Mass issue attitudes and the role of political sophistication: the European case

In this article, I investigate the role of political sophistication in constraining mass attitudes. Following Converse (1964)’s theory, I hypothesise that sophisticated citizens are able to constrain their ideas to one single dimension, which is highly connected to their ideological outlook. Ambivalent, not ideological and unconstrained belief systems are symptom of a lack of political sophistication. To test this, I replicate the analysis of Lupton et al. (2015): I shift the focus from the American to the European public and I conduct an analysis of the differences in mass attitudes across four EU macro-areas. Utilising data from the 2014 EES, I employ a two-step procedure. First, I run EFA models to explore how political space is organized in different regions. Then, based on EFA’s results, I specify two-factor CFA models to investigate the dimensionality of issue attitudes across levels of sophistication. I show that in most countries political space is organized coherently with the model detected by Kriesi et al. (2006, 2008). I discover that the most sophisticated citizens constrain their attitudes to a single dimension that is consistent with their ideological outlook. These findings are more robust in Northern and Western Europe than in the other macro-areas.