Essays on the Conditional Nature of Opinion Formation: Multilevel Models Explaining Institutional and Temporal Variation in Behavior.

Abstract

This dissertation is composed of three papers that study citizens' opinion formation process considering the contextual conditions surrounding them as a key explanatory source of cognitive variation. Taken together, the papers indicate that political regimes that provide abundant cues and easy-to-process political information favor the organization of political opinions and attitudes. My first paper proposes a conceptual framework that interprets the political environment in terms of its degree of complexity and applies it to the structure of citizens' opinions about political issues. My second paper develops and tests hypotheses about how institutional and party system factors encourage the alignment of citizens' political evaluations in accordance with their partisan dispositions. My third paper is an empirical examination of the contentious claim that citizens update their opinions in unbiased fashion. I test this hypothesis by estimating the influence that party identification has over the rate of change of individuals' political opinions on salient political issues. The first two papers employ a cross-national design which studies individuals' political cognition through the lens of the micro-macro linkage, meaning the connection between system-level properties of a polity and the individuals nested in that polity. The third paper studies individuals' opinions considering the passage of time as a key source of heterogeneity. The three papers identify important, and previously unaccounted, empirical patterns such as the varying role of cognitive resources on the level of association of citizens' opinions, the strong influence that clarity of responsibility exercises over the association between partisanship and political evaluations, and the demonstration that individuals update their opinions with strong partisan biases. All papers rely on multilevel modeling techniques, and engage in innovative uses of this statistical framework. This includes dealing with multivariate dependent variables, capturing latent variables, and accounting for the initial conditions problem of longitudinal data. A practical consequence that follows from this dissertation is that when political institutions are designed, we should consider the type of information that average citizens will be exposed to. This can help engage a portion of the electorate that would otherwise not care about public affairs.