Philip Converse

What do you think?" And they're like, "It sucks," and they disagree.

And then again, even Converse back in the '50s and '60s was getting this result.

Like, you poll people about what they believe over time, and their views vacillate, but they don't know that they vacillate.

You just ask them, like, "Why did you change your mind?" And the most common response is, "I didn't change my mind.

Another book I had read earlier is Democracy for Realists by Christopher Aitken and Larry Bartels, which looking at the data differently, they're looking at slightly different things, but have a similar view of what is happening in elections.

And What you found is, you and Professor Kinder, was that looking at this data in many different ways, different cuts through all the decades that the data has been kept, really does reinforce a famous thesis by Philip Converse in the early 1960s that the American public, at least most of it, is ideologically innocent.

That is, they do not have a consistent ideology.

So can you talk about what that means, what an ideology is, and how voters actually, whether they are liberal or conservative in the way we talk about it in podcasts, in the news, among elites and government officials? Sure.

So.

One of the original conceptions of ideology goes back to a piece by Phil Converse back in about 1964 about kind of the origin and nature of belief systems is the title.

And he kind of in that piece looks at Americans' ideologies.

This would be kind of late 50s is the data that he's working with at that point.

Mostly because, one, it's way too long.

And two, it has way too many words that even college students don't understand.

But the fundamental logic of that is Converse's idea of issue constraint, which is we're going to look, we're going to ask you a bunch of issue questions.

It's like 60.