I develop a theoretical model of the relationship between the macro-structure of political communications and the micro-structure of individuals’ political attitudes. This model conceives of public opinion as a field of competition, where positions correspond to stances on issues, and are occupied both by individuals and by major political actors who compete over their support via political communications. Individuals attend to these communications to better develop their political attitudes. Since a large volume of interdisciplinary work suggests that reliably answering survey questions is an acquired cultural competency that requires substantial training to achieve, I use survey response reliability as a key measure of this enculturation. This points me to a concrete question: do patterns of survey response reliability suggest that competing ideological camps focus on the same issues? To answer this, I develop a formal latent class model of position reliability and estimate it with the 2008-2010-2012 General Social Survey panel. I find that more popular positions are generally reported more reliably than less popular ones, as would be expected if ideological camps predominantly focused on issues where they had an advantage.

我开发了一个政治传播的宏观结构与个人政治态度的微观结构之间关系的理论模型。该模型将公众舆论视为一个竞争领域，其中立场与对问题的立场相对应，并且由个人和主要政治行为者占据，他们通过政治交流争夺支持。个人参与这些交流以更好地发展他们的政治态度。由于大量跨学科工作表明，可靠地回答调查问题是一种后天获得的文化能力，需要大量培训才能实现，因此我使用调查答复的可靠性作为衡量这种文化适应的关键指标。这让我想到了一个具体问题：调查响应可靠性的模式是否表明相互竞争的意识形态阵营关注相同的问题？为了回答这个问题，我开发了一个正式的职位可靠性潜在类模型，并使用 2008-2010-2012 综合社会调查小组对其进行了估计。我发现更受欢迎的立场通常比不那么受欢迎的立场更可靠，如果意识形态阵营主要关注他们有优势的问题，这是可以预料的。