Measures of Attitudinal Consistency as Indicators of Ideological Sophistication: A Reliability and Validity Assessment

Abstract

This paper contributes to an ongoing reappraisal of methods traditionally used in the study of mass belief systems. Previous studies have focused on the reliability and validity of The American Voter "levels of conceptualization" index (e.g., Smith, 1980; Cassel, 1984). The present study extends this line of investigation by evaluating two attitudinal consistency measures of ideological sophistication: the group-based, correlation approach which has appeared in the literature for more than two decades, and the Barton-Parsons measure of individual belief consistency which has been used in several recent studies. In contrast to the levels of conceptualization, which have demonstrated at least modest construct validity in previous studies, attitudinal consistency measures are found to be both minimally reliable and minimally valid indicators of ideological sophistication.