more formal detail the model of policypreferences estimated in the paper's text. Although complex in its nota-tion, the structure of the model is a quite simple set of hierarchical,nonrecursive linear equations. Certain of the intervening variables in the



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860 THE JOURNAL OF POLITICS, VOL. 45, 1983hierarchy are latent or unobserved, as is common in factor analyticmodels -a fact that complicates statistical estimation. This appendix isorganized to follow the hierarchical structure of the model rather than thepresentation in the text.Underlying Components

The first parts of the model are the three sets of equations describing in-dividuals' common orientations, policy-specific components, and partyidentifications. We denote these components as Y1t, Yv1,and Y3trespec-tively, with t = [1 = 1956, 2 = 1958, 3 = 1960] and j = [1 = Jobs,2 = Education, 3 = Health, 4 = Power and HIousing]. The equationsrelate the values of these components to the individual socio-demographicvariables shown in table 1, denoted as X, and to a stochastic term, andthey follow the conventional linear form,

Ylt = XB1t + U1t, (Al)Y2j = XB2j + U21, (A2)Y3t = XB3t + U3t. (A3)

The coefficients symbolized by B1, B2, and B3 assess how we expect valuesof these components to differ for differences in each of the individualvariables in X. The stochastic terms U, to U3 represent the aspects ofthese components not accounted for by the individual variables and thelinear model. (We have omitted the individual subscript, i, for Y, X, andU for simplicity of exposition.) Given that the panel study covers threeelection years and four policy questions, there are three separate equa-tions represented by equations Al and A3 (as denoted by t) and four by A2(as indicated by j), and for a total of ten equations in the underlyingmodel shown in figure 1. The four policy-specific components differ foreach policy, but are presumed not to vary over time. (This latterspecification is tested and rejected for the power and housing question.)We include separate structural equations explaining party identifica-tions, thus treating them as an endogenous influence. (We estimate thecoefficients in these equations in the statistical procedures but do notreport them, as they are not relevant for the discussion of preferences.)This method eliminates bias in the estimates of party identifications' in-fluences on preferences attributable to the reciprocal effects ofpreference-based party evaluations on identifications (see Franklin andJackson, 1983, for evidence of such effects). Included among the in-dividual characteristic variables, X, are three variables related only toparty identifications - father's identification and reaching voting age



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SYSTEMATIC BELIEFS OF THE MASS PUBLIC 861before 1932. These three variables do not directly influence preferences,so they identify the effect of party on preferences.11 (The entries in B1Aand Bv corresponding to these variables equal zero.)

We summarize this first part of the model in matrix form asY= (Y1t,Y2j,Y3t)= X(B1t,Bz1,B3t) (UltU21,U3y) = XB + U (A4);

where Y, X, B, and U are the appropriately dimensional matrices for theten underlying equations represented by equations A1-A3.Policy Preferences

The influence of the above three components on individual policypreferences is also represented as a linear equation. We denote thepreferences on issue j at period t as Wj, and write this expression asW = Y1tA1j, Y2jA21,+ Y3tA3j, + ej, . (A5)

The coefficients A11i, A2j, and A3jt indicate how much we expectpreferences to differ for differences in common orientations, policy-specific considerations, and party identifications, while ej, is the randomterm that includes for variations in responses not accounted for by theprevious three explicit terms. Four questions and three time periodswould mean that we have twelve separate equations represented by A5.However the health care question was omitted in 1958, giving eleven. Wehave double subscripted the A1, A2, A3 coefficients to indicate that theyvary by policy item j, and by year t. (The estimated values are shown intable 2.) Thus we permit each component to have a different effectacross policies and over time. Lack of such variation is the basis for ourconclusion of constraint and stability.We write the policy preference equations in A5 in matrix form as

W = YA + e. (A6)W is the matrix of responses to the eleven policy questions; Yis the matrixof implicit values for the ten underlying components; A is the matrix ofcoefficients relating W to Y; and e is the matrix of eleven implicit randomterms.

