Public opinion research has made tremendous progress in identifying the conditions under which individual- and group-level factors induce citizens to form coherent political attitudes, yet comparatively little attention has been given to the role of national political context for belief system coherence. By modeling political beliefs as dedicated statistical networks based on nationally representative surveys covering 38 European countries between 2002 and 2020, the present article shows that national-level belief systems vary substantially and systematically in attitude constraint…

The social sciences heavily depend on the measurement of abstract constructs for quantifying effects, identifying association between variables, and testing hypotheses. In data science, constructs are also often used for forecasting, and, thanks to the recent big data revolution, they promise to enhance their accuracy by leveraging the constantly increasing stream of digital information around us. However, the possibility of optimizing various social indicators implicitly hinges on our ability to reliably reduce complex and abstract constructs (such as life satisfaction or social trust) into numeric measures…

This article undertakes a comprehensive investigation into several common critiques of career politicians. Career politicians are said to be self‐serving, active and assertive when it suits their career interests, and much more interested in attaining higher offices than in serving as constituency‐oriented MPs. Yet, empirical investigations of their alleged behaviors are few, and the results are patchy and mixed. Focusing on the United Kingdom case and using a multi‐dimensional conceptualization that accords with academic and popular understandings of career politicians, the article draws on uniquely rich attitudinal and longitudinal behavioral data covering the first large generational wave of career politicians to be elected to parliament in the early 1970s…

This paper examines the concept career politician. It seeks to clarify, systematize, and measure this ambiguous multidimensional concept in order to facilitate testing theories and hypotheses associated with it. We argue that career politicians are full-time politicians who lack significant experience in the wider world and have other distinguishing attributes for which they are both appreciated and criticized. From claims and critiques put forward by political scientists, journalists, publics, and politicians, we extract four principal dimensions…

Belief network analysis (BNA) has enabled major advances in the study of belief systems, capturing Converse’s understanding of the interdependence among multiple beliefs (i.e., constraint) more intuitively than conventional statistics. However, BNA models struggle with representing political divisions that follow a spatial logic, such as the “left-right” or “liberal-conservative” ideological divide. We argue that Response Item Networks (ResINs)are advantageous for such analyses as they model belief systems in a latent ideological space. In addition to retaining many desirable properties inherent in BNA…

Ideological scales derived from policy position items are prevalent in political psychology and behavioral research. However, the underlying spatial assumptions of these scales are rarely scrutinized. This study investigates how assumptions about the dimensionality of the latent ideological space can significantly impact empirical estimates, even when using the same data from the same respondents. Through a comprehensive literature review and statistical simulations using data from the ANES, we demonstrate that the optimal number of latent ideological dimensions increases without bound as researchers include additional items for analysis…