Inferring Belief Systems in Mass Publics: A Pragmatic Approach

• In Event: Reconsidering Ideology in Mass Publics

Abstract

Traditional approaches to the study of mass belief systems are limited in two important respects. First, most quantitative analyses of attitude structure place too much emphasis on segmenting the ideologically constrained from the ideologically innocent. This approach imposes unnecessarily coarse distinctions on belief systems that discount the ways ordinary citizens think about politics. Second, and relatedly, such approaches impose researcher-defined relationships between belief elements that define ideology in ways that make it observationally equivalent to partisanship. That is, they are too sensitive to selection on particular beliefs. We address these limitations by drawing on Robert Brandom’s inferentialist philosophy of language, which holds that communication relies on overlapping norms regarding what is socially appropriate to infer about the relationships between concepts. Reconceptualizing ideological belief systems as the sets of relationships between idea-elements that citizens see as reasonable to infer, we introduce novel quantitative methods to systematically identify groups of citizens for whom idea-elements exhibit different relationships. The results provide a clearer distinction between partisanship and ideology with fewer researcher-imposed biases.

Authors

• Jon Green, Northeastern University

• Nic Fishman

• Nicholas Thomas Davis, University of Alabama