Public Opinion

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as synthetic survey respondents, yet it is unclear whether their belief-system structure matches that of real publics. We compare 28 LLMs to the 2024 General Social Survey (GSS) using 52 attitude items and demographic persona traits. We estimate polychoric correlation matrices and propagate un-certainty in the GSS via bootstrap resampling with multiple imputation. Constraint is measured by the variance share explained by the first principal component and by effective dependence, a determinant-based measure of global linear dependence. Across models, LLM personas exhibit substantially higher constraint than humans; conditioning on persona traits reduces constraint far more for LLMs, indicating greater demographic mediation. Projection onto a shared GSS basis further shows overemphasis of the leading dimension and missing secondary structure. These results caution against treating LLM personas as a reliable foundation for synthetic survey data generation.

Research in political science suggests campaigns have a minimal effect on voters’ attitudes and vote choice. We evaluate the effectiveness of the 2016 Trump and Clinton campaigns at informing voters by giving respondents an opportunity to name policy positions of candidates that they felt would make them better off. The relatively high rates of respondents’ ability to name a Trump policy that would make them better off suggests that the success of his campaign can be partly attributed to its ability to communicate memorable information. Our evidence also suggests that cable television informed voters: respondents exposed to higher levels of liberal news were more likely to be able to name Clinton policies, and voters exposed to higher levels of conservative news were more likely to name Trump policies; these effects hold even conditioning on respondents’ ideology and exposure to mainstream media. Our results demonstrate the advantages of using novel survey questions and provide additional insights into the 2016 campaign that challenge one part of the conventional narrative about the presumed non-importance of operational ideology.