Beliefs

Conceptual Problems

Generally, one can think of political beliefs as individual orientations toward politics, related to other similar concepts such as political values and political attitudes. But the terminological jungle that comes along with these concepts makes it very hard to make sense of such a definition; as William J. McGuire has stated, we find ourselves with a set of names in search of a distinction rather than with a distinction in search of a terminology, making the situation rather complicated and blurry. An often implicit assumption is that these concepts (beliefs, values, and attitudes) can be placed on an underlying continuum ranging from the most basic or abstract to the most specific. The most abstract ones would therefore be the filters through which citizens form their more specific orientations. However, this continuum is often defined by the opposition between attitudes and values. Values are commonly placed on the top of the scale, at the highest level of generality or abstraction, and attitudes are conceptualized as being more specific. But the place of political beliefs within this framework is not so clear. A review of the uses of the concept shows that there is deep controversy over how to locate political beliefs within this context. Indeed, on one hand are scholars who quasi automatically equate political beliefs with values and use both terms almost interchangeably, such as Stanley Feldman, who treats “core” beliefs as roughly equivalent to political values. On the other extreme, there are many scholars who consider beliefs as the more specific components of attitudes. In this latter framework, attitudes are conceptualized as summary evaluations made of opinions and beliefs, and therefore, beliefs would be placed at a lower level of generality or abstraction.

This controversy often passes unnoticed because most scholars simply do not pay attention to the definitional issue. Nevertheless, the extremely divergent uses of the concept must lead us to conclude that the placement of the concept in a latent (undefined) scale is not the appropriate path to follow if we aim at analytical precision. There is no clear consensus on where to place beliefs in such a scale and, therefore, its usefulness is extremely [Page 144]limited. We thus turn our attention to other attempts that are more analytically oriented.

...