Ambivalence Toward American Political Institutions

The characterization of attitudes as lying along a single bipolar (negative to positive) continuum has widely been rejected as inadequate in social and political psychology. Instead, scholars recognize that attitudes can have separate positive and negative components—a two-dimensional view which contends that ambivalence is fundamental to our understanding of attitudes. As the contributions to this volume illustrate, within a relatively short period of time scholars have made important advances in demonstrating the role that ambivalence plays in the expression of attitudes about social and political policies, individuals, and social groups.1 However, there has been no consideration of ambivalence toward another object of tremendous importance to the political system, namely, the institutions of American government.