Abstract
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. In simultaneously relying on a novel, network-derived measure of attitude constraint and node-level centrality metrics, the analysis reveals that belief system coherence can, in part, be explained by programmatic linkages between citizens and ideologically differentiable parties. Approximately one quarter of this belief structuring effect is mediated by the relative centrality of symbolic ideological attachments (i.e. abstract left-right positions) within belief networks. Abstract ideological summary positions are not central to all belief systems, but where they are, mass beliefs tend to be more coherent overall.
Philip Warncke
Post-doctoral fellow in Political Science
Philip Warncke is a recent doctoral graduate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Philip studies mass belief systems, particularly how to measure and compare them, as well as their consequences for political outcomes.