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Prominent accounts of public opinion argue that citizens' preferences are unstable, with stated desires on policies varying wildly from survey to survey, and ideologically incoherent, with preferences on multiple policies evidencing little or no structure. In the aggregate, these findings suggest that many voters are not capable of fulfilling their normative role in the democratic system. In this article, we challenge this conventional view and argue that the apparent instability and incoherence among the public are both overstated and outdated. Using panel surveys from the 1970s, 1990s, and 2010s, we conduct a multi-trait multi-method (MTMM) confirmatory factor analysis of citizen preferences in multiple issue areas. Our results reveal a surprising degree of preference stability in all three time periods across many policy domains. Furthermore, our results reveal increasing levels of ideological thinking over time and that these patterns of stability and coherence hold across subpopulations defined by levels of sophistication.

AbstractFact-checking and warnings of misinformation are increasingly salient and prevalent components of modern news media and political communications. While many warnings about political misinformation are valid and enable people to reject misleading information, the quality and validity of misinformation warnings can vary widely. Replicating and extending research from the fields of social cognition and forensic psychology, we find evidence that valid retrospective warnings of misleading news can help individuals discard erroneous information, although the corrections are weak. However, when informative news is wrongly labeled as inaccurate, these false warnings reduce the news' credibility. Invalid misinformation warnings taint the truth, lead individuals to discard authentic information, and impede political memory. As only a few studies on the tainted truth effect exist, our research helps to illuminate the less explored dark side of misinformation warnings. Our findings suggest general warnings of misinformation should be avoided as indiscriminate use can reduce the credibility of valid news sources and lead individuals to discard useful information.