The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics

Belief systems have never surrendered easily to empirical study or quantification. Whole belief systems may also be compared in a rough way with respect to the range of objects that are referents for the ideas and attitudes in the system. A realistic picture of political belief systems in the mass public, then, is neither one that omits issues and policy demands completely nor one that presumes widespread ideological coherence; it is rather one that captures with some fidelity the fragmentation, narrowness, and diversity of these demands. Perhaps the simplest and most obvious consequences are those that depend on the fact that reduced constraint with reduced information means in turn that ideologically constrained belief systems are necessarily more common in upper than in lower social strata. The controversy over internal communism provides a classic example of a mortal struggle among elites that passed almost unwitnessed by an astonishing portion of the mass public.