The Effect of Education on Ideological Consistency

Using data from the 1964, 1968, and 1972 American national election studies, this report raises serious questions about the validity of the "salience-of-politics" hypothesis that has been invoked to account for the dramatic growth of mass ideological consistency since the late 1950s. A reconceptualization of the consistency construct along liberal-conservative lines and a more refined analysis of the effect of education suggests that the rising level of educational attainment in the mass public may be the major factor explaining long-term trends in the structure of American political ideology. George F. Bishop is a Faculty Research Associate in the Behavioral Sciences Laboratory at the University of Cincinnati. This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the 30th Annual Conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, Itasca, Illinois, May 1975. The research was supported, in part, by a Biomedical Science Support Grant to the author from the University of Notre Dame. The author wishes to thank Howard Reiter, David Repass, and Carl Sterling for their helpful comments. POQ 40 (1976) 337-348 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.183 on Sun, 11 Jun 2017 18:35:13 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 338 GEORGE F. BISHOP before the findings and their implications become part of a new "common wisdom" about the nature and determinants of American political ideology.1 Among the major problems is inadequate control of level of education in examining the effect of education on attitude consistency. In fact, the present article argues that rising levels of education should be substituted for political salience as an explanation for rising ideological consistency. Before examining the effect of education, however, we need briefly to scrutinize the available evidence for the effect of political salience on the structure of mass belief systems. The Salience Hypothesis While Nie and his associates have acknowledged that their explanation of increased consistency in the electorate as a function of the greater salience of politics in the 1960s breaks down, in part, for the 1968 to 1972 period, they fail to note that this explanation also falls apart even for the earlier periods under examination. That is, their own data indicate that the largest single increase in political salience, as measured by interest in presidential campaigns, occurred between 1956 and 1960: a net increase of 14 percent; whereas between 1960 and 1964, there was only a 4 percent jump in "positive salience" (Nie and Andersen, 1974: 571-575). Surprisingly, however, the most dramatic upsurge in ideological consistency took place in the latter time period, while the salience hypothesis would lead us to predict the 1956 to 1960 period. Thus, unless they are willing to postulate an unusual sort of sleeper effect for the salience variable, the evidence from their own analysis appears to be quite incongruent with an "interest-based" interpretation. That the changing salience of politics is not the central factor affecting the growth of mass ideology becomes even more apparent when one closely examines the data reported by Nie and his colleagues on changes in political attitude consistency among those respondents who were "very interested" and "not at all interested" in presidential politics, particularly in the 1964 national election. Probably the most damaging datum is the significant rise in ideological consistency among the "not at all interested" group, though it was not as large as that observed for the "very interested" respondents-a point which Nie and Andersen acknowledge. ' The major difficulties, in addition to those examined in the present article, are: (a) the operationalization of ideological consistency in terms of intercorrelations among attitudes and opinions arbitrarily assumed to represent "liberal" and "conservative" frames of reference, (b) problems of item comparability over time because of significant changes in question wording and format beginning with the Survey Research Center's (SRC) 1964 election study-the point at which the greatest increase in mass attitude consistency has been observed, and (c) problems of comparability in sample design between the 1968 and 1972 election studies due to the inclusion of persons under the age of twenty-one for the first time in the latter study. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.183 on Sun, 11 Jun 2017 18:35:13 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms EFFECT OF EDUCATION ON CONSISTENCY 339 But if increased interest in politics is primarily responsible for increments in mass attitude consistency, it is still quite difficult to understand why consistency should have increased by 21 points from 1960 to 1964 among those for whom politics is, at most, a remote concern. Some other influence must be operating, one which produces higher levels of attitude consistency despite differences in levels of political interest.2 Furthermore, as Nie and Andersen recognized in their analysis, the use of interest in following presidential campaigns is hardly an adequate indicator of salience; hence, the salience hypothesis remains essentially untested. The Effect of Education In their investigation Nie and Andersen also tested the hypothesis that changing levels of education account for the growth of mass ideology by comparing the degree of attitude consistency among persons with at least some college to that among persons having less than a complete high school education. Not surprisingly, they reported education had hardly any impact on the development of mass ideological consistency: While those with some college education manifest higher levels of consistency throughout the period, both the educated and less educated groups have shown increases in consistency which are far greater than the differences between the groups at any point in time. More important, those with less than a high school education have shown increases in consistency almost equal in magnitude to the increases shown for the college educated (Nie and Andersen, 1974:570). But their analysis does not take into account the fact that those with at least some college in the 1972 data set, for example, would tend to have a higher average level of education than their 1956 counterparts, since the former group is likely to include a greater number of college graduates. Similarly, we would expect to find a larger number of persons with at least some high school among those having less than a complete high school education in 1972 than in 1956 because of the replacement of less well-educated older cohorts with better-educated younger cohorts. To express it another way, Nie and Andersen did not control for differences in level of education in a sufficiently refined manner; their categories of "at 2 A plausible hypothesis which might account for the sudden spurt in ideological consistency in 1964 would be changes in SRC question wording and format; that is, greater consistency in the mass public would be due, in part, to the filtering out of less politically sophisticated respondents and, also, to qualitative changes in the nature of the questions themselves-e.g., items on the cold war and size of government. Nie and Andersen reject this interpretation, but the artifact hypothesis needs to be tested more systematically. Schuman and his colleagues (Schuman and Duncan, 1974; Presser and Schuman, 1975), for instance, have found that relatively minor changes in question wording and format such as the use of opinion filters and forced-choice questions, rather than agree-disagree questions can produce significant changes not only in the marginal distributions of items, but also in the amount of association between items. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.183 on Sun, 11 Jun 2017 18:35:13 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 340 GEORGE F. BISHOP least some college" and "less than complete high school" are too crude to permit sensitive comparisons over time. Nor did they consider the possibility of standardizing the 1956 election data, through reweighting procedures, to the educational distribution of the 1972 election data to determine to what extent mass attitude consistency might have increased despite changing levels of education. Even if they had used these methodological procedures, however, the changes in question wording and format made by the Survey Research Center since 1964 for the various issues (e.g., size of government, cold war) create serious problems of comparability for any trend analysis using these data sets.3 Consequently, the present article does not attempt to reanalyze their trend data; rather, it carries out a more refined analysis of the effect of education on ideological consistency, using multiple indicators of sociopolitical attitudes and what Hyman (1972) calls an internal replication design with multiple surveys. Finally, it needs to be emphasized at the outset that Nie and Andersen, like most previous researchers, selected the absolute amount of association between opinions on various domestic and foreign issues as a measure of consistency, whereas this research relies on a more direct indicator of "liberal-conservative" ideological consistency. Such differences may account for some of the discrepant findings reported here.