No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
The Origins & Meaning of Liberal/Conservative Self-Identifications Revisited
Abstract
This paper examines the permanence of differences in the psychological underpinnings of ideological self-identifications.
Previous research has suggested that conservatives differ from liberals insofar as their self-identifications as such are
best explained as the product of a negative reaction (both to liberalism generally and to the groups associated with it in
particular) rather than a positive embrace. However, this paper demonstrates that the dynamics underlying the formation of
ideological self-identifications are not static reflections of inherent differences in liberal and conservative psychologies
but rather evolve in response to changes in the political environment. Whereas feelings (positive or negative) toward liberalism
played a decisive role in shaping individuals’ ideological self-identifications during the New Deal/Great Society era of liberal
and Democratic political hegemony, the subsequent resurgence of political conservatism produced a decisive shift in the bases
of liberal and conservative self-identifications. In particular, just as conservative self-identifications once primarily
represented a reaction against liberalism and its associated symbols, hostility toward conservatism and its associated symbols
has in recent years become an increasingly important source of liberal self-identifications.
... businessmen and the military for conservatives and feminists and ethnic minorities for liberals (Conover and Feldman 1981). In fact, studies indicate that conservative self-identification is primarily a reaction against liberalism and its associated social groups while hostility toward conservative groups has become an increasingly powerful predictor of liberal self-identification in recent years (Zschirnt 2011). Social influences figure prominently in scholars' explanations of the symbolic-operational paradox, as well. ...
... Take, for example, a party primary or general election in which a candidate is perceived to be at odds with an intra-party ideological faction: members of the opposing ideological ingroup may be less willing to support that candidatethrough voting, financial contributions, 2 This explanation is not contingent upon a belief in the symbolic ideology view, contested by operational ideology advocates, that ideological identification is primarily based upon evaluations of social groups associated with ideological labels (Conover and Feldman 1981;Zschirnt 2011; for a critical analysis, see Abramowitz and Saunders 2006), although that is a view with which I generally agree. Self-categorization, or internalization of a group identity, is sufficient to trigger the social identity processes described above; whether an individual arrives at the point of ideological identification based on symbolic evaluations or policy preferences should not be determinative, only the fact of self-categorization. ...
Motivated by symbolic ideology research and Social Identity Theory (SIT), this article introduces an original measure of ideological social identity (ISI) designed to capture feelings of psychological attachment to an ideological in-group and facilitate analysis of their attitudinal and behavioral effects. Data from a nationally representative sample of survey experimental participants indicates that the ISI scale is empirically distinct from ideological self-placement, the standard measure of symbolic ideology, and it conditions the effects of self-placement on vote choice in actual and hypothetical election scenarios. ISI is also common within the American public, particularly among conservatives, and responsive to environmental stimuli that make ideology salient including electoral competition and “new media” news sources. In addition to its immediate contributions, this research represents a necessary first step toward more fully exploiting the profound theoretical and empirical implications of SIT in studies of ideological identification.
... Since age strongly co-varies with tenure, it was left out. In terms of values, political orientations are important in the United States (Jost, 2006); Americans who draw positively on conservatism often support the preservation of traditional values, social control and free capitalism; while Americans who draw positively on liberalism often support reform, progress and equality, with positive attitudes towards marginalized groups (Conover & Feldman, 1981;Zschirnt, 2011). In light of the possibility that the political identification of traditional American workers can affect their solidarity towards atypical workers, we controlled for liberal and conservative political identification. ...
In this article, we examine the extent to which typical workers act in solidarity with atypical workers. We collected unique survey data from United Auto Workers striking against General Motors in 2019 during the strike and after the ratification vote. Although solidarity was generally high, we do find that typical workers with longer tenure exhibit less solidarity with atypical workers and that they are more prone to be on strike due to material reasons. In the second survey, after workers had voted on the proposed contract, we find that typical workers were more prone to vote yes to the agreement for self‐interested, material reasons and that solidarity with atypical workers had a significant, negative effect on the probability of voting yes to the agreement. Our findings support notions that insiders strike and vote according to self‐interests. We discuss these findings in light of the insider/outsider, dualization and union strategy literature.
... This resulted in a significant reduction in the number of self-described independents. Reilly and Hedberg (2022) have argued that in light of the more recent work of Klar and Krupnikov (2016) and Zschirnt (2011), which showed the importance of the independent identity, classifying self-identified independents as partisans seems counterproductive in examining their influence on partisans, especially when respondents elected to self-identify as leaners. The authors collapsed three groups-respondents who selected option 3, 4, or 5-as independent, thus treating leaners as Independents (VCF0303, Summary 3-category scale). ...
Independents remain hard to categorize because they are, by their choice of self‐identification, resisting the standard categories of political classification. Despite the growth in independent voter identity, many political strategists still view independents as partisans. In this article, we contribute to the academic literature on independent voting behavior by exploring whether those who identify as politically independent function as true independents by accounting for their voting patterns over time. We do this by analyzing data produced by the American National Election Studies (ANES) on political identification and voting choices from 1972 to 2020 on each of the three ANES measures of party affiliation. Our findings show when tracking independent voting behavior over more than one election, there is a significant volatility in voting loyalty and independents as a group are distinct from partisans. This volatility was observed in all three measures of party affiliation used by the ANES survey data. The research also finds evidence that a sizeable number of independents move in and out of independent status from one election to another.
Related Articles
Grossmann, Matt. 2014. “The Varied Effects of Policy Cues on Partisan Opinions.” Politics & Policy 42(6): 881–904. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12102 .
Reilly, Thom, and E. C. Hedberg. 2022. “Social Networks of Independents and Partisans: Are Independents a Moderating Forcer?” Politics & Policy 50(2): 225–43. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12460 .
Saeki, Manabu. 2019. “Anatomy of Party Sorting: Partisan Polarization of Voters and Party Switching.” Politics & Policy 47(4): 699–747. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12318 .
... 1. Strong Democrat 2. Democrat 3. Independent, leans Democrat 4. Independent 5. Independent, leans Republican 6. Republican 7. Strong Republican However, unlike the recommendation in Keith and others (1992), we collapsed three groups-respondents who selected option 3, 4, or 5-as independent, thus treating leaners as independents instead of partisans. In light of the more recent work of Klar and Krupnikov (2016) and Zschirnt (2011), which showed the importance of the independent identity, classifying them as partisans seems counterproductive in examining their influence on partisans, especially when respondents elected to self-identify as leaners. In all the analyses we present here, the spectrum variable was dummy coded for all but the most conservative category, meaning that we did not treat these values as a linear scale but as unordered nominal categories. ...
While scholars have long recognized that social networks impact political engagement for partisans, comparatively little work has examined the role of networks for independent voters. In this article, we contribute to existing research on social networks and politics by surveying Arizona registered voters about their political persuasion, personal networks, and media consumption habits. Our findings show that independents have networks that are structurally different from partisans. Specifically, we found that both Democrat and Republican respondents were more likely to frequently talk about politics with independents than with members of the opposing party. Independents were also less likely than partisans to end a friendship over a political dispute. Taken together these findings show that independents may be frequent and reliable discussion partners for partisans and may be able to moderate political views. We find evidence for the moderating force of independents is especially apparent in the media consumption habits of Republican respondents.
Related Articles
Cormack, Lindsey. 2019. “Leveraging Peer‐to‐Peer Connections to Increase Voter Participation in Local Elections.” Politics & Policy 47(2): 248–66. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12297 .
Malmberg, Fredrik G., and Henrik Serup Christensen. 2021. “Voting Women, Protesting Men: A Multilevel Analysis of Corruption, Gender, and Political Participation.” Politics & Policy 49(1): 126–61. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12393 .
Rowe, Andrew D., and David E. Pitfield. 2019. “The Challenge of Social Media Incorporation: A Case Study of HACAN Clearskies.” Politics & Policy 47(4): 775–806. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12319 .
... In other words, Republican identifiers are a far more homogeneous group than Democratic identifiers. This research is bolstered by findings that show that conservative identity is stronger than liberal identity, the content of which is "primarily a reaction against liberalism and its associated social groups" (Devine 2015, 510;Zschirnt 2011). Similarly, the increased emphasis on identity-based ideology also makes conservative identifiers more sensitive to elite social cues that signal what newly politicized policies are deemed consistent with the prescribed meaning of conservatism (Barber and Pope 2019). ...
