Self Identification Friday October 18 2024 1 57 PM REFERENCES Ellis C Stimson J A 2012 Ideology in America Cambridge University Press P 60 ideological self identi cation is the best measured longitudinal construct in all of American politics p 16 The empirical reason for being suspicious about self identi cation is that we know from a wealth of research that citizens quite often do not understand the political meanings of the terms liberal and conservative Citizens may use such terms but it is clearly at odds with the facts known since at least Converse 1964 to say that the American public thinks about politics in explicitly ideological ways or in ways that exhibit deep familiarity with what ideological terms mean As a result in measurement terms we take the position that ideological self identi cation as measured by common survey items is not an a priori valid indicator of the concept of ideology p 57 In the last forty five years if self identi cation were the driver all presidential elections of the era in which we have measures of ideological self identi cation would have been Republican landslides p 58 Ideological self identi cation measures are now commonplace in empirical models of voter behavior where they are often referred to simply as measures of ideology and many commercial polls include self identi cation questions p 59 how adoption of conservative self images came to dominate American politics we suspect that what happened before the 1970s has helped to shape the attitudes that Americans have toward the liberal and conservative labels And it has altered the ways in which citizens use these labels to pass judgment on candidates parties and policies p 71 Americans hold operationally liberal preferences on a wide variety of political issues especially on the issues of spending and social welfare that alone de ned the party system for much of the 20th century The liberal identi cation has never been truly dominant in American politics even when Democratic policymakers making sweeping changes in the size and scope of the welfare state were regularly winning elections In the current era with relatively evenly split political parties and closely contested elections the liberal identi cation is never close to majority status p 72 Clearly symbolic ideology is something very different from operational ideology By the operational measure America is unmistakably dominated by the left By the symbolic measure it is unmistakably dominated by the political right This con ict a central theme of much of what we will have to say in the following chapters means that an inference based upon either one alone which is to say most of what has been written about American ideology is wrong We will have to come to terms with the fact that Americans tend to want to call themselves conservative while they advocate big government liberalism p 83 we see in all our evidence is that the symbols of liberalism became charged with symbols of race and of racial riot and of protest Americans are on balance liberals in their responses to speci c policy issues But they see liberalism as something else a sympathy for a largely unpopular racial minority which