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Decomposing Public Opinion Variation into Ideology, Idiosyncrasy, and Instability

Lauderdale, Benjamin E.; Hanretty, Chris; Vivyan, Nick

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Authors

Benjamin E. Lauderdale

Chris Hanretty



Abstract

We propose a method for decomposing variation in the issue preferences that US citizens express on surveys into three sources of variability that correspond to major threads in public opinion research. We find that, averaging across a set of high-profile US political issues, a single ideological dimension accounts for about 1/7 of opinion variation, individuals’ idiosyncratic preferences account for about 3/7, and response instability for the remaining 3/7. These shares vary substantially across issue types, and the average share attributable to ideology doubles when a second ideological dimension is permitted. We also find that (unidimensional) ideology accounts for almost twice as much response variation (and response instability is substantially lower) among respondents with high, rather than low, political knowledge. Our estimation strategy is based on an ordinal probit model with random effects and is applicable to other data sets that include repeated measurements of ordinal issue position data.

Citation

Lauderdale, B. E., Hanretty, C., & Vivyan, N. (2018). Decomposing Public Opinion Variation into Ideology, Idiosyncrasy, and Instability. Journal of Politics, 80(2), 707-712. https://doi.org/10.1086/695673

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Oct 14, 2017
Online Publication Date Mar 1, 2018
Publication Date Mar 1, 2018
Deposit Date Oct 24, 2017
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal Journal of Politics
Print ISSN 0022-3816
Electronic ISSN 1468-2508
Publisher The University of Chicago Press
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 80
Issue 2
Pages 707-712
DOI https://doi.org/10.1086/695673

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Copyright Statement
© 2018 by the Southern Political Science Association.





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