What goes with what and for whom? How political sophistication shapes the structuring of economic and cultural beliefs

Recent studies have acknowledged the heterogeneity in the way citizens make sense of their economic and cultural beliefs, thus calling to question the conventional assumption that political views are organized along a single liberal-conservative dimension and connected accordingly with left-right identifications. Our article contributes to this stream of research. Primarily highlighting the influence of political sophistication on attitude consistency, we show that only the most interested in politics associate their economic and cultural attitudes in accordance with the liberal-conservative continuum and are able to combine them in a coherent fashion with their ideological identifications. In contrast, large segments of the French public do not respond to the dominant framing of the political debate.