Expertise a N D Political Psychology

Expertise has been a topic of fascination among cognitive psychologists for many years now. Numerous studies have explored expertise in 1981), and many other areas. In recent years, social psychologists have shown an increasing interest in expertise as well (e.. being learned by cognitive psychologists about the correlates and consequences of expertise in nonsocial domains are proving to be very helpful for understanding social cognition. While all of this has been going on in psychology, political scientists have maintained a long-standing interest in variation of political expertise within mass publics.' The term expertise has rarely been used in this literature, but that concept is clearly present in a great deal of the most influential political science literature, usually traveling under the name of political involvement. In The American Voter, for instance, Campbell, Converse, Miller, and Stokes (1960) showed that highly politically involved citizens have more ideologically organized views about political affairs than do less involved citizens. A little later, Converse (1964) provided even more compelling evidence of hetero-geneity in the American electorate in terms of political involvement and its effects on attitude organization. And during the years since then, many investigators have found that politically involved and uninvolved citizens think differently about political events in numerous other ways as well (e. However, most of t h s evidence has been descriptive instead of explanatory. Although various studies have shown that citizens who are involved in political affairs think