Influential beliefs are crucial for our understanding of how people reason about political issues and make political decisions. This research proposes a new method for measuring the influence of political beliefs within larger context of belief system networks, based on the advances in psychometric network methods and network influence research. Using the latest round of the European Social Survey data, we demonstrate this approach on a belief network expressing support for the regime in 29 European countries and capturing beliefs related to support for regime performance, principles, institutions, and political actors. Our results show that the average influence of beliefs can be related to the consistency and connectivity of the belief network and that the influence of specific beliefs (e.g. Satisfaction with Democracy) on a country level has a significant negative correlation with external indicators from the same domain (e.g. Liberal Democracy index), which suggests that highly influential beliefs are related to pressing political issues. These findings suggest that network-based belief influence metrics estimated from large-scale survey data can be used a new type of indicator in comparative political research, which opens new avenues for integrating psychometric network analysis methods into political science methodology.
翻译:深入人心的信仰对于我们了解人们如何认识政治问题和作出政治决定至关重要。这项研究根据心理计量网络方法和网络影响研究的进展,提出了在信仰体系网络大背景下衡量政治信仰影响的新方法。我们利用最新一轮的欧洲社会调查数据,在信仰网络上展示这一方法,表示支持29个欧洲国家的政权,并捕捉与支持政权业绩、原则、体制和政治行为者有关的信仰。我们的结果显示,信仰的平均影响可能与信仰网络的一致性和连通性有关,具体信仰(如对民主的满意度)对国家一级的影响与同一领域的外部指标(如自由民主指数)有着显著的负相关关系,这表明极具影响力的信仰与紧迫的政治问题有关。这些调查结果表明,基于网络的信仰影响从大规模调查数据中估计的衡量尺度,可以在比较政治研究中使用一种新的指标,为将心理计量网络分析方法纳入政治科学方法开辟了新的途径。