The electoral connection incentivizes representatives to take positions that please most of their constituents. However, on votes for which we have data, lawmakers vote against majority opinion in their district on one out of every three high-profile roll calls in the U.S. House. This rate of "incongruent voting" is much higher for Republican lawmakers, but they do not appear to be punished for it at higher rates than Democrats on Election Day. Why? Research in political psychology shows that citizens hold both policy-specific and identity-based symbolic preferences, that these preferences are weakly correlated, and that incongruous symbolic identity and policy preferences are more common among Republican voters than Democrats. While previous work on representation has treated this fact as a nuisance, we argue that it reflects two real dimensions of political ideology that voters use to evaluate lawmakers. Using four years of CCES data, district-level measures of opinion, and the roll-call record, we find that both dimensions of ideology matter for how lawmakers cast roll calls, and that the operational-symbolic disconnect in public opinion leads to different kinds of representation for each party.
... Some commentators suggest that selfidentifying as conservative can coincide with support for liberal policies (Devine, 2015). Zschirnt (2011) indicates that self-identifying conservatives may be reacting against liberalism while self-identifying liberals may reflect a growing hostility toward conservatism. Blum (2013) argues that liberal self-ascription does not necessarily correlate with liberal policy stance while Hatemi et al. (2014) discuss political attitudes variance as explained by genetic influences. ...
Responsible decision-making is a sub-domain of social emotional competence and develops through the educational process of social and emotional learning (SEL). The current review examines responsible decision-making and explores, specifically, the relationship between moral reasoning (MR) and academic achievement (N = 6,992, 18), MR and religiosity (N = 3,441, 15), MR and political orientation (N = 12,960, 15) and MR and personality (N = 1,659, 8). Forty-three studies qualified for inclusion and analysis. The results indicated a positive effect between MR and academic achievement (ES = + 0.24). Interestingly, small negative effects were found between MR and political orientation (ES = - 0.06). Results also indicated small non-significant effects between MR and religiosity (ES = - 0.00, p = .94), and MR and personality (ES = + 0.01, p = .92). Possible interpretations of these findings are discussed with reference to the literature.
... Conversely, the researchers concluded that individuals who describe themselves as conservative may do so due to its accuracy in describing their religious (defined as a strict interpreter of the Bible) or social (measured in terms of a person's child-rearing views) perspectives. Other work posits that both ideologies are influenced by evaluations of key social groups with labour unions, feminists, and environmentalists more positively evaluated by the left and big business, Christian fundamentalists, and the military by the right (Zschirnt, 2011). Both the positive evaluations of these groups and the hostility toward them were found to be important sources of US liberal and conservative self-identifications. ...
Recent research highlights the significant role of political ideological identities in America’s increasing political polarisation. In line with social identity theory, self-placement as a US liberal or conservative predicts favouritism toward the ideological in-group and negative attitudes and behaviours toward the outgroup. The theory also holds that the link between self-categorisation and behaviour is mediated by the content of that identity, by what an individual believes it means to be a member of that group. Although previous research has done much to analyse the differences between US liberals and conservatives on various a priori dimensions, little work has been aimed at gaining a holistic account of ideological identity content from the individual’s lay perspective. Through qualitative analysis of 40 interviews (20 liberals and 20 conservatives), this study identifies central themes in the meaning self-identified US liberals and conservatives attribute to these labels and finds evidence for asymmetrical constructions of these identities. The liberal participant group’s identity construction revolved around identification as, and concern for, individuals, supported by reference to personal values and political issues and underpinned by a motivation to move toward a more equal society. Conversely, the conservative participant group connected the understanding of their identity directly to the political ideology of the nation through a thread of self-reliance and reverence for the national group. Implications for political behaviour and the study of ideological identity are discussed.
... Subjective ratings of political affiliation are externally valid and strongly predict group identification and voting behaviour [33]. Moreover, political affiliation is a particularly salient type of group affiliation and is associated with differences in identity, social norms and values [34] and predicts divergent in-and out-group preferences and inter-group behaviours in experimental studies [35]. ...
The ability to attribute intentions to others is a hallmark of human social cognition but is altered in paranoia. Paranoia is the most common positive symptom of psychosis but is also present to varying degrees in the general population. Epidemiological models suggest that psychosis risk is associated with low social rank and minority status, but the causal effects of status and group affiliation on paranoid thinking remain unclear. We examined whether relative social status and perceived group affiliation, respectively, affect live paranoid thinking using two large-N (N = 2030), pre-registered experiments. Interacting with someone from a higher social rank or a political out-group led to an increase in paranoid attributions of harmful intent for ambiguous actions. Pre-existing paranoia predicted a general increase in harmful intent attribution, but there was no interaction with either type of social threat: highly paranoid people showed the same magnitude of increase as non-paranoid people, although from a higher baseline. We conclude social threat in the form of low social status and out-group status affects paranoid attributions, but ongoing paranoia represents a lowered threshold for detecting social threat rather than an impaired reactivity to it.
... In particular, the validity of studies conducted with the assumption that attitudes on various issues converge into a single ideological dimension has been incessantly questioned. The relationship between ideological self-identification and issue attitudes, and the influence of both types of preferences on voting behavior has not been consistent in every cases, but has shown cross-sectional and diachronic variations (Klingemann 1972;Conover and Feldman 1981;Jacoby 1986;Kitschelt andLellemans 1990, Knutsen 1997;Seligson 2003;Ellis and Stimson 2009;Simon 2011). In addition, empirical studies have shown that the traditional assumption of the liberal-conservative ideological division along the economic issues might not be pertinent to newly developing societies (Seligson 2003:466;Luttbeg and Gant 1985). ...
This article examines the distinct features of the ideological thinking and their impact on ideological competitions among the members of Korean National Assembly (KNA). In particular, it analyzes the influence of preferences on security issues on the formation of ideological self-identification and internal competitions of the KNA. By applying factor analysis, it shows that the issue attitudes among the members of the KNA do not converge into the ideological self-identification. In addition, preferences on security issues can be distinguished from the ideological self-identification among the member of the KNA and have an independent impact on their legislative voting behavior. These results imply that a more valid understanding of the legislative behavior among the members of the KNA could develop by specifying issue attitudes independently from the ideological self-identification.
... Long-term forces are smaller in number and easier for researchers to identify and measure. For example, much attention has been devoted to conceptualization and measurement of party identification (e.g., Green et al., 2002;Weinschenk, 2010;Zschirnt, 2011). However, shortterm forces, including a discussion with a friend or coworker (Beck et al., 2002), television ads (Huber and Arceneaux, 2007), or various characteristics of the candidates such as their facial appearance (Ballew and Todorov, 2007) or perceived personality (Kinder, 1986), are nearly infinite in number and are much harder to measure and link to the voting decision (e.g., Miller and Shanks, 1996). ...
... 104 Auch bei einer möglicherweise mehrdimensionalen Realität politischer Konflikte kann das Links-Rechts-Schema damit sinnvoll Anwendung finden. 105 Zusammenfassend muss das Links-Rechts-Schema nicht als hochversierte Ideologie, sondern kann als politische Identität (Zschirnt 2011), super-issue oder generalisierte Policy-Orientierung begriffen werden (Fuchs und Klingemann 1990;Laver und Budge 1992). Für räumliche Modellierungen von Verhalten bietet es den Vorteil einer klaren theoretischen Einordnung: Die Distanz auf der Links-Rechts-Achse verweist auf eine ideologische Nähe eines Bürgers zu einer Partei, aus welcher ein generalisierter (ideologischer) Nutzen entspringt, der in konkrete Sachfragennutzen übersetzt werden kann und Auskunft über Präferenzen gibt. ...
... Second, we expect that legitimacy of CSR will be associated with beliefs about social responsibility. Previous studies (Conover and Feldman 1981; Jost 2006) demonstrated that political ideology expresses a set of attitudes about economic philosophies, capi talism, and government regulation of industry. Recently, Chin et al. (2013) found that liberal CEOs emphasized CSR more than conservative CEOs. ...
