Belief Systems and Political Decision Making

This article studies the belief systems and political decision making and examines the observation that political scientists have the ability to tell a coherent story about citizens and public opinion. It reviews and summarizes the original story about citizens and politics, which can be found in Converse's 'The Nature of Mass Belief Systems'. The next section discusses three revisions of the story and the studies that gird them. The article ends with an examination of the validity of these three revisions.