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Numerous studies in the past decade have suggested that voters in the US have become increasingly sophisticated, ideologically, & that this is due largely to the separate or combined impact of the growing educational attainments of the US public & the greater salience of politics in the late 1960s & 1970s. Here, it is hypothesized that much of the reported change in constraint--ie, the amount of relationship between issue items--may be due to a simple methodological artifact: changes in question wording & format. Using data from an experiment conducted as part of a national survey carried out by the National Opinion Research Center (three random subgroups of approximately 500 cases), the effect of wording & format differences on opinion structuring & amount of "don't know" or "no opinion" responses is examined. According to the findings, wording & format differences can account largely for much of the change observed during this period, & it is suggested that some generalizations about American voters may not be quite as "time-bound" as the current literature would lead one to believe. 2 Tables. AA.

It has often been suspected, but seldom researched, that respondents to surveys give opinions on topics to which they have given little or no thought. Telephone survey data from 631 respondents & interview data from 1,218 respondents are used to assess the magnitude of this problem. In the absence of an explicit filter question, about 33.34% of respondents had opinions about a fictitious Public Affairs Act, while filter questions reduced this to 5-10%. People with opinions on other issues are more likely to express opinions on this fictitious issue. Effects of education & race on response rate are identified; age, sex, & income do not have substantive effects. Low interpersonal trust is associated with high response rates & negative responses, while the reverse is true for high interpersonal trust. This pattern is reflected also in responses to real issues. 7 Tables. W. H. Stoddard.

Recent reports, particularly those of Norman Nie & his colleagues, have indicated that rather dramatic changes have occurred in the structure of mass belief systems of the United States public. Using data from a 1973 NORC survey of 1,500 respondents, the current research demonstrates that, in fact, very little change in the constraint of the political ideas of the typical voter has occurred since the supposedly nonideological 1950s. Most of the change reported is, instead, a result of methodological artifacts; specifically, changes in question-wording introduced with the Mich election series-the data source for most of these studies-in 1964. When the ideological consistency of the electorate is examined with identical questions over time, it is found to be rather constant from the 1950s through the 1970s. 2 Tables. AA.

Previous articles in this Review, including a Controversy in 1992, debated the comparability of alternative forms of the question about partisanship asked in Gallup and Michigan SRC surveys. Bishop, Tuchfarber and Smith contribute to this debate by reporting and analyzing evidence from 15 experimental surveys in Ohio in 1991–1993. They conclude that the distribution of partisan loyalties will generally be the same whether one uses the Gallup or Michigan Survey Research Center question and that, contrary to findings of Abramson and Ostrom, the Gallup form is no more responsive to short-term political forces than its SRC counterpart. In response, Abramson and Ostrom agree that during many time periods there will be little difference between aggregate levels of macropartisanship regardless of which measure is used. But they argue that during periods of political volatility the Gallup approach will accentuate differences, while the SRC version will attenuate them.