Abstract Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is one of the ways through which companies gain legitimacy. However, CSR actions themselves are subject to public skepticism because of increased public awareness of greenwashing and scandalous corporate behavior. Legiti¬macy of CSR actions is indeed influenced by the actions of the company but also is rooted in the basic cultural values of a society and in the ideologies of evaluators. This study examines the legitimacy of CSR actions of publicly traded forest products companies as compared to family-owned forest products companies. Results indicate a lower legit¬imacy for CSR actions of publicly traded companies than for family-owned companies. The study also examines the effect of social responsibility orientation (SRO) of evalu-ators on the legitimacy accorded to companies’ CSR ac-tions. We found that SRO was negatively associated with legitimacy, especially for women. Perceived profitability of companies was negatively associated with legitimacy of CSR actions for publicly traded but not for family-owned companies.
... Environmental factor structures (social and unique to the individual) should reflect the various insights with regard to specific attitude structures outlined in the extant political science literature (e.g. Adorno et al., 1950; Conover and Feldman, 1981; Jost et al., 2003; Zaller, 1992). Genetic factor structures should reflect those identified in the evolutionary literature , regarding procreation and survival (Barkow et al., 1992; Lumsden and Wilson, 2005; Petersen and Kennair, 2009). ...
Scholars have long focused on socio-psychological attachment, elite discourse, and rational action to explain the nature and structure of ideologies. Recently genetic and neurobiological influences have also emerged as predictors of ideological preferences. So far however, there has been little synthesis of these findings into the larger discourse on the structures and manifestations of ideology. The few studies which do include genetic sources of information imply that culture is merely a passenger on a genetic foundation. Here, we test this assumption and in doing so offer a foundation for merging social, psychological, rational, and biological theories of attitude formation and structure. Utilizing a genetically informative sample, we find striking differences between the genetic and environmental factor structures of inter-related attitudes that form ideologies. The structure imposed by social influences corresponds to recognized definitions of liberalism and conservatism on a left–right continuum; however, the genetic factor structure combines liberal attitudes toward sex and reproduction with conservative attitudes toward punishment, defense and immigration. That is, the structure imposed on social and political attitudes by the social environment is a cultural veneer laid on a potentially divergent underlying structure of genetic differences. Our findings should encourage a new understanding of ideology that encompasses genetic, individual, and cultural mechanisms that operates in both conflict and concert depending on local and temporal contexts.
... We contend that that should be particularly true for voters who have negative attitudes toward a range of cultural " outgroups. " A vast body of research documents the important role of group affect and group-based attitudes for citizens' political attitudes, orientations, and decisions (Berelson et al. 1954; Campbell et al. 1960; Sears et al. 1980; Conover and Feldman 1981; Brady and Sniderman 1985; Miller et al. 1991b; Jelen 1993; Bolce and De Maio 1999a; Green et al. 2002), and, as we have mentioned, evaluations and perceptions of the social groups to which candidates belong are quite important for determining attitudes toward and support for them. There is no question that how individuals feel about Muslims and Arabs as groups should strongly influence their propensities for voting for Muslim-and Arab-American political candidates. ...
... This study using self-reported measures establishes new territory in the study of political ideology and behavior/attitudes toward the environment and social/fiscal issues. Conover (1981) is one of the first social scientists to examine political-ideological identity. ...
This study explored whether attitudes toward the natural environment are affected by self-reported conservatism. Political ideology was measured with three items measuring general, social and fiscal conservatism/liberalism. Environmental attitudes were measured by using LaTrobe and Ascot's (2000) Modified New Environmental Paradigm (NEP)/Dominant Social Paradigm (DSP). The NEP/DSP considers four factors: human interference with nature; equity and development issues; humans and economy over nature; duties to nonhumans. An interesting pattern of findings emerge, showing that fiscal conservatism is negatively associated with environmental attitudes, even when controlling for region, gender and age, that is for variables that tend to be associated with conservatism.
... Party identification is conceptualized as an attitude, a positive emotional evaluation of political objects: parties and candidates. Partisanship is also a heuristic for organizing political information, evaluations, and behaviors (Conover and Feldman, 1981; Cwalina et al., 2008). It is a kind of 'perceptual screen' through which individuals 'filter', interpret, and evaluate political information. ...
The multi-disciplinary nature of political marketing lends itself to a micro/macro analysis. The goal of the article is to present the theoretical frames allowing one to develop an approach to political marketing, which may become the foundations of a general theory of political marketing. Like microeconomics and macroeconomics are the two major categories within the field of economics, so are micro and macro approach to political marketing the two major perspectives that allow one to better understand the workings of modern democracies and the processes taking place there. Such an approach can integrate various theories of particular political behavior considered as part of an external macrostructure, understood as broad social, political, legal, economic, and technological context, with the theories of political behavior of individuals and institutions considered as internal microstructure.
... The effects of distributive spending, as discussed, may not be constant across ideologies or levels of sophistication and may not be constant across types of spending. Conover and Feldman (1981) show that individuals base their evaluations of liberals and conservatives—and by extension base their self placement—on responses to different stimuli. This finding suggests that liberals and conservatives might respond differently to different types of spending. ...
... Election campaigns are usually contests among candidates representing various ideological factions of a party (Polsby 1981). Those candidates frequently make ideological appeals, and voters seem to respond to those appeals (Conover and Feldman 1981; Hedlund 1977-78; Holm and Robinson 1978; Lengle 1981; Levitin and Miller 1979; Norrander 1988; Wattier 1983a). It seems prudent to control for voter ideology. ...
... We contend that that should be particularly true for voters who have negative attitudes toward a range of cultural " outgroups. " A vast body of research documents the important role of group affect and group-based attitudes for citizens' political attitudes, orientations, and decisions (Berelson et al. 1954; Campbell et al. 1960; Sears et al. 1980; Conover and Feldman 1981; Brady and Sniderman 1985; Miller et al. 1991b; Jelen 1993; Bolce and De Maio 1999a; Green et al. 2002), and, as we have mentioned, evaluations and perceptions of the social groups to which candidates belong are quite important for determining attitudes toward and support for them. There is no question that how individuals feel about Muslims and Arabs as groups should strongly influence their propensities for voting for Muslim-and Arab-American political candidates. ...
... Political institutions also work to socialize citizens into the dominant norms of a country's democracy (Eckstein 1988). Regime norms such as majority rule act as political symbols, which can have both cognitive and evaluative effects (Cobb and Elder 1973, cited in Conover and Feldman 1981). Our theory emphasizes the affective effects encouraged by institutions as symbols. ...
four anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments.
... First, some citizens adopt global positions based on factors other than specific issue positions (Conover and Feldman 1981; Jacoby 1991; Stimson 2004). Partisanship, for instance, often develops in the family, as a part of political socialization process, not issue based considerations (Campbell, Converse, Miller and Stokes 1960; Green, Palmquist, and Schickler, 2004; Jennings and Niemi 1968, 1981; Niemi and Jennings 1991). ...
Conservative intellectuals have expressed concern that Donald Trump has tarnished the conservative brand with his authoritarian-populist rhetoric and style of governing. What exactly is Donald Trump’s effect on this ideological label? In this paper I replicate work showing that members of Congress who have openly supported Trump are seen as more conservative than those who do not openly support him. I then test this relationship experimentally and explore whether a pro (or anti) Trump cue alone drives this perception or whether other perceived, unstated issue positions might influence this result. I find that supporting Trump moves candidates rightward compared to a control group, and this effect is about twice as large as the anti-Trump cue which moves candidates leftward. I also find that candidates who support Trump are more likely to be associated with additional issue-related content, which could affect ideological perception. Roadmaps for extensions are also discussed.
When do Americans view political violence as legitimate? In this article, I use experimental methods to examine public perceptions of domestic political violence perpetrated to advance right-wing or left-wing agendas. Specifically, I examine the extent to which the alignment of political ideology (conservative/liberal) with a political cause influences perceptions of legitimacy for objectively equivalent acts of violence. Controlling for variables such as perpetrator identity, I demonstrate that political ideology influences both how members of the public perceive the morality of political violence and the extent to which they view an act as constituting terrorism, even when the severity of violence and type of target are identical. The findings have implications for policy makers and practitioners in designating acts as terrorism and developing policies to prevent or counter political violence.
Theories of symbolic ideology view it as an affective orientation untouched by ideational content. Drawing on Shalom Schwartz's theory of basic human values, we propose that four bedrock values—universalism, openness to change, conservation, and self‐enhancement—shape symbolic ideology. We explore whether politically sophisticated and unsophisticated individuals ground symbolic ideological identities in cognitive values to a comparable degree. Using data from two nationally representative U.S. surveys, we find that universalism and conservation predict liberal‐conservative attachments for people at all levels of sophistication. By contrast, openness to change and self‐enhancement values appear to have little influence on symbolic ideology. The universalism and conservation effects hold controlling for multiple psychological and individual differences variables. These results suggest that ideational predispositions play a substantial role in shaping symbolic ideology.
