While such concepts as "belief systems" and "levels of conceptualization" have played a central role in research on "issue voting" and other important questions, political scientists have paid relatively little attention to the processes by which human organisms process the signs and symbols they encounter in political (or in survey interview) situations, or to how people selectively attend to those stimuli. The research reported here takes from cognitive psychology and information processing the concept of a "schema" which organizes and structures those stimuli in varying ways and to varying degrees. Utilizing various measures of stimulus recall and recognition, it compares the reaction to political and non-political stimuli of persons putatively possessing a well-developed political schema ("politicos") and those lacking such a schema ("apoliticals"). The results suggest that the concept offers a promising approach for research on problems of political perception and response.Contemporary research on political behavior appears committed to the notion that the average American voter is a &dquo;homo-not-so-sapient.&dquo; Gallup polls and similar election-year surveys from the 1930s on have regularly reported low levels of public information in the American electorate. Following Converse's classic work on the nature of belief systems (1964a, 1964b, 1970), most studies characterize the typical citizen as not only having little information about government and politics, but as having attitudes of minimal consistency and content. Some &dquo;revisionist&dquo; researchers have since claimed to find more content and consistency in American voters' minds, and hence more rational and ideological voting than did Converse, leading to a contining &dquo;controversy&dquo; as to whether or not &dquo;rational&dquo; or &dquo;issue&dquo; voting is a genuine phenomenon of American voting behavior (Niemi and Weisberg, 1976).The key question in this controversy, of course, is not whether or not voters behave one way instead of another, or which ones do and at UNIV OF PENNSYLVANIA on June 16, 2015 ips.sagepub.com Downloaded from