Society: America Not as Politically Conservative as You Think

The reason why so few conservatives turn out to be solid right-wingers is that the word conservative has different meanings for different people, according to political scientists Christopher Ellis of Bucknell and James A. Stimson of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, who describe their findings in a new working paper, Pathways to Ideology in American Politics: The Operational-Symbolic ‘Paradox' Revisited

According to their research, some people genuinely know what it means to be a conservative in the current political debate and indeed express matching preferences across all issues. But these constrained conservatives (as Ellis and Stimson call them) account for only 26 percent of all self-identified conservatives.

More common are the moral conservatives (34 percent), who think of themselves as conservative in terms of their own personal values, be they social or religious. And they are indeed right-leaning on social, cultural and religious issues. But they also like government spending on a variety of programs and generally approve of government interventions in the marketplace, hardly making them true conservatives.

And still others, conflicted conservatives (30 percent), are not conservative at all on the issues. But they like identifying themselves as conservatives. To them, it somehow sounds better. They like the word, explained Ellis. Or at least, they like it better then their other choices in the traditional self-identification questionnaire: moderate and liberal.

Finally, a smaller group of self-identified conservatives (10 percent) could be classified as libertarian — conservative on economic issues, liberal on social issues.

Self-identified liberals, on the other hand, are consistently liberal on all the issues, according to Ellis and Stimson. Two-thirds of liberals fit into the category of constrained liberals, who pick the label because it actually describes their worldview.

[Emphasis added].

This is a longstanding phenomenon. In another paper, Ellis and Stimson have shown going back to at least 1937 — the heart of the New Deal — that the American public, on average, has been operationally liberal and symbolically conservative. That is, that when asked about specific liberal government programs — be they spending on education, environmental protections, regulation of business — the majority of voters consistently say they approve.

For more, see America Not as Politically Conservative as You Think by Lee Drutman, January 14, 2011 at Miller-McCune.