EDUCATION AND MASS BELIEF SYSTEMS' An Extension and Some New Questions Stephen Earl Bennett, Robert Oldendick, Alfred J. Tuchfarber, and George F. Bishop Using the SRC/CPS's national election surveys from 1956 to 1976, this paper investi- gates the effect of education on consistency among the public's domestic policy opinions. Evidence from both gamma correlations and factor analysis indicates that education has neither a strong nor a linear effect on issue constraint over the 20 years covered by the data, for the lowest and the highest education strata consistently show the highest levels of constraint. We do not conclude, however, that education is unrelated to recognition of ideological concepts, for almost one-half of the lowest education stratum do not use "liberal" and "conservative" terms. We conclude that issue constraint does not directly translate into ideology and suggest some new directions that future research should take if we are to evaluate effectively the effect of education on opinion structuring. This paper assesses the impact of educational attainment, which has often been cited as one of the most important influences on how people order their political cognitions, on the degree of "statie issue con- straint" among the populace's domestic policy opinions from 1956 to 1976.1 Initially, one almost feels the need to apologize for asking the reader to wade through yet another study of the effects education has on some aspect of political behavior. After all, there is a very large corpus of research conducted over the past three decades which substantiates Almond and Verba's claim (1965, p. 316) that the highly educated A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the 1978 Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association. Stephen Earl Bennett, Department of Political Science; Robert Oldendick, Alfred J. Tuehfarber, and George F. Bishop, Behavioral Sciences Laboratory, University of Cin- cinnati. Political Behavior © 1979 Agathon Press, Inc., New York Vol. 1, No. 1, 1979 0190-9320/79/010053-20501.50 53