| dc.description.abstract | In March 2010, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) was signed into law amid mixed reviews from the public. The primary research question for this dissertation is: what explains the public’s level of support for the ACA? Extant literature on preference formation on complex issues points to the persuasiveness of political elites such as party leaders and policy entrepreneurs (Moore 1987; Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996, Jacobs and Shapiro 2000, Bartels 2005, Jacobs and Mettler 2011) and the way media frames the issues (Iyengar and Kinder 1987, Iyengar 1990 and 1991, Gilens 2000, Kellstedt 2000, Edy and Meirick 2007). Also important is the impact of political knowledge and sophistication (Brady and Sniderman 1985, Lupia 1994, Bartels 2008, Jerit 2009) and the role incomplete information plays in decision making (Simon 1965, Meltzer and Richard 1981, Jones and Baumgartner 2005). Social constructionists posit that a person’s mental construction an issue plays an important role in preference formation (Berger and Luckmann 1966, Conrad and Barker 2010). I analyzed preferences regarding the ACA using Cultural Theory, a framework that measures ideological values on two dimensions rather than the typical unidimensional left-right model of ideology. My results indicate cultural worldview is the strongest predictor of opinions on more complex questions related to the ACA in which the individual has little factual knowledge. It is not as useful a tool for questions on issues for which the social construction of important elements in the questions supersede the individuals’ ideological values as measured by Cultural Theory. The results reveal some important limitations of the theory with respect to highly complex political issues. | en_US |