11 This procedure is directly comparable to two-stage least squares, with the equation forparty identifications corresponding to the first stage, and our estimates of the effect of partyidentifications on preferences being the second stage. This is the conventional means forovercoming possible simultaneity bias (see Hanushek and Jackson, 1977, chs. 8 and 9).



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862 THE JOURNAL OF POLITICS, VOL. 45, 1983Model Estimation

The above set of equations constitutes a hierarchical, nonrecursive,linear system. Unfortunately, these equations cannot be estimated by thesimple linear least squares procedures commonly used to estimate suchstructures, e.g., two-stage least squares. The intervening endogenousvariables for the common orientations and policy specific terms, Y1,andYv,,are not observed, so we cannot directly estimate equations Al and A2and thus cannot estimate A5 in the second stage. The statistical problemthen is how best to use the observed socio-demographic variables, X, andthe observed responses to the policy and party identification questions inthe survey, W, and P, respectively, to estimate the parameters in equa-tions Al1,A2, and A5. The description of the procedure used relies on thematrix form of these expressions shown in equations A4 and A6.The statistical procedure is described in detail in Hanushek and Jackson(1977, ch. 10) and Joreskog and Sorbom (1976) and is only summarizedhere. It uses equations A4 and A6 to derive expressions for the expectedvariances and covariances among the observed variables, denoted inmatrix form as Ex, Exw,and E,, as functions of the unknown parameters.We then use the variances and covariances among the observed variables,denoted as Sx, Sxw,and Sw,as estimates of Ex, Exw,and Ew, and calculatethe parameter values that best fit the observed data. (Note that Sxdi-rectly estimates Ex.)To obtain expressions for .xwand Ew,note that substituting the expres-sion in equation A6 for Y in equation A4 gives

W= YA + e = (XB + U)A + e = XBA + UA + e. (A7)We now assume that:1. all stochastic terms are independent of the exogenous socio-demo-graphic variables, i.e., X is independent of U and e (this is the as-sumption on which all regression analysis is based); and2. the stochastic terms in the underlying components are independent ofthose in the policy preference equations (e is independent of U1, U2,and U3).

With these assumptions,Fl. = E(X'W) = ExBA, andEw = E(W'W) = A'B'X'XBA + A'E(U'U)A + E(e'e)

= A1B'2xBA + A1E2A + Se . (A8)



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SYSTEMATIC BELIEFS OF THE MASS PUBLIC 863We pick the values for A,B, E, and E. that best fit the observedvariances and covariances, Sx. and S,. Best fit in this case is defined asmaximizing the likelihood of obtaining the observed data under theassumption that U and e are distributed multivariate normal. We fur-ther assume that each ej, is independent of the others, so that Se isdiagonal. If these assumptions hold, the maximum likelihood procedureprovides a statistical test of the model's fit. This test, based on the chi-squared distribution, indicates the probability of getting a worse fit bychance if the estimated model is correct. The higher that probability, thebetter the fit and the less likely we are to reject the estimated model as thecorrect one.The statistical procedures followed here also include an adjustment topurge the responses of the expected systematic response bias estimated inJackson (1979). The survey response model, including a possible biasedresponse Rjt for question j at time t for person i is

Zi= VijPrij, + Rjt(1-Prij,),,where Zij,is the response of person i to question j at time t, Wij,is the per-son's "true"response given by equation A5, and Prij, s the probability theperson responds with a true response rather than the biased response Rjt.The estimates for Rj,and Prij,reported in Jackson (1979) are used to purgethe observed responses of any systematic bias. By denoting theseestimates by Rjt and Prij, we have

W t = I - - R q-Prijj

where qijt s any random error introduced by the estimates for Rjt and Prij,.This expression gives

w*t= - Rjj _ Rjt = Wijt + qijt = Yi1tAot+ Yi21A2ft + Yi3tA3ft+ eij, + qij,

The analysis discussed in the text applies to the adjusted, or purged,responses, denoted here as Wi*. This qij, term is treated as another typeof measurement error which is independent of X and U, but not necessar-ily of eij,. The structure shown in equation A8 still applies, and weestimate the relevant parameters with the LISREL program.



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The Systematic Beliefs of the Mass Public Estimating Policy Preferences With Survey Data

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