The Stability of Political Preferences: Comparisons of Symbolic and Nonsymbolic Attitudes

Abstract

It has often been argued that political attitudes vary along a continuum from highly symbolic to nonsymbolic and that symbolic political attitudes are more stable across the life cycle than are nonsymbolic political attitudes. The evidence used to support this contention shows that the overtime consistency of attitude reports is high for symbolic attitudes, such as political party affiliation, and low for nonsymbolic attitudes, such as attitudes toward specific government policies. This paper reports three investigations that decomposed test-retest correlations between attitude reports into components due to attitude change and attitude measurement unreliability. Data from 1956-60, 1972-76, and 1980 National Election Panel Studies (NES) revealed that reports of symbolic attitudes were more consistent over time because they contained less random measurement error, not because these attitudes were more persistent over time. The differences in measurement precision across attitude object categories appear to be due to differences in the format of the survey questions used to measure them. It therefore seems that the persistence and potency of political attitudes vary more across citizens than they do across attitude object categories. All of these findings suggest the need for revision of conventional wisdom about the viability of some central assertions of democratic theory.

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