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CHAPTER 2 Beliefs, Behavior, and Narratives Any study that concentrates on deep political beliefs such as those about distributive justice must overcome many challenges. Before anything else, we must properly understand these beliefs themselves, and approach them in a way that yields clear evidence and politically relevant conceptions, as well as theories that ultimately contribute to the pursuit of the good life. l As part of this understanding, we must also have a proper sense of the sources of these beliefs. Are they for the most part environmentally determined, and ifso, what are the mechanisms through which people acquire their beliefs? Or are they subjectively determined, and if so, how then do these beliefs develop within individuals? Are beliefs that appear to be content-oriented in fact only the rationalizations of self-interest? Are they part of an ego defense, a means of coping with and responding to inner psychological conflicts, particularly those caused by repressed desires? Or again, are they the result ofa reality-screening process required by certain psychological needs, or simply by the limits of cognitive capacity? Once these questions are answered satisfactorily, we must then understand the relevancy ofthe beliefs to the political process. An understanding of deep beliefs may prove quite interesting intrinsically, but to be meaningful to the understanding ofpolitics it must carry with it a sense ofhow beliefs matter. Regarding legislators, this requirement means that our understanding must include a sense of how deep beliefs operate in the legislative process. Political behavior may be independent of beliefs; regarding legislators , it may be a product of electoral or even material self-interest, or it may be mostly a product of independent, external forces. These are all difficult questions . To be sure, we cannot expect to arrive at the ultimate answers, but nonetheless, we do need to realize some understanding as a base from which to proceed with the investigation and analysis. What follows is a brieftreatment ofthe issues that are most relevant to the concerns ofthis study, and a presentation ofthe theoretical approach that I will adopt. I begin with an examination ofthe study ofpolitical beliefs themselves, which includes a look at both their nature and their sources. I then move to a discussion of the connections between beliefs and behavior, which more directly involves the Connecticut State Senate.2 I conclude with a briefpresen15 16 Narratives of Justice tation of the concept of narrative, which I use to organize and understand the senators' responses. Studying Political Beliefs The Converse Model and the In-Depth Approach. Throughout the past three decades, the study ofpolitical beliefs and ideology has been dominated by the behaviorally and cognitively oriented works ofPhilip Converse and the Survey Research Center, and the controversies these works engendered. The American Voter studies (Campbell et al. 1960) concluded that public citizens were by and large unsophisticated in their thinking about politics. What this meant was that they did not think abstractly and therefore did not think ideologically. In his work in "The Nature ofBeliefSystems in Mass Publics" (1964) and also in The American Voter, Converse concentrated on the notion of constraint, or the degree ofcoherency ofand connection between issue positions held at anyone time, and similarly concluded that the mass public by and large did not think in constrained, connected terms, and therefore did not think ideologically.3 In the Converse treatment, ideology was seen as a belief system, with attitudes toward things constituting the basic building blocks. These attitudes stood in certain relations to each other. A belief system was marked by constraint , which meant "the success we would have [at any given time] in predicting , given initial knowledge that an individual holds a specified attitude, that he holds certain further ideas and attitudes" (Converse 1964, 207). Adopting a social-psychological perspective, his model considered the relations between these attitudes as culturally defined and in turn learned by individuals. If the relations were learned well, they would be prominent and would remain stable over time. The relations were not hypothesized to vary with individuals, and they were defined in traditionalliberallconservative terms. To the degree that citizens had not learned these relations, that they did not think in liberal and conservative terms as defined by Converse, and that their attitude relations were not stable over time, they were considered to be unideological, unconstrained , and unsophisticated. The vast majority ofthe citizens fit this category between 1956 and 1960.4 At these lower levels of constraint, attitudes were guided by considerations ofgroup benefit, the "nature...

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