I'm skeptical, though not enough to drop $8 on the paper. The quote, "If citizens just blindly follow their party without thinking much about it..." sets of my

I'm skeptical, though not enough to drop $8 on the paper. The quote, "If citizens just blindly follow their party without thinking much about it..." sets of my BS detector, because it's one of those pat statements that (other) people are predictably dumb or gullible. The first problem with saying people take positions uncritically is that you need to determine how interested they are in the subject. Assuming this was a longitudinal study, I'd want to know how much thought respondents had put into an opinion when doing the survey. The simple explanation is the 15% who flipped likely never had strong (or well-developed) opinions in the first place. It's fairly unusual in politics to see reversals without any explanation, simply because politicians have to interact with people who are very invested in politics. And if you read those explanations charitably, most reversals aren't. For instance, government programs are sold to the public with warranties of fitness of purpose. If your welfare program was sold with such a guarantee and doesn't live up to that promise, then you're not reversing yourself to oppose it. It's right to be skeptical of reversals and the explanations, but if you're buying into the notion that people are "blindly" following their leadership, you're probably falling for some cheap partisan rhetoric yourself.