Our study examines the impact of college education on individuals' ideological orientations (identifying as politically liberal or conservative) using a massive expansion of opportunities to attend college known as the graduation quota program in South Korea. A 1979 military coup in South Korea mandated that all public and private colleges expand their college admission quotas by thirty percent in 1981 and fifty percent in 1982. As an ideal natural experiment for our study, the mandatory increases in college enrollment happened quickly and exogenously in a short timeframe. We use the birth cohorts that were exposed to this abrupt policy change as an instrumental variable (IV) to identify the long-term effects of college education on political preferences. We find that the enrollment expansion caused those individuals who were induced to attend college by the graduation quota program to be more politically liberal.
This study explains how the economy affects the foreign policy rhetoric used by American presidents. When economic conditions deteriorate, presidents criticize foreign nations to boost their approval ratings. Presidents use this “diversionary cheap talk” in response to the misery index of unemployment plus inflation, which poses a unique threat to their popularity. They target historical rivals, which make intergroup distinctions most salient. Diversionary cheap talk is most influential for and most frequently used by Democratic presidents, whose non-core constituents prefer hawkish foreign policy but already expect it from Republican presidents. I test the observable implications of the theory with the American Diplomacy Dataset, an original record of 50,000 American foreign policy events between 1851 and 2010 drawn from a corpus of 1.3 million New York Times articles.
Political participation of citizens is one of the basic preconditions for the existence and successful functioning of democratic systems. The notion of democracy in the literal translation from the Greek language is called the rule of the people, so democracy would not justify its name without the rule of citizens, nor could it function without the minimum level of political participation. Political participation can be seen through three dimensions: electoral participation, conventional political participation (institutionalized activities related to a political party) and unconventional political participation (protestive political activities).
At present, younger but also older and well-established democracies, are facing a decrease in electoral and conventional political participation, trust in systems and institutions, growth of scepticism and cynicism towards politics as well as conventional political participation. The low level of political participation, apart from political, also represents a social problem because it threatens democracy, given that the development of a country as well as its legal and economic functioning are determined by the degree of political awareness and involvement.
One of the tools that can be used to positively influence on the increase of political participation is political marketing which, although sometimes criticized, is gaining greater significance in politics. In political marketing, it is necessary to know the voter and his behaviour in order to influence the voter in the desired direction. Earlier sociological studies have identified various influential factors on political participation, but there is a large unexplored space, especially when it comes to conventional political participation, in the context of political marketing itself. The lack of research in this area is even more present in younger democracies and transition countries.
The purpose of this doctoral dissertation is to contribute to the theory of political marketing and to the theory of political participation through a better understanding of the relationships between the observed potential predictors of political participation intention in order to positively influence them with the activities of political and social marketing. In addition to the stated primary objective, the dissertation seeks to explore and analyse the current level of political participation (electoral participation, conventional and unconventional political participation), to explore potential socio-demographic differences in political participation (gender, age, education, income, religiosity), to perform cluster analysis of voters based on the level of their political involvement and to examine and analyse their socio-demographic and psychographic characteristics for the needs of voter segmentation in political marketing.
The results of the primary research have shown that higher levels of electoral participation are expressed by older citizens, citizens with higher household incomes and citizens with higher rates of religiosity. Greater tendency to participate in unconventional activities have men, citizens with higher household incomes and higher educated citizens. The situation with conventional political participation is also similar: men and citizens with higher incomes are more inclined to it, whereas in the case of education and religiosity, no significant differences were found.
The results of the primary research also found that the intention for conventional political participation are largely influenced by political involvement, ie political interest, perceived political knowledge, participation in unconventional political activities, subjective norms, and satisfaction with previous political choice. By defining the key variable for political participation, political involvement, voter clusters are developed according to the level of political involvement. The results have shown that almost 60% of citizens belong to a cluster of politically apathetic citizens, ie those who are not at all involved or interested in politics. This high percentage is a worrying fact and it is clear that it is necessary to encourage political involvement among citizens.
In his eponymous Culture Wars, Hunter described the polarizing forces vying for control of American universities during the late 1980s and early 1990s. This chapter presents empirical findings from two studies on intellectual diversity using data from the 2010 College Senior Survey (CSS) sponsored by the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at the UCLA. The first study employed Hierarchical Generalized Linear Modeling (HGLM) that accounts for violations of independent observations in grouped data through a nested, hierarchical structure. The second study used Polytomous Rasch Model (PRM), a measurement technique developed by Danish mathematician Georg Rasch that generates person ability estimates in accordance with item difficulty estimates on the same scale. The purpose of these studies was to investigate if the preponderance of evidence supports the position that socially conservative Christians perceive an environment on elite U.S. university campuses that is respectful of the expression of diverse beliefs.
Cambridge Core - Media, Mass Communication - Frenemies - by Jaime E. Settle
In the past decade, issues of intellectual diversity at elite universities in the United States have resurfaced after years of dormancy. Leading the charge as been the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), which argues that ideologically left-leaning elite universities in the United States inhibit conservative thought. Using data from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) College Senior Survey of universities ranked as high and very high selectivity (N = 5587), this study explored the questions of whether religious/socially conservative undergraduate seniors at elite universities systematically perceive a campus climate that is less respectful of diverse beliefs than their less religious/socially conservative counterparts, and how religious/social conservatism is related to the perception of intellectual diversity. A Rasch model helped evaluate the religious/social conservatism construct. Students who scored high on the religious/social conservative scale perceived their university as less accommodating of diverse beliefs. Students’ perception of a campus climate respectful of diverse beliefs was negatively associated with religious/socially conservative indicators.
Le conservatisme est précisément une démarche de restauration. Authentique, il ne renonce jamais à ses propres valeurs avec un minimum d’intervention possible pour protéger, sans être dévastateur... C’est renoncer à l’histoire et au savoir-faire de la tradition dans l’élaboration de la structure sociale. Les nouveaux nés ne peuvent subvenir à leurs besoins, donc ils ont besoin de soins et sont dépendants de leur environnement pour survivre et assurer leur ascendance ou la continuité de l’espèce. La nécessité de l’objet commence depuis le début. Que l’être humain n’est pas parfait et considère que l’intelligence de ce dernier est limitée, en conséquence, cela exige une vie sociale. Freud (1914) prétend que le premier état mental du bébé est un état de narcissisme primaire qui ne produit aucune différence et dont le bébé forme un ensemble avec le monde et toute l’énergie libidinale est en lui. La transition vers les relations avec la réalité et les objets n’est possible qu’en s’éloignant de l’uniformité après l’illusion de l’omnipotence vécue grâce aux fonctions d’harmonie d’une mère suffisamment positive ou bénéfique. Les objets peuvent changer de place entre eux, et ils seront investis pour être ou ne pas être une chose déterminée. L’individu a le choix soit de maintenir une relation avec le premier objet en s’investissant dans des relations similaires qu’il entretient avec l’objet qui l’assouvit et l’entretient par l’intermédiaire du choix de l’objet analytique ; soit de maintenir le narcissisme primaire en s’investissant sur l’objet qu’il considère comme faisant partie de sa personnalité, qui était comme lui dans le passé et comme il souhaitait devenir en choisissant un objet narcissique. La continuité des objets et le développement des relations de l’objet peuvent être considérées dans le conservatisme comme une proportion directe de l’effort pour harmoniser le développement et la continuité.
Initially an intellectual tradition stemming from the late 1700s, conservatism in America has grown into a veritable social movement, comprising a complex network of activists, elected officials, lobbying groups, financial backers, and media outlets. This article traces American conservatism from its roots in the intellectual realm to its present-day significance as a social movement and political force. It describes the three main strands of conservative thought – traditionalism, libertarianism, and anticommunism – citing the major thinkers within each strand. To illustrate its development into a social movement, the article presents four watershed moments for American conservatism – Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan's presidency, the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress, and most recently, the advent of the Tea Party in 2009.
