The DOI matches its Crossref record; 55 of the 55 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Information Effects in Collective Preferences
Abstract
Contrary to much of the literature on collective opinion, I find that the low levels and uneven social distribution of political knowledge in the mass public often cause opinion surveys to misrepresent the mix of voices in a society. To assess the bias introduced by information effects, I compare “fully informed” collective preferences simulated from actual survey data to collective preferences revealed in the original data. Analysis of policy questions from the 1988 and 1992 American National Election Studies shows that group differences in knowledge, along with the public's modest average level of political knowledge, can cause significant distortions in measures of collective opinion. The mass public may appear more progressive on some issues and more conservative on others than would be the case if all citizens were equally well informed. To the extent that opinion polls influence democratic politics, this suggests that information effects can impair the responsiveness of governments to their citizens.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
An Economic Theory of Democracy.
Banfield, E. C., & Downs, A. (1958) · Midwest Journal of Political Science · doi:10.2307/2109186 · Cited by 18,594
The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion
Zaller, J. R. (1992) · doi:10.1017/cbo9780511818691 · Cited by 7,785
The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion.
Kenski, H. C., & Zaller, J. R. (1993) · Contemporary Sociology · doi:10.2307/2074664 · Cited by 5,169
Eulau, H. (1960) · American Political Science Review · doi:10.1017/s000305540012235x · Cited by 4,722
What Americans Know about Politics and Why It Matters
Brooks, C., Carpini, M. X. D., & Keeter, S. (1997) · Contemporary Sociology · doi:10.2307/2655098 · Cited by 4,437
Elder, J. W., Geertz, C., & Rosenhack, K. P. S. (1964) · Cited by 3,878
(1962) · Excellence and Leadership in a Democracy · doi:10.7312/grau91070-013 · Cited by 3,317
Linear Probability, Logit, and Probit Models
Aldrich, J., & Nelson, F. (1984) · Sage eBooks · doi:10.4135/9781412984744 · Cited by 2,596
Mansbridge, J. J. (1980) · Cited by 1,929
The Reasoning Voter: Communication and Persuasion in Presidential Campaigns
Popkin, S. L. (1991) · University of Chicago Press eBooks · doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226772875.001.0001 · Cited by 1,874
Cited by
When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions
Nyhan, B., & Reifler, J. (2010) · Political Behavior · doi:10.1007/s11109-010-9112-2 · Cited by 3,173
Misinformation and the Currency of Democratic Citizenship
Kuklinski, J. H., Quirk, P. J., Jerit, J., Schwieder, D., & Rich, R. F. (2000) · The Journal of Politics · doi:10.1111/0022-3816.00033 · Cited by 1,167
What can we learn from 25 years of PUS survey research? Liberating and expanding the agenda
Bauer, M. W., Allum, N., & Miller, S. (2007) · Public Understanding of Science · doi:10.1177/0963662506071287 · Cited by 768
Political ignorance and collective policy preferences
Gilens, M. (2001) · American Political Science Review · doi:10.1017/s0003055401002222 · Cited by 764
Meaning and Measurement in Cross-National Research on Satisfaction with Democracy
Canache, D., Mondak, J. J., & Seligson, M. A. (2001) · Public Opinion Quarterly · doi:10.1086/323576 · Cited by 527
Metadata
- Authors
- Althaus, S. L.
- Venue
- American Political Science Review
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press (CUP)
- Published
- 1998-09
- Volume
- 92
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 545-558
- ISSN
- 0003-0554 (ISSN-L)
- 1537-5943
- OpenAlex
- W2000952803
- Cited by
- 461
- References
- 55
- FWCI
- 28.67
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Information Effects in Collective Preferences. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.2307/2585480
- The paper
- Althaus, S. L. (1998). Information Effects in Collective Preferences. American Political Science Review. https://doi.org/10.2307/2585480
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
