Does the mass public see the Supreme Court as a "political" institution? Past research on public opinion of the Supreme Court has consistently argued that the Court holds a special place in the minds of citizens. From this perspective, citizens are socialized early on to view the Court in mythical terms, and associate justices with symbols of legality. Put simply, the public sees the Court as above the political and ideological fray. This creates a "reservoir of good will" which shields the Court from negatively viewed decisions. Brandon Bartels and I have recently been exploring the extent to which this accepted wisdom is in need of revision. Our work centers on the question of whether the public actually does view the Court in political terms, and whether institutional loyalty towards the Court may be more tenuous than previously thought. We have found that exposure to the Court is not universally beneficial in terms of institutional loyalty (i.e. "to know the Court is to love it"), but conditional on the individual's political predispositions (e.g. ideology) and their information environment. We have also found that the public, to a large extent, prefers a politicized Court selection process. We argue that this is a reasonable preference given the recognition that Court decision making is ideological in nature. We find that citizens who recognize the political nature of the Court, and have liberal or conservative preferences, prefer their elected representatives to ideologically vet nominees. Partisan Ambivalence and Political Information Processing What happens when a citizen's partisan identification conflicts with their party evaluations? Research on the nature of partisanship has tended to fall into one of two boxes: traditional or revisionist. From the former perspective, party identifications are social identities: affective attachments rooted in early childhood socialization. The latter perspective has argued that partisanship is more akin to a summary judgment of past party performance, and is thus more evaluative in nature. More recent work has argued that this may represent a false dichotomy. In the words of Green, Palmquist and Schickler (2002), partisans can negatively evaluate their in-party, "without changing the team for which they cheer." In other words, evaluation and identity exist, at least to some degree, as independent processes. Importantly, however, this suggests they may often conflict with one another. Howard Lavine, Marco Steenbergen and I have been exploring the consequences of this conflict. We argue that when partisanship is conflicted in this sense, it is seen as a less reliable cue for political judgment and decision making. This leads to a number of downstream consequences related to an increase in systematic processing: delayed judgments, greater attention to the substantive content of political materials, and an overall decrease in partisan biases. Our work suggests that the traditional view of the "good" citizen as sophisticated and interested is incomplete. Political engagement often leads to more partisan bias. The normatively desirable consequences of engagement are most visible for conflicted partisans. Complexity in the Structure of Mass Ideology In the last decade or so, scholars across the social sciences have become increasingly interested in the antecedents of political ideology in the mass public, and in particular, its biological and psychological determinants. Much of this work, however, has utilized a relatively simplistic conceptualization of ideology as a unidimensional, left-right continuum. However, much work in both psychology and political science suggests that we need multiple dimensions to account for the public's preferences (e.g. social and economic), and that the meanings imposed on the "liberal" and "conservative" labels may be heterogeneous across citizens. Stanley Feldman and I have recently explored the implications of a more complex understanding of ideology for these emerging theories. We find that demographic, political and psychological antecedents differ in terms of their influence across dimensions of ideology. For instance, need for cognitive closure seems to increase social conservatism, in line with previous research, but has no effect on economic conservatism. Similarly, authoritarian predispositions are only related meaningfully to the social dimension. We also find that liberalism and conservatism are defined in a variety of ways. Using latent class analysis, we find six different ideological "types" in the mass public, ranging from traditional American liberals and conservatives, to populists and libertarians. And again, this heterogeneity in meaning moderates the influence of antecedent variables. Heterogeneity in the Structure of Political Representations How do citizens represent the political space, the collection of relationships among political objects? Such representations are foundational with respect to downstream political judgment and behavior, because they impose meaning on these objects, and provide the basis for the extraction of their evaluative implications. Despite this, little work in political science has explored this topic. For my dissertation, I explore the nature, antecedents, and consequences of citizen political representations. Using individual differences scaling (INDSCAL) on object similarity judgments (e.g. "Obama" and "Christians"), I empirically estimate the dimensions that citizens utilize to categorize and compare political objects, and the weights that they apply to these dimensions. I also seek to explain variation in these weights, and thus the "shape" of these representations. I argue that the key to understanding such variation lies in the motivational priorities of citizens, or in other words, their core value structures. Finally, I examine the extent to which such variation has direct consequences for political judgment and behavior. I experimentally examine the effectiveness of elite persuasion as a function of these individual predispositions, and message and source characteristics. |