The Structure of Political Judgement

Abstract

The notions of content and structure of psychological systems are contrasted, and it is pointed out that most studies of personality, attitudes or judgement have examined content variables. Ways to measure more structural characteristics are described and these are applied to judgements within the domain of political stimuli. An investigation is reported in which left‐wing, centre and right‐wing subjects made several kinds of judgements about national governments. These judgements were analysed to generate a number of measures of differentiation of structure. Results indicate that a judge's political orientation is not related to the number of dimensions he uses, but that it is related to the nature of these dimensions. The implications which this methodology and conceptual framework have for investigations of other social stimuli and for cross‐national research are discussed.