Political Expertise and the Use of Ideology: Moderating Effects of Evaluative Motivation

Much research suggests that political experts are more likely to structure attitudes toward different issues in an ideologically consistent fashion. Based on recent studies of motivational influences on social cognition, we hypothesize that only experts with a high need to evaluate—a strong motivation to establish evaluations of social objects—may “apply” ideology to a variety of issues. Data from the 1998 NES Pilot and 2000 NES are used to examine this hypothesis. While experts do show more ideological constraint, this relationship appears to be limited to individuals with a high need to evaluate. Additional analyses indicated that this interactive effect extended to other indices of the use of ideology as well.