In recent years, the electorate has sorted along ideological lines. Republican identifiers have grown more likely to self-identify as conservatives. Democrats, however, have been slow to embrace the liberal label. And while many Americans are operationally liberal and express support for liberal policy positions, in symbolic terms, the American electorate is much more conservative in nature and appears reluctant to hew to the liberal label. The uneven nature of partisan sorting and the observed symbolic/operational divide have both been linked to Republican efforts at making “liberal” a dirty word, but researchers have yet to offer a direct test of the effects of exposure to anti-liberal rhetoric. In this study, I rectify this shortcoming using the 2004 University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW)/Brigham Young University (BYU) panel study coupled with data on the content of candidates’ campaign advertising from the Wisconsin Advertising Project. I find that exposure to anti-liberal campaign messages had a direct effect on evaluations of Democratic candidates, vote intention, and vote choice, but only in senate races. At the same time, self-identified ideology was unmoved by elite efforts at disparaging the liberal label—thereby calling into question simple versions of a common explanation for the existence of conservative Democrats and “conflicted” conservatives.
The aim of this article is to present the method of latent ideological types and its possible uses. Two dominant approaches to measuring the ideological orientations of the public are self-identification and expert evaluation of attitudes and value orientations. Both approaches are also a common ingredient in international comparative research. In this article the authors first focus on the strengths and methodological weaknesses of those approaches. They then introduce their method of latent ideological types as a different approach. They present the principles of the method, the necessary sequence of steps, and conclude with its concrete application using CSES Slovakia 2010 data. The method of latent ideological types is based on subjective placements on a given set of ideological orientations or scales. The non-manifest ideological inclinations of the respondents are then determined from their attitudes and opinions. Using attitude variables, definitional patterns and cluster analysis the authors proceed from manifest ideological types to latent ideological types. The resulting latent ideological positions of the respondents may differ from their manifest self-identifications. The advantages of knowing the latent positions are discussed.
Since the 1990s the ideological gap between men and women has grown, but scholars debate whether this difference is driven by diverging opinion on individual issues or differences in ideological reasoning. Utilizing Item Response Theory, we test for gender differences in multiple aspects of ideological thinking: ideological constraint, stability, the importance of individual issues to ideology, and the degree to which people base their self-reported ideological identity on policy issues. In contrast to existing studies showing that men and women privilege different sets of issues when choosing an ideological label, we find that men and women organize their opinions in much the same way. The gender gap in ideology reflects differences of opinion, but not political reasoning. Our results call for a shift away from research that searches for ways in which men and women reason differently about politics and focuses instead on why ideological thinking is so similar between the sexes despite difference in social experiences and on the elements of gender that explain basic differences in opinion.
This paper extends Ellis and Stimson’s (Ideology in America. New York: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2012) study of the operational-symbolic paradox using issue-level measures of ideological incongruence based on respondent positions and symbolic labels for these positions across 14 issues. Like Ellis and Stimson, we find that substantial numbers—over 30 %—of Americans experience conflicted conservatism. Our issue-level data reveal, furthermore, that conflicted conservatism is most common on the issues of education and welfare spending. In addition, we also find that 20 % of Americans exhibit conflicted liberalism. We then replicate Ellis and Stimson’s finding that conflicted conservatism is associated with low sophistication and religiosity, but also find that it is associated with being socialized in a post-1960s generation and using Fox News as a main news source. Finally, we show the important role played by identities, with both conflicted conservatism and conflicted liberalism linked with partisan and ideological identities, and conflicted liberalism additionally associated with ethnic identities.
Trust and reciprocity are theoretically essential to strong democracies and efficient markets. Working from the theoretical frameworks of social identity and cognitive heuristics, this study draws on dual-process models of decision making to expect (1) the trustor to infer trustworthiness from partisan stereotypes and thus to discriminate trust in favor of co-partisans and against rival partisans, but (2) the trustee to base reciprocity decisions on real information about the trustor’s deservingness rather than a partisan stereotype. So whereas partisanship is likely to trigger trust biases, the trust decision itself provides enough information to override partisan biases in reciprocity. The analysis derives from a modified trust game experiment. Overall, the results suggest partisanship biases trust decisions among partisans, and the degree of partisan trust bias is consistent with expectations from both social identity theory and cognitive heuristics. When it comes to reciprocity, however, information about the other subject’s level of trust nullifies partisan bias.
Holding an unpopular position on an issue important to voters can endanger a candidate’s electoral success. What is the candidate’s best agenda-setting strategy? To focus on other issue positions congruent with the same ideological stereotype, shoring up support among like-minded voters? Or to “go maverick” by discussing some issues that signal liberal positions and some that signal conservative positions? Existing voting models suggest the answer depends on voter preferences, since going maverick should have symmetric effects—support among voters who agree with the candidate’s positions will decrease, proportionally, as support increases among voters who disagree. We argue, however, that stereotype incongruence prompts these voters to process information differently, yielding asymmetric effects. We test our expectations experimentally, using a fictional candidate webpage to show how the benefits of going maverick can outweigh the costs.
One theory to explain why courts often ignore relevant social science research is that it often refutes judges' sociopolitical beliefs. Using the death penalty as the exemplar social issue, this study explored whether lawyers' sociopolitical attitudes affect their judgments about the legal relevance of social science research introduced in court cases. Law students and state court judges completed a questionnaire that presented vignette summaries of two U.S. Supreme Court death penalty cases along with descriptions of the social science evidence contained in the Court opinions, with the evidence manipulated in this study to either support or not support the death penalty. After reading each vignette, participants rated the legal relevance, admissibility, and dispositive weight of the social science evidence. They then were asked about their own attitudes about the death penalty, science and social science backgound, attitude about social science, and political attitudes. In the case where the social science evidence was used to make new law generally, there was a bias effect: participants rated the evidence higher when it matched their own beliefs as compared to when it did not match their beliefs. Participants' level of science background neither moderated nor mediated the bias effects. There was no relationship between political views and evidentiary ratings or attitude about the use of social science in law. However, there was a relationship between evidentiary ratings and attitudes about the use of social science in law, as well as between evidentiary ratings and attitudes about judicial interpretation. Implications of the results for the use of social science in law are discussed.
This article explores the ideological dynamics of democratic regime change in South Korea from a comparative perspective. Analyzing national sample surveys conducted during the first decade of democratic rule, we find that the democratization of the country’s right-wing dictatorship has resulted in a movement of many South Koreans from the right to the left on the ideological spectrum. However, many of the South Koreans who have shifted their position on the spectrum have done so without changing their thinking about what “the left” and “the right” represent. This particular pattern of ideological dynamics that features change in identification, but continuity in content, confirms two distinct theories. As expected from the theory of democratic human development, democratization provided South Koreans with a wide array of legal rights allowing them to think freely. As expected from the theory of political socialization, however, the content of the thinking retains an old, authoritarian conception of rule. Unlike the democratization of political institutions, which can be achieved in a few years, the democratization of mass political thinking appears to be an intergenerational phenomenon that requires more than a decade for completion.
Using data from 3 different samples, the authors found that: (a) the relationships between political conservatism and racism generally increased as a function of educational sophistication; however, the relationship between political conservatism and anti-Black affect did not increase with educational sophistication. (b) The correlation between political conservatism and racism could be entirely accounted for by their mutual relationship with social dominance orientation. (c) Generally, the net effect of political conservatism, racism, and social dominance orientation on opposition to affirmative action increased with increasing education. These findings contradict much of the case for the principled conservatism hypothesis, which maintains that political values that are largely devoid of racism, especially among highly educated people, are the major source of Whites’ opposition to affirmative action.
The theory of symbolic racism contends that White individuals' opposition to busing springs from a basic underlying prejudiced or intolerant attitudinal predisposition toward Blacks, not self-interest or realistic group conflict motives. The present research argues that realistic group conflict motives do help explain Whites' opposition to busing. Two major criticisms of the symbolic racism approach are made: (a) that the tests of symbolic racism vs group conflict explanations of opposition to busing have not been fair because of a narrow definition of group interests that ignores the role of subjectively appreciated threat and challenges to group status; and (b) that by forcing racial attitudes onto a single continuum running from prejudice to tolerance, the symbolic racism researchers overlook the importance of the perception that the civil rights movement is a threatening force. By reanalyzing the Michigan National Election Study data (2,705 voting-age citizens in the 1972 phase and 2,248 in the 1976 phase) used by D. O. Sears et al (1979, 1980), the present research broadens the notion of self-interest and operates with a multidimensional conceptualization of racial attitudes. In so doing, the data demonstrate that Whites' opposition to busing reflects group conflict motives, not simply a new manifestation of prejudice. (63 ref)
Our research examines the implications of political beliefs for the relationship between preferences for freedom and security. We briefly situate the relationship in historical context and relate it to today's struggle with terrorism. Then we examine the influence of political beliefs on normative preferences for how liberty and security should be related and for perceptions of how they currently are being balanced. Using original data from a national Internet survey of more than 3,000 respondents, we examine causal relationships among core, domain, and policy context beliefs for preferences about balancing freedom and security.
