Top-down/ bottom-up theory of political attitude formation
Definition: Ideological preferences are products of environmental conditions (top-down) and internal predispositions (bottom-up) that motivate people to hold liberal or conservative policy preferences.
Political attitudes, they argued, are a combination of social experiences (top-down) and genetic pathways (bottom-up).
They former are those things that we usually associate with political attitudes, such as life experience and exposure to news and political information
The latter exert stable influence on attitudes and behavior over time and across different situations.
