Information processing and public opinion

There is some debate as to whether DeTocqueville (1848/1945) was right in claiming that Americans of the 19th century took political discussion and debate as their highest pleasure, but there is little debate about how Americans of the 21st century measure up. In the earliest days of modern political science, Berelson, Lazarsfeld and McPhee (1954) put a great deal of effort into determining how much Americans knew about candidates and issues, but the findings of theirs and similar studies were sufficiently pessimistic that as Delli Carpini and Keeter (1996) note, surveys soon stopped asking such questions. On the individual level, it seems clear that Americans do not know much about politics, and do not care much about politics (Bennett 1986; Bennett/ Resnick 1990). While this may be a rational allocation of citizens' resources, in either the economic (Downs 1957) or psychological (Fiske/Taylor 1991) sense, the question remains: how do people who do not know or care much about politics wind up creat ing a responsive democracy? This paradox apparently dysfunctional citizens who compose an apparently functional public — comes into sharp relief when one examines the empirical findings and theoretical debates of public opinion research1 over the past half century. We will do this by reviewing modern public opinion research from an in formation processing perspective. This combination is vital today because of the rapid convergence of political and social psychology, as researchers in the two fields increas ingly cite each others work citations to Philip Converse run seven lines in the index of the recent Handbook of Social Psychology (Gilbert et al. 1998) -, use common termi nology and even draw paychecks from the same departments (McGraw 2000). This article will proceed as follows. In the next section, we attempt to come to grips with the role of a citizen in a democracy and show how public opinion research