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Sociological Methods & Research
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The Selectively Political Citizen?

Modeling Attitudes, Nonattitudes, and Change in 1950s Public Opinion

CLEM BROOKS

University of California, Berkeley

Since Converse's pioneering work, social scientists have had to grapple with a perplexing phenomenon: the apparent willingness of many citizens to express an opinion to survey researchers when they in fact have no corresponding attitude. New approaches to measuring latent structures make it possible to address some of the controversies surrounding nonattitudes and to probe the empirical adequacy of Converse's account of mass political attitudes. This article extends the work of Duncan, Stenbeck, and Brody by analyzing Converse's Black-White model and alternative latent trait models when the American Panel Study data have not been recoded as dichotomies or trichotomies. The fit that Converse reported for his Black-White model is found to be the product of an invalid recoding scheme. Latent trait models provide a superior fit to the data. Although latent trait models do not allow researchers to classify respondents into logical classes of attitude (or nonattitude) holders, modeling results indirectly suggest that nonattitude holders were not a majority on any issue. Respondents' tendency to choose ideologically consistent categories is found to be limited. The relevance of these findings to the idea of a "selectively political citizen" is discussed in conclusion.

Sociological Methods & Research, Vol. 22, No. 4, 419-459 (1994)
DOI: 10.1177/0049124194022004001
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