Issue Constraint In Political Science Research Paper

The adequacy of this description of politics has been the subject of intense empirical scrutiny. Perhaps the most significant concern is whether ideology adequately characterizes the way people think about political choices. Does a person’s belief or opinion about one issue predict or constrain his or her beliefs and opinions on other issues? Is there, as Philip Converse termed it, ‘issue constraint’?

Issue constraint consists of three separate conjectures: (a) rationality of individuals, (b) existence of general belief systems for individuals, and (c) existence of aggregate or widely held belief systems that simplify political debate.

1. Individual Rationality

Issue constraint presumes a high degree of rationality. Specifically, at a minimum it is posited that individuals have consistent preferences among directly comparable alternatives, such as spending priorities on the budget and candidates running for a given office. A strong definition of rationality holds that if person prefers alternative A to alternative B and alternative B to alternative C, then he or she, in turn, prefers alternative A to alternative C. (For a more complete discussion of concepts of rationality, see Brady and Ansolabehere (1989).)

If individuals cannot order alternatives that are immediately comparable, they likely do not possess more general belief systems.

Do individuals reason consistently? Some observers deny this basic conjecture of rationality, citing the low correlations across issue items in national surveys and low correlations in responses to specific items over time (Converse 1964). Response instability, however, might reflect problems with question wording, rather than actual inconsistencies in people’s opinions. (The literature on measurement problems and response instability is lengthy. Zaller (1992, Chap. 4) provides an excellent discussion of such problems).

A more appropriate approach to measuring and testing rationality uses a strong definition of consistency. A number of researchers have designed survey instruments that offer people pairs of choices, among multiple choices. For example, for the alternatives A, B, and C, the survey would ask people their preferences between A and B, between B and C, and between A and C. The answers to all possible combinations of pairs are, then, combined to examine the ability of people to sort the alternatives in a way consistent with some underlying structure of wellordered preferences. In psychometrics this question wording technique is known as paired comparisons. Studies of primary election candidates (Brady and Ansolabehere 1989), taxing and spending priorities (Hansen 1998), and national defense strategies (DeNardo 1995) show high degrees of individual rationality. Use of paired comparisons to study attitudes about public policies is relatively new, and much wider use of the approach is in order for measuring the consistency and structure of preferences.

2. Individual Belief Systems

The idea of issue constraint posits that individuals use general rules in their thinking about politics. They apply their own general conceptions of justice and the public good to each new issue they encounter. As a result, an individual’s preferences on one topic constrain preferences on other topics, problems or policies. Do individuals use principles or rules, or logic that they apply across issues, such as standards of fairness, or do individuals reason about each issue differently?

There is considerable debate about whether individuals have belief systems, or instead have preferences that are specific to given social problems. Research on learning and on partisanship is broadly consistent with the notion that individuals have belief systems: individual people do interpret political communications through partisan or ideological lenses (Berleson et al. 1954, Zaller 1992). However, it is difficult to say whether such behavior reflects the use of principles in reasoning about politics or other causes, such as habitual behavior.

The theoretical difficulties lie in establishing the bases for general political beliefs and distinguishing them from factors that are specific to certain domains. Specifically, do people reason in a consistent way regardless of which interests are at stake?

The search for a few basic principles that people use has proved difficult. Various schools of thought posit different foundations for people’s beliefs. Beliefs, for example, may be structured entirely around social institutions and attitudes of tolerance (Herbert McClosky (1964) goes so far as to tie these beliefs to personality types).

Beliefs may also be structured around economic interests, such as income or class (a classic expression of the foundation of belief systems in economic interests is Downs (1958)).

One particularly important conjecture derives from social contract theory. Every society embraces a set of principles on which consent is based. Political scientists in the middle of the twentieth century, for example, posited that Americans adhere to three principles—commitment to majority rule, to equality of opportunity, and to individual liberty (minimal government)—and applied these principles to specific policies. The give and take in politics is over the interpretation of the terms and how conflicts among these principles are resolved. (McCloskey and Zaller (1984) provide an excellent discussion of the basis for the American creed. For dissent about the basis of consent about fundamentals, see Prothro and Griggs (1960) and Dahl (1961 Chap. 28).)

Racial politics has served as the locus for the most intense debate over the notion that individuals have stable, general belief systems. Research by Donald Kinder and others suggests that individuals expressed preferences about public policies, such as jobs programs and school funding, depend on which racial groups those programs are perceived to benefit (Kinder and Sanders 1996). Paul Sniderman and his collaborators argue, contrary to Kinder and others, that people use general principles about fairness and the authority of government in thinking about politics that affect specific groups. Among other things, Sniderman and his colleagues demonstrate that racially intolerant ‘liberals’ can be prompted using political statements to support more tolerant positions, whereas racially intolerant ‘conservatives’ cannot (Sniderman and Carmines 1997). How much racial differences undercut the power of more general ideological belief systems remains a hotly debated question, with fundamental implications about whether people reason about public issues using general principles or rely on specific interests and stereotypes.