There has been a substantial increase in research on the determinants and consequences of political ideology among political scientists and social psychologists. In psychology, researchers have examined the effects of personality and motivational factors on ideological orientations as well as differences in moral reasoning and brain functioning between liberals and conservatives. In political science, studies have investigated possible genetic influences on ideology as well as the role of personality factors. Virtually all of this research begins with the assumption that it is possible to understand the determinants and consequences of ideology via a unidimensional conceptualization. We argue that a unidimensional model of ideology provides an incomplete basis for the study of political ideology. We show that two dimensions—economic and social ideology—are the minimum needed to account for domestic policy preferences. More importantly, we demonstrate that the determinants of these two ideological dimensions are vastly different across a wide range of variables. Focusing on a single ideological dimension obscures these differences and, in some cases, makes it difficult to observe important determinants of ideology. We also show that this multidimensionality leads to a significant amount of heterogeneity in the structure of ideology that must be modeled to fully understand the structure and determinants of political attitudes.
We argue that the social construction of target populations is an important, albeit overlooked, political phenomenon that should take its place in the study of public policy by political scientists. The theory contends that social constructions influence the policy agenda and the selection of policy tools, as well as the rationales that legitimate policy choices. Constructions become embedded in policy as messages that are absorbed by citizens and affect their orientations and participation. The theory is important because it helps explain why some groups are advantaged more than others independently of traditional notions of political power and how policy designs reinforce or alter such advantages. An understanding of social constructions of target populations augments conventional hypotheses about the dynamics of policy change, the determination of beneficiaries and losers, the reasons for differing levels and types of participation among target groups, and the role of policy in democracy.
Scholars argue that the social structural basis of the party system in the United States developed during the New Deal era has weakened, resulting in an increasing tendency for ideology to shape partisan support. We test this proposition by examining the role of ideology in the formation of partisanship in the United States over the last two decades. We find that, over the last 20 years, ideology has played an increasing role in shaping partisanship, one that cuts across traditional New Deal social group cleavages.
A number of researchers have argued that the effects of prejudice on the racial policy attitudes and general political beliefs of white Americans may be restricted to the poorly educated and politically unsophisticated. In contrast, rather than being motivated by prejudice, the racial policy attitudes and ideological values of the politically sophisticated white Americans should be more firmly informed and motivated by the tolerant values at the heart of American political culture. These values include such things as individualism, notions of fair play, and devotion to the principle of equality of opportunity. We tested this hypothesis using white respondents from the 1986 and 1992 National Election Studies. Our evidence generally indicated that racial policy attitudes and political ideology were more powerfully associated with ideologies of racial dominance and superiority among politically sophisticated white Americans than among political unsophisticated white Americans. Moreover, even among the sophisticated, we found that various forms of egalitarianism predicted support for-rather than opposition to-affirmative action and that support for equal opportunity is not uniformly distributed across the political spectrum. African and African American Studies Psychology
Past studies have found evidence of a connection between race and crime in the minds of many white Americans, but several gaps remain in our knowledge of this association. Here, a multimethod approach was used to examine more closely the racial component of whites’ support for ostensibly race-neutral crime policies. Conventional correlational analysis showed that negative stereotypes of African Americans—specifically, the belief that blacks are violent and lazy—are an important source of support for punitive policies such as the death penalty and longer prison terms. A survey experiment further showed that negative evaluations of black prisoners are much more strongly tied to support for punitive policies than are negative evaluations of white prisoners. These findings suggest that when many whites think of punitive crime policies to deal with violent offenders, they are thinking of black offenders.
SOCIAL ATTITUDE REFERENTS-E.G., PRIVATE PROPERTY, RELIGION, CIVIL RIGHTS-ARE DIFFERENTIALLY CRITERIAL (RELEVANT) FOR DIFFERENT SETS OF INDIVIDUALS. THEIR STRUCTURE IS DUALISTIC: 2 BASIC ORTHOGONAL DIMENSIONS SPAN THE ATTITUDE DOMAIN DUE TO A PRESS TOWARD DICHOTOMIZING REFERENTS INTO CRITERIAL AND NONCRITERIAL AND TO THE CULTURE THAT OFFERS 2 MAIN IDEOLOGIES (LIBERALISM AND CONSERVATISM). BIPOLARITY APPEARS WHEN REFERENTS CRITERIAL FOR 1 SET OF INDIVIDUALS ARE USED NEGATIVELY BY ANOTHER SET OF INDIVIDUALS. FACTOR-ANALYTIC RESEARCH OF SOCIAL AND EDUCATIONAL ATTITUDES YIELDED SEVERAL 1ST-ORDER FACTORS, 2 ORTHOGONAL 2ND-ORDER FACTORS, AND LITTLE BIPOLARITY. 2 IMPLICATIONS FOR ATTITUDE RESEARCH ARE: (1) ITEMS SHOULD BE NATURAL EXPRESSIONS OF ATTITUDES AND NOT SYNTHETIC CONSTRUCTIONS (E.G., ITEM REVERSALS, BALANCED SCALES), AND (2) ATTITUDE REFERENTS THEMSELVES SHOULD BE STUDIED. (47 REF.)
Recent work has implicated negative attitudes toward blacks in support for toughened criminal-justice measures. This suggests that the issue of crime may be implicitly "racialized," despite a lack of overt racial content. The present study examines the hypothesis that education may weaken the relationship between negative racial perceptions and crime-related policy attitudes. In contrast to traditional views about the role of education in the domain of race-related attitudes, the results of analyses using several different general-population samples suggest that the effects of education are somewhat paradoxical: they reduce the intensity of negative racial perceptions, while bolstering the relationship between these perceptions and criminal justice attitudes.
This article contrasts the “self-interest” and “symbolic politics” explanations for the formation of mass policy preferences and voting behavior. Self-interested attitudes are defined as those supporting policies that would maximize benefits and minimize costs to the individual's private material well-being. The “symbolic politics” model emphasizes pressures to make adulthood attitudes consistent with the residues of preadult socialization. We compare the two models in terms of their ability to account for whites’ opposition to busing school children for racial integration of the public schools, and the role of the busing issue in presidential voting decisions, using the 1972 Center for Political Studies election study. Regression analysis shows strong effects of symbolic attitudes (racial intolerance and political conservatism) on opposition to busing, and of the busing issue on presidential voting decisions. Self-interest (e.g., having children susceptible to busing) had no significant effect upon either. It is concluded that self-interest is often overestimated as a determinant of public opinion and voting behavior because it is too rarely directly assessed empirically. © 1979, American Political Science Association. All rights reserved.
This chapter discusses the social psychologists study “top of the head” phenomena in their experimental investigations. Attention within the social environment is selective. It is drawn to particular features of the environment either as a function of qualities intrinsic to those features (such as light or movement) or as a function of the perceiver's own dispositions and temporary need states. These conditions are outlined in the chapter. As a result of differential attention to particular features, information about those features is more available to the perceiver. Relative to the quantity of information retained about other features, more is retained about the salient features. When the salient person is the self, the same effects occur, and the individual is also found to show more consistency in attitudes and behaviors. These processes may occur primarily in situations which are redundant, unsurprising, uninvolving, and unarousing. They seem to occur automatically and substantially without awareness, and as such, they differ qualitatively from the intentional, conscious, controlled kind of search which characterizes all the behavior.
The U.S. is without a Burkean tradition of conservatism, and instead, as Louis Hartz and others have said, has a conservatism grounded in Lockean liberalism. The recent revival of political conservatism, marked by the twice successful candidacy of Ronald Reagan for President, points up the dilemmas in this conservatism: it must either reach back to its liberal heritage for intellectual sustenance, or it must reject that past. The first strategy, this article argues, is potentially self-defeating, while the second breeds contradiction by making conservatives into radical innovators. The new conservatives, the essay continues, have tried to have it both ways. They have sought at once to embrace a libertarianism for which the modern state is anathema and a moralism drawn largely from an illiberal religious fundamentalism. In the end, the author concludes, the new conservatism's pursuit of a morally regenerate republic neither transcends nor resolves the dilemma that plagues conservatives in American politics.
