The Effects of the 1980 and 1984 Campaigns on Mass Ideological Orientations: Testing the Salience Hypothesis

O NE of the most plausible and intuitively obvious hypotheses in public opinion research is that mass attitudes, perceptions and beliefs are shaped, to some extent, by the political environment. When parties, in the 1950s, were strong organizationally and in the electoral process, party identification was high in the electorate; when, in the ensuing decades, parties lost their importance in nominations, campaigns, and in providing information to voters, party identification declined (Wattenberg 1984). When government seemed to be working and the media not highly critical of the political process, political trust was high; when these aspects of the environment changed during the Vietnam period and Watergate, trust declined as well (Abramson 1982; Miller 1974). When party conflict on the issues was low in the 1950s, issue voting was also low; when parties and candidates took more distinct stands and conflict intensified during the 60s and early 70s, so too did the electorate's use of issue preferences to guide their vote (Pomper 1972; Miller and Miller 1976). While the role the environment has played in structuring these political attitudes and behaviors seems relatively clear, its influence on the public's ideological orientations is much more controversial. After numerous studies found that the use of ideological terms to describe parties and candidates (the levels of conceptualization measure) increased during the 1960s, as had the ideological consistency (or constraint) of their own issue orientations, scholars initially turned to an environmental explanation, or what Fleishman (1986) terms the salience hypothesis. According to this view, the public's ideological views of politics, and the consistency of their own policy preferences