Entropic measures of belief system constraint

The notion of the constraint (or degree of organization) of belief systems is a potentially fruitful one in both political science and sociology. Exis ting attempts to measure constraint, however, have had severe drawbacks, bo th conceptual and methodological. This paper argues that this constraint is better conceived of as the absence of dispersion in a table of cross-class ified beliefs and demonstrates that measures based on this conception are b etter at discerning the presence of constraint where it is quite likely to exist, namely, in small, ideologically focused groups. The approach to cons traint outlined here has a number of other advantages: it is equally approp riate to interval, ordinal, or nominal data; it does not require external c riteria of what responses should be associated with others; it is not varia nce-dependent; it does not assume that constraint is equivalent to either r educed dimensionality or pairwise association; and it is equally appropriat e for mass and nonmass belief systems. It is also simple to conduct tests o f significance difference across populations. Finally, this paper outlines the proper way to standardize such measures, which applies to other uses of the entropy measure, such as the quantification of income inequality. (C) 1999 Academic Press.