Mass issue attitudes, political sophistication and ideology: the European case

This article investigates how mass issue attitudes are structured and constrained across different levels of political sophistication. To do so, it replicates the analysis of Lupton et al. (J Politics 77(2):368–380, 2015) in the European context, relying on the 2014 and 2019 European Election Studies (EES). First, it tests seven models of issue dimensionality on each European country by means of CFA. Then, it investigates whether connections among issue dimensions become stronger at increasing levels of sophistication. Finally, it checks correlations between factors and ideology. Results show that voters’ issue dimensionality considerably changes between the two EES waves, switching from a heterogeneous configuration in 2014 to a predominant GAL/TAN model in 2019. Analyses find evidence that sophisticated voters constrain their attitudes to one single underlying dimension only in some cases. Therefore, the constraining role of sophistication cannot be generalized to all European countries. Yet, the link between issue dimensions and ideological orientations appears strong across (almost) all countries, showing that issue attitudes, especially for highly sophisticated voters, are rooted in ideology.