3) PUBLIC OPINION INSTABILITY

at the individual and the aggregate levels, information "deviates in significant and politically consequential ways from the projected behavior of a 'fully informed' electorate" (195).  Uninformed voters can use cues and information shortcuts to vote as if they were more fully informed, however they will vote significantly 'less well' than they would if they truly were fully informed; "[P]olitical ignorance has systematic and significant political consequences" (220).
--BARTELS 1996

Significant implications of this analysis indicate a divide in thinking on the importance and relevance of mass public opinion for democracy.  Before one can determine whether public opinion is important for democracy, however, it is important to determine whether or not there is such thing as a 'public opinion', first, and second, whether this aggregate opinion can be successfully measured.  Shapiro's article seems to be responding to a growing trend toward the belief that mass publics cannot successfully indicate their own preferences, let alone be useful for democratic decision-making or change.
--SHAPIRO 1998

There is no single, organized principle of public opinion. Instead, individuals utilize predispositions (values, beliefs, affect judgments, group evaluations, expectations) in their assessment of political issues. Politicians and elites play a key role in defining these predispositions, but the information level of citizens plays a key role as well.  Contrary to popular public opinion research, then, response variability does not mean that the electorate is incapable of public opinion, but instead impl9ies that public opinion response is more complex than we had imagined. As a result, a consistent left-right political ideology, common in public opinion research, should not be expected from aggregate public opinion.
--ALVAREZ & BREHM 2002

Estimation of information effects: Zaller's approach using interviewers' ratings as summary measure of respondents' political informedness; estimates of voting behavior given 'full information' is then compared to actually voting behavior (all information obtained from survey data, with probit estimates and analysis, and likelihood ratio tests account for deviations in comparisons between the two); graphs of parameter estimates of the previous analysis broken out by relevant demographic categories (ie, blacks, females, protestants, Catholics)
--BARTELS 1996

Voting behavior is significantly affected by information of the electorate; at the individual and the aggregate levels, information "deviates in significant and politically consequential ways from the projected behavior of a 'fully informed' electorate" (195).  Uninformed voters can use cues and information shortcuts to vote as if they were more fully informed, however they will vote significantly 'less well' than they would if they truly were fully informed; "[P]olitical ignorance has systematic and significant political consequences" (220).
--BARTELS 1996

Individuals make decisions by adaptation (over time) and through bounded rationality.  In other words, individuals have the capacity and ability to make rational decisions, and in many cases can make decisions within a rational context, but complexities in society make it necessary for individuals to constantly be adapting to their unique circumstances (increasing likelihood of mistakes in decision-making) and also that even in a situation where completely perfect information is known to make a decision, the information must be processed by the individual.  Since each individual will have differing results from this process (even with the same information) the "rational" decision made is done so within the context of the 'boundedness' of the individuals ability to process the information in such a way as to determine the correct outcome.
--JONES 2001

Achen indicates that attitudes are stable, but survey items are unable to tap these attitudes. He suggests that measurement error should lead to reduced correlations between separate assessments that do not vary with the inter-assessment interval, whereas instability in the attitudes themselves should result in correlations that decrease with increasing inter-assessment intervals
--LIEBERMAN 2003

The implications of mass versus elite competence in formulating and expressing public opinion are relevant to important research and discoveries of the modern democracy.  Through an analysis of Zaller's The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion, and Converse's "Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics," the author shows how seemingly complimentary arguments of both actually conflict with one another on one very important issue: whether or not the public has viable, important, and measurable public opinions that are important for democracy.  While Zaller's work stands as an extension and improvement on Converse's 'nonattitudes', in fact Zaller couches "response instability" as an ambivilance versus a nonattitude.  Zaller continues, however, to show that this ambivilance is not, as Converse might argue, a public simply guessing at answers of which they have no knowledge.  Instead Zaller denies the existence of any true "position" of individual public opinion, or even of a tendency for mass "preferences" based on aggregated valuation of these opinions (in which presumably the "nonattitude" guesses on either end of the spectrum might cancel themselves out, leaving patterns that can be interpreted as public opinion from at the least "those who can form an opinion").
--SHAPIRO 1998

Arguments: Citizens internalize elements of both sides of a political conflict, which doesn't indicate 'nonattitudes' but rather that voters "internalize elements of both sides of a political conflict" to reconcile conflicting principles present simultaneously in order to make difficult political choices (915).  According to the author, results indicate that "ambivalence creates instability in candidate evaluations, substantially delays the formation of citizens' voting intentions, diminishes the influence of both personality assessments and issue proximity on summary candidate evaluation and ultimately weakens the prediction of vote choice" (916).
--LAVINE 2001