ABSTRACT
Inspired directly by John L. Sullivan's work, this chapter examines temporal variability in mass-level ideological thinking from 1980 to 2004. The analyses rely heavily on a novel methodological tool first introduced by Marcus, Tabb, and Sullivan (1974)—weighted multidimensional scaling (WMDS)—to consider whether and how variability in political sophistication within the American electorate leads to individual differences in ideological thinking. These models employ the same individual differences scaling methodology that Sullivan and colleagues employed in their re-examination of the “great ideological leap” that supposedly occurred among the American electorate from the 1950s through the 1960s and 1970s. The results show that public perceptions are organized along two predominant evaluative dimensions. The first clearly corresponds to the liberal-conservative continuum. The substantive meaning of the second dimension is less clear, but it definitely is related to the degree to which various stimulus objects are “close” to mainstream electoral politics. The results also show that by 2004, unlike previous eras, everybody—regardless of sophistication level—made crystallized ideological distinctions between most prominent political actors. Yet, other forms of ideological thinking and attitudinal constraint remain subject to clear individual differences in 2004, exactly as they were in the earlier years.
