The Breadth, Depth, and Utility of Class, Partisan, and Ideological Schemata *

Given the complexity and ambiguity ofthings political, there are many ways to think about government and politics. The authors compare class, partisan, and ideological schemata in terms of cognitive content and utility in discriminating among political policies and President Reagan's positions on the issues. The "rich-poor" class schema is found to provide most respondents with a mechanism for dealing effectively with "spend-save" type issues, while both the "Republican-Democrat" partisan schema and the "liberal-conservative" ideological schema provide sophisticated respondents with an effective cognitive framework for dealing with both spend-save issues and the more abstract noneconomic policies. It is fast becoming an article of faith in the groves of academe that God so loved physicists She gave them all the simple problems, leaving the rest of us with what are called "interesting questions," the hallmarks of which are disagreements over concepts, disputes about measures, and counterarguments to every interpretation. Nowhere is the controversial nature of political science more evident than in the literature on belief systems, in particular the role of ideology. Although the conceptual and methodological problems with ideological belief systems are serious enough for Bennett (1977) to have called for a moratorium on empirical research pending the