Much of the recent literature about political knowledge and public opinion concludes that the
low information levels of the American public are benign to the workings of democracy …

What is the effect of democratic competition on the power of elites to frame public opinion?
We address this issue first by defining the range of competitive contexts that might surround …

Opinion pollsters, political scientists, and democratic theorists have long been concerned
with the normative and methodological implications of nonattitudes (Converse 1964). Of the …

A new information-processing paradigm, drawing heavily upon concepts generated by the
cognitive sciences, has emerged in research on mass communication and public opinion …

A rich and important tradition in political science involves the analysis of patterns of political
ideology. 1 Initially, the identification and characterization of such patterns had been …

Most Americans lack any substantial degree of ideological sophistication (Kinder 1998), yet
they often manage to express coherent views across a range of issues. The conventional …

The use of public opinion polls has changed dramatically in recent years. As the American
public's attention span continues to shrink, news reporters are finding it more difficult to …

This article compares estimates of “informed” public opinion derived from the regression-
based approach of Bartels, Delli Carpini and Keeter, and Althaus with those from the …

Kinder and Nelson examine two complementary sets of question wording experiments
contained in the 1989 Pilot Study. In the first experiment, Kinder and Nelson compare …

Is polling a process that brings" science" into the study of society? Or are polls crude
instruments that tell us little about the way people actually think? The role of public opinion …