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My purpose is to offer an assessment of the scientific legacy of Converse's "Belief Systems" by reviewing five productive lines of research stimulated by his authoritative analysis & unsettling conclusions. First I recount the later life history of Converse's notion of "nonattitudes," & suggest that as important as nonattitudes are, we should be paying at least as much attention to their opposite: attitudes held with conviction. Second, I argue that the problem of insufficient information that resides at the center of Converse's analysis has not gone away, & that newly fashioned models of information processing offer only partial remedies. Third, I suggest that the concept of the "average voter" is a malicious action, as it blinds us to the enormous variation in political attention, interest, & knowledge that characterizes mass publics, in Converse's time as in our own. Fourth, I develop an affirmative aspect of Converse's analysis that has mostly been overlooked: namely, that if ideological reasoning is beyond most citizens' capacity & interest, they might fall back on a simple & reasonable alternative, which I will call "group-centrism." And fifth, I consider the possibility that while the majority of individual citizens falls short of democratic standards, the public as a whole might do rather well. Adapted from the source document.

▪ Abstract  This chapter reviews the vast and sprawling literature that seeeks to illuminate and explain the effects of mass communication on American public opinion. Klapper's famous verdict of "minimal effects," delivered some 40 years ago on this subject, was faithful to the evidence available to him at the time, but now seems quite mistaken. With sharp improvements in design, measurement, and analysis, and with keener understanding of human information processing, minimal effects have given way to an entire family of real effects: agenda-setting, priming, framing, and even, looking in the right places, persuasion.

A president skillful enough, or fortunate enough, to preside over a healthy economy is rewarded with public support. Examined are two conceptions of the individual citizen that might underlie this aggregate relationship. A president's popularity might decline when economic times are bad because citizens in effect blame him for their personal hardships -- the pocketbook citizen hypothesis -- or because they see the president as failing to cope adequately with national economic problems, quite apart from the economic dislocations of private life -- the sociotropic citizen hypothesis. Across a variety of tests, results from national surveys covering the Nixon, Ford, & Carter presidencies consistently supported the sociotropic hypothesis. Several promising explanations for the findings are suggested, & their normative implications explored. 2 Tables, 3 Figures. AA.