Silvan Tomkins has suggested that it is possible to distinguish personalities ranging along the left (humanist) to right (normative) dimension. These differences are not always reflected by conventional measures of liberalism-conservatism; a more promising approach is by Tomkins' Polarity Scale that measures left/right affinities in a number of ideological domains. This paper reviews Polarity Theory and the findings from studies employing the Polarity Scale (such as differences in emotional lability; differences in predominant affective response, positive or negative; possible differences in "blaming the victim"). The findings are sparse because of the limited use of the Polarity Scale. To supplement these findings, a survey of the psychological literature on behavioral differences was made, with special attention to "anomalous" differences between liberals and conservatives (i.e., differences that seem inexplicable on the basis of ideological content alone). These anomalies both support and contradict Tomkins' theory, but it is clear that the conceptual structure provided by Polarity Theory is of great value in organizing the findings in this area.
This article contrasts short-term self-interest and longstanding symbolic attitudes as determinants of (1) voters' attitudes toward government policy on four controversial issues (unemployment, national health insurance, busing, and law and order), and (2) issue voting concerning those policy areas. In general, we found the various self-interest measures to have very little effect in determining either policy preferences or voting behavior. In contrast, symbolic attitudes (liberal or conservative ideology, party identification, and racial prejudice) had major effects. Nor did self-interest play much of a role in creating @'@issue publics@' that were particularly attentive to, informed about, or constrained in their attitudes about these specific policy issues. Conditions that might facilitate more self-interested political attitudes, specifically having privatistic (rather than public-regarding) personal values, perceiving the policy area as a major national problem, being high in political sophistication, perceiving the government as responsive, or having a sense of political efficacy, were also explored, but had no effect. The possibility that some long-term self-interest might be reflected in either group membership or in symbolic attitudes themselves is examined. While such possibilities cannot be definitively rejected, problems with interpreting standard demographic findings as self-interest effects are discussed.
Although over the past few decades liberal/conservative self-identifications have often played a part in studies of belief systems, they have seldom been the focus of research. Recently, however, several studies have suggested that such identifications play a significant role in voting behavior and political perception. Implicit in this research, however, are two tenuous assumptions: that liberal/conservative identifications are bipolar in meaning and that underlying this bipolarity is cognitive meaning based on political issues. In this paper, we develop a model of ideological identifications that emphasizes their symbolic and nondimensional origins and nature. Based on the 1976 and 1978 National Election Studies, our empirical analysis reveals strong support for the model. Specifically, ideological identifications are found to have largely symbolic meanings, a fact that helps to explain some of the findings concerning the relationship of the liberal/conservative continuum to political perception and behavior.
Group identification has been an important concept utilized by scholars for understanding the formation of political preferences by the mass citizenry. This research tests two competing hypotheses that attempt to explain longitudinal variation in the effect of group identifications on the preferences of the citizenry: Whether such change occurs (1) as a result of shifts in the proportion of the electorate that identifies with a group or (2) as a result of the varying impact of group identifications on political preference. The evidence indicates that the impact of group identifications on citizens' candidate preferences changes in response to the political salience of the group, as others have predicted, accounting for variations in group voting patterns.
Equally wrong is the theory that the American and European civilizations are evolving in opposite directions. The thesis of Robert Kagan, the neoconservative propagandist, that Americans are martial and Europeans pacifist, is complete nonsense. A majority of Americans voted for either Al Gore or Ralph Nader in 2000. Were it not for the overrepresentation of sparsely populated, right-wing states in both the presidential electoral college and the Senate, the White House and the Senate today would be controlled by Democrats, whose views and values, on everything from war to the welfare state, are very close to those of western Europeans. Both the economic-determinist theory and the clash-of-cultures theory are reassuring: They assume that the recent revolution in U.S. foreign policy is the result of obscure but understandable forces in an orderly world. The truth is more alarming. As a result of several bizarre and unforeseeable contingencies – such as the selection rather than election of George W. Bush, and Sept. 11 – the foreign policy of the world's only global power is being made by a small clique that is unrepresentative of either the U.S. population or the mainstream foreign policy establishment.
The current unidimensional conceptualization of party identification contains many ambiguities. Most troubling, however, has been the debate over the dimensionality of this important concept. This article further examines the defects of the unidimensional conceptualization of party identification using the National Election Studies party thermometers. The results repeatedly demonstrate that the current conceptualization inadequately expresses individual affect toward the political parties and political independence. An alternative conceptualization is discussed that would eliminate the anomalies of the unidimensional concept.
Utilizing data from the 1988-96 American National Election Studies (ANES) and the 1997 ANES pilot Study, we will show that voters have begun to orient their political attitudes and behaviors according to their feelings toward Christian fundamentalists. This is particularly the case with antifundamentalists, the roughly one-fifth of the white nonfundamentalist public who, significantly more so than other nonfundamentalists, intensely dislike fundamentalists and who perceive members of this religious group as militantly intolerant, ideologically extreme, inegalitarian with respect to women's rights, and monolithically Republican. These associations coincided with a marked shift in the proportion of antifundamentalists who became concerned about cultural and religious issues in national political life. Multivariate analyses show that feelings toward Christian fundamentalists are now a significant predictor of relative party assessments, adverse to the Republican party. Moreover, logistic regression analyses demonstrate that antipathy toward Christian fundamentalists has become a significant explanatory variable of vote choice in recent presidential elections. Antifundamentalism today has joined ideology as a predictor of presidential vote choice, and its impact surpasses the effects of traditional economic variables, such as attitudes toward government activism and retrospective assessments of the economy. Our findings lend support to scholars who contend that the 1992 presidential election quickened or heightened cultural and religious forces that to this day structure attitudes toward the two major parties. The data attest to the power of negative religious out-group affect in shaping political perceptions, attitudes, and behavior during periods of cultural ferment.
This article shows that citizens can estimate what politically strategic groups--liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, and blacks and whites--stand for on major issues. These attitude attributions follow from a simple calculus, a likability heuristic. This heuristic is rooted in people's likes and dislikes of political groups. Thanks to this affective calculus, many in the mass public are able to estimate who stands for what politically, notwithstanding shortfalls in information and information processing.
RANDALL STRAHAN and DANIEL J. PALAZZOLO discuss the leadership style of former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich. They show that Gingrich's own goals and understanding of leadership significantly influenced his activist leadership style and that he both shaped the context in which he led and altered the expectations of his followers.
GARY C. JACOBSON argues that the results of the 2002 congressional election were consistent with past midterm elections as referenda on the administration and the economy, although the terrorist attacks of September 11 profoundly affected the referendum's substance. The modest Republican victory was a consequence of the post-September 11 rally in support for President George W. Bush, redistricting (in the House), and higher turnout among Republican loyalists. There was no evidence of any national shift in public sentiment toward the Republican party.
Subjects with some religious affiliation are more prejudiced than those without affiliation, but no significant difference between Protestants and Catholics. There is a low but significant negative relation of intelligence and education to ethnocentrism. Interviews threw light on parental relations, childhood, conception of self, and dynamics and organization of personality. Projective techniques are described and results analyzed. 63 interviews are analyzed qualitatively for prejudice, political and economic ideas, religious ideology and syndromes among high and low scorers. The development of two contrasting cases is given. Criminality and antidemocratic trends in prison inmates and a study of clinic patients complete the investigation of the authoritarian personality pattern. 121 references. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Employed a systematic coding technique to assess the integrative complexity of policy statements of 45 US Senators who, on the basis of their 1975 and 1976 voting records, had been classified as liberal, moderate, or conservative. Two hypotheses were tested. One hypothesis, derived from research on the authoritarian personality and conservatism, was that Ss who consistently voted for conservative ideological causes would be more prone to rely on simple (good vs bad) evaluative rules in interpreting policy issues than liberal or moderate Ss. The 2nd was that Ss who voted in ideologically consistent patterns (regardless of the liberal or conservative content of the ideology) would be more prone to rely on simple evaluative rules in interpreting issues than Ss who voted in less consistent patterns (moderates). 20 paragraph-sized statements were sampled from the speeches of each S; all material was coded for integrative complexity. Results indicate that conservative Ss made significantly less complex statements than their liberal or moderate colleagues. This finding remained significant after controlling for political party affiliation, education, years of service in the Senate, and age. Alternative interpretations of the data are examined. (38 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Using the results of an extensive mail survey of donors to Republican presidential candidate and party committees, we compare contributors to Pat Robertson's campaign with donors to right-wing and mainstream Republican committees. While measures of salience, ideology, religiosity, demography and partisanship show Robertson supporters to be distinctive in expected ways, they are remarkably similar to other kinds of Republicans in many other respects. These findings suggest that the Christian Right will be eventually assimilated into the Republican party.