How survey researchers elicit beliefs when sensitive matters such as fairness and race are involved raises a troublesome set of methodological concerns. Sensitive matters may lead to biased answers. Individuals may wish to give the ‘correct’ response to a survey question because of social stigmas associated with certain attitudes. Looking across questions, people may exhibit more (or less) constraint than they truly have if some of the survey questions are corrupted by response biases. The challenge is to develop unobtrusive measures of preferences that will allow researchers to separate specific interests and stereotypes from general principles or beliefs. This remains a substantial methodological challenge.

3. Aggregate Constraint

Ideology, or more generally the notion of issue constraint, is useful to the extent that it allows people to sort out the political beliefs of those involved in politics in some simple way, say, from liberal to conservative. Shorthand assessments of politics are extremely common. The Americans for Democratic Action, the American Conservative Union, and many other interest groups publish annual ratings of legislators, which rank politicians from 0 to 100 according to legislators’ consistency with the groups’ ideology. Survey research organizations and interest groups publish similar classifications of voter ‘types’ based on clusters of answers to questions, ranging from abortion to zero-based budgeting. In fact, several public interest groups wishing to improve voter decisions offer simple on-line questionnaires that allow people to evaluate their own ‘ideology’ and compare it with the candidates’ (e.g., GoVote.Com (www.govote. com)).

A central question for political scientists who analyze ideology is whether politics boils down to one dimension or multiple dimensions. The greatest degree of aggregate issue constraint is provided by positing one dimension; that is, everyone sorts out along a continuum from one extreme (say, liberal) to another (say, conservative). The least degree of aggregate constraint is when every issue differs so the number of dimensions over which people take differing political stances equals the number of issues on the public agenda. For social choice theory, larger numbers of dimensions create analytical difficulty and lead social scientists to the conclusion that institutions that constrain the political agenda and thus open political discourse are needed.

What does the dimensionality of politics look like? The most intensive study of the subject has been of roll-call votes in the US Congress. The US Congress typically takes over 1,000 roll-call votes each year covering hundreds of different policy concerns and issues. Using statistical scaling techniques, political scientists analyze the correlations across all roll call votes to determine how many different factors describe the behavior of legislators. (Two different techniques have been developed expressly for this purpose and are widely used by congressional scholars. Poole and Rosenthal (1997) use a nonlinear maximum likelihood technique, which assumes probabilistic voting and normal probability distributions for each vote. Heckman and Snyder (1997) assume probabilistic voting in a spatial model with uniform probabilities, which implies a linear factor analysis model with boundary constraints.) The number is very small, possibly just one. One factor dominates congressional roll call voting, and it is most strongly distinguished by legislators’ votes on important economic issues, such as taxation, Social Security, education, welfare, and the minimum wage.

This factor explains seven times more of the variation in roll-call votes than any other factor. Other, much less important dimensions, tap conflicts over civil liberties and international relations. In the 1950s 1960s, and 1970s, race served as a much stronger second dimension of conflict in American politics; it has since been subsumed by the first dimension. (For details on the dimensionality of Congress, see Poole and Rosenthal (1997) and Heckman and Snyder (1997).)

Studies of aggregate constraint among the public have been limited by the nature of the survey enterprise. The costs of interviewing large samples within legislative districts or asking detailed questions about dozens of policies are prohibitive. However, within the present limitations, only a handful of dimensions typically appear, with the main dimension tapping attitudes about the economic authority or size of government. A fundamental conjecture of representative politics is that elected officials are responsive to the citizenship. This general idea has been applied to questions of issue constraint. Do elected officials show the same sort of issue constraint on their beliefs that the public exhibits? This question has proved incredibly hard to study, owing to the enormous cost of doing extensive elite and mass surveys. Many studies of this question suggest that the degree of constraint differs between the elite and mass levels and that the degree of agreement between elites and masses varies across issues. In his classic article ‘On the nature of mass belief systems,’ Philip Converse (1964) documented significantly lower correlations across issues among the masses than among elites, and suggested that people with higher education levels exhibited higher degrees of constraint. It is unclear whether there is much association, then, between the belief systems of mass publics and the belief systems of elites.

Evidence of responsiveness or aggregate constraint comes, again, from the US Congress. A number of important studies have attempted to measure the responsiveness of elected officials to voters by associating roll-call voting behavior with mass attitudes. Political scientists have found strong association between district ideology, proxied by presidential vote, and roll-call voting behavior (e.g., Ansolabehere et al. 1999). Perhaps the most striking evidence of linkages between mass beliefs and elite beliefs and behavior comes by taking a broader historical perspective. Over time, the policies embraced by the courts, Congress, the President, and the electorate move strongly together. Across a wide range of concerns on the public agenda, as the populace moved to the left from the 1950s to the 1960s, so too did American institutions and policy, and as the populace moved to the right in the 1980s, so too did institutions and policy (Mayhew 1991). Without settling who—masses or elites— moved first, these broad historical patterns provide strong evidence of important issue constraint in American politics.

Despite empirical concerns about the degree of issue constraint in public thinking, ideology remains a central organizing principle for political science. The reason is parsimony. For observers of politics, ideology is a useful shorthand; for voters, who have to sort out complicated choices, it may be essential.

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