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The Economic Sophistication of Public Opinion in the United States Sekhon, Jasjeet Uploaded 09-18-1997 Keywords Public Opinion Economic Sophistication Survey of Consumer Attitudes and Behavior (SCAB) Natural Rate of Unemployment NAIRU Unemployment Bootstrap Bootstrap Confidence Region Abstract I show that the public does indeed have coherent and sophisticated reactions to macroeconomic variables. These reactions are consistent with economic theory. Individuals form evaluations and expectations in a way which is sensitive to the complex trade-off between unemployment and inflation as determined by the nonaccelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU). The primary dataset used in this analysis has 69,680 observations and is compiled by merging 113 individual level ``Surveys of Consumer Attitudes and Behavior'' from 1976:01 to 1991:12. The data analysis makes extensive use of bootstrap methods to create confidence regions and to conduct hypothesis tests.

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The Impact of Political Campaigns on the Effects of Political Sophistication Fournier, Patrick P. Uploaded 09-18-1997 Keywords campaign sophistication information heterogeneity individual deviation aggregate deviation Canadian politics Abstract [none provided]

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Partisan and Ideological Trends: Causality and Sophistication in the Electorate Box-Steffensmeier, Janet M. De Boef, Suzanna Uploaded 04-01-1997 Keywords political sophistication macropartisanship macroideology ARFIMA models Granger causality Abstract Studying the liberal-conservative dimensions of political competition deserves high-priority to gain insight into political change, as emphasized by Eisinga, Franses, and Ooms (1997, 3) and Inglehart and Klingemann (1976, 272). Yet the relationship between ideological and partisan movements in the American electorate has largely gone uninvestigated (but see Box-Steffensmeier, Knight, and Sigelman 1996). We investigate the relationship between trends in macropartisanship and macroideology for more and less politically sophisticated adults. We argue that only a portion of the electorate is involved with and attentive to the political environment, able to organize political debate in terms of liberal and conservative referents, and in turn, can link their ideological and partisan identifications. Using CBS and New York Times survey data on partisanship and ideology we find a causal relationship between ideology and partisanship only for the more politically sophisticated respondents. Mutual causality at both short and long lags characterizes the relationship between partisan and ideological change for adults with education beyond high school. In addition to the increased level of political sophistication that characterizes those for whom the series are linked, these respondents are more likely, by wide margins, to have claimed to have voted than less sophisticated respondents. Thus, any linkage has political implications. The incentives for politicians to link popular ideological sentiment with partisanship are strong. The people who put them in office (or kick them out) are the same folks who connect ideology and partisanship and who pay attention to politics.

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Should Voters be Encyclopedias? Measuring the Political Sophistication of Survey Respondents Lawrence, Christopher Uploaded 12-23-2006 Keywords political sophistication public opinion item-response theory models political knowledge measurement NES DPES Abstract In this paper, I apply item-response theory models to the problem of measuring the political sophistication of survey respondents in the United States and the Netherlands, discuss the advantages of IRT models over traditional measurement techniques (additive indices, interviewer evaluations) for second-stage analysis, and demonstrate the construct validity of the IRT-based measures. I also demonstrate the relative performance of knowledge items and items constructed from party/candidate relative placement questions on both the NES and DPES.

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Partisanship, Political Knowledge, and Changing Economic Conditions Lawrence, Christopher Uploaded 05-18-2012 Keywords political knowledge party identification hierarchical modeling economic voting public opinion political sophistication ANES 2008-09 Panel Abstract Existing research is replete with evidence that individuals’ perceptions of the state of the economy are seemingly only loosely connected to more objective evaluations of its state and are contaminated by partisan influences. This paper provides further evidence of why these partisan influences come about, by advancing the hypothesis that citizen political knowledge moderates the effect of partisanship on economic evaluations, grounded in Zaller’s Receive-Accept-Sample model of opinion formation and articulation. The paper also advances the hypothesis that more knowledgeable partisans will respond to changes in elite messaging regarding the economy fairly rapidly after a change in control of the government. I examine these propositions using data from the ANES panel study of public opinion between January 2008 and June 2010, and find evidence affirming the essential interactive role of knowledge and partisanship in the formation and articulation of evaluations of the national economy.