Despite a recent resurgence of interest in the concept of group consciousness, relatively little attention has been devoted to the political impact of group identifications. Consequently, in this paper the effects of group identification on political perception and evaluation are investigated. Theoretically, a schematic approach is adopted in outlining the perceptual effects of group identifications. Empirically, data from the 1980 National Election Study are used to test some of the hypotheses derived from this schematic approach. The results from this analysis suggest that group identifications play an important role in defining the perceptual viewpoints that people bring to bear on politics; people identifying with different groups focus on different things and evaluate political issues from different perspectives.
This article examines the role of racial attitudes in shaping white Americans’ opposition to welfare. Past research on welfare views has focused on economic self-interest, individualism, and egalitarianism. Using a covariance structure model, I confirm the significance of these factors, but find that racial attitudes are in fact the most important source of opposition to welfare among whites. In addition, racial attitudes influence the pattern of support white Americans express toward various aspects of the welfare state: negative attitudes toward blacks lead many whites who support spending for education, health care, and the elderly to oppose means-tested programs aimed exclusively at the poor. Finally, this research carries implications for broader theories of race and politics. Contrary to the suggestion that traditional racial prejudice is no longer a potent force in American politics, I show that at least one aspect of traditional prejudice—the stereotype of blacks as lazy—is still widespread and continues to have a profound impact on whites’ political thinking.
Contrary to a great deal of the postelection commentary, the results of the 2002 midterm congressional elections were neither surprising nor historically anomalous. Neither did they signal an end to the national partisan stalemate exposed by the 2000 elections. (1) Rather, the election results, summarized in Table 1, were entirely consistent with models treating midterm elections as referenda on the administration and economy, and they reflected once again the distinct, evenly-balanced partisan divisions in the electorate that solidified during the Clinton administration.
Recent research suggests that welfare attitudes may be shaped by negative perceptions of blacks, suggesting an implicit racialization of the policy. But what might inhibit the racialization of welfare? In this vein, research indicating that education facilitates tolerance suggests that negative racial perceptions and welfare attitudes may be less related among the educated. However, education may also be associated with a greater ability to connect general predispositions with specific policy attitudes. Somewhat paradoxically, this suggests that the association between racial perceptions and welfare attitudes may be stronger among the college-educated, despite their lower overall levels of racial hostility. Study 1 shows that education attenuates negative racial perceptions, while strengthening their impact on public-assistance attitudes—but only when assistance is described as “welfare.” Study 2 extends and qualifies this finding, showing that education strengthens the relationship between perceptions of welfare recipients and global welfare attitudes only when recipients are black.
Recent work has implicated negative attitudes toward blacks in support for toughened criminal-justice measures. This suggests that the issue of crime may be implicitly “racialized,” despite a lack of overt racial content. The present study examines the hypothesis that education may weaken the relationship between negative racial perceptions and crime-related policy attitudes. In contrast to traditional views about the role of education in the domain of race-related attitudes, the results of analyses using several different general-population samples suggest that the effects of education are somewhat paradoxical: they reduce the intensity of negative racial perceptions, while bolstering the relationship between these perceptions and criminal justice attitudes.
Current work suggests that individualistic values are more likely to be invoked in judgments about welfare recipients when the latter are black. Nevertheless, this “racialization” hypothesis has yet to be directly tested by looking at whether generalized individualism is more strongly related to hostility toward welfare recipients among whites when the recipients are black. In this paper, I conduct this critical test. I also show that this tendency is strongest among college-educated whites and that it occurs for both descriptive individualism (i.e., the belief that hard work and self-reliance lead to success) and prescriptive individualism (i.e., a normative endorsement of these traits).
The standard treatment of party identification makes several untested assumptions, especially that citizens can identify with only a single party and that political independence is just the opposite of partisanship. A more general possibility is that several attitudes must be taken into account: attitudes toward the Republican party, the Democratic party, political independence, and political parties generally. A literal reading of the usual party identification is consistent with this multidimensional interpretation. Citizen ratings of the two parties turn out to be virtually uncorrelated, as are ratings of independence and political parties, confirming this multidimensional view. Strength of identification and strength of independence are separate in this model, which explains some of the anomalies in the current literature, including intransitivities in relationships with other variables and weak correlations involving independence. New questions included in the 1980 CPS National Election Study support this interpretation and provide a new understanding of political independence.
This study explores the dimensionality of partisan strength and independence by analyzing the relationships between the traditional four-point partisan strength scale, a strength of independence scale, and other relevant variables in the 1980 and 1984 NES/CPS election studies. In particular, the investigation centers on the possible different explanations for independence. The findings tend to support explanations for independence that concern party attachment and civic responsibility. The data show that partisan strength and independence are separate components of party identification. Previous findings based on the use of the traditional partisan strength scale may therefore need to be reconsidered.
Opinion research is beset by two major types of "artifactual" variance: huge amounts of overtime response instability and the common tendency for seemingly trivial changes in questionnaire form to affect the expression of attitudes. We propose a simple model that converts this anomalous "error variance" into sources of substantive insight into the nature of public opinion. The model abandons the conventional but implausible notion that most people possess opinions at the level of specificity of typical survey items--and instead assumes that most people are internally conflicted over most political issues--and that most respond to survey questions on the basis of whatever ideas are at the top of their heads at the moment of answering. Numerous empirical regularities are shown to be consistent with these assumptions.
When news of the O. J. Simpson verdict swept across the United States, a nation stood divided as blacks and whites reacted differently to the decision. Seldom has the racial division that permeates our society come so clearly and prominently into view. Divided by Color supplies the reasons for this division, asserting that racial resentment continues to exist. Despite a parade of recent books optimistically touting the demise of racial hostility in the United States, the authors marshal a wealth of the most current and comprehensive evidence available to prove their case. Kinder and Sanders reveal that racial resentment remains the most powerful determinant of white opinion on such racially charged issues as welfare, affirmative action, school desegregation, and the plight of the inner city. But more than a comprehensive description of American views on race, Divided by Color seeks to explain just why black and white Americans believe what they do. Kinder and Sanders analyze the critical factors that shape people's opinion on race-related issues, uncovering the relative importance of self-interest, group identity, ideological principles, as well as racial animosity. Finally, the authors explore how the racial divide has insinuated itself into the presidential election process and examine the role of political elites in framing racial issues for ordinary citizens. The most accurate and thorough analysis of American attitudes toward race and racial policies undertaken in decades, Divided by Color is destined to become a landmark work on race in America.
Despite the societal trend toward religious comity and accommodation, sizable fractions of the American public hold antagonistic sentiments toward religious conservatives. Utilizing 1988-96 American National Election Study (ANES) data, this study explores the nature and depth of antipathy toward Christian fundamentalists. Data show that antagonism toward fundamentalists is significant today, and increasingly has become concentrated in segments of the populace that have distinct and overlapping characteristics. Multivariate analyses demonstrate that antipathy has religious as well as political sources. It is pervasive among the highly educated and among seculars. And recently, cultural progressivism has also become a significant predictor of antipathy. Antifundamentalism has declined among religiously conservative Catholics and Protestants, cultural traditionalists, and self-reported Republicans. Beginning in 1992, attitudes toward this religious group have become polarized. These results have implications for the American party system and religious pluralism.
Leo-cons; A classicist's legacy: New empire builders Religious outlook, culture war politics, and antipathy toward Christian fundamentalists
- J L Atlas
- G Demaio
Atlas, J. (2003). Leo-cons; A classicist's legacy: New empire builders. New York Times, May 4. Bolce, L., & DeMaio, G. (1999a). Religious outlook, culture war politics, and antipathy toward Christian fundamentalists. Public Opinion Quarterly, 63, 29–61.
Leo-cons; A classicist’s legacy: New empire builders
- J Atlas
The neo-cons in power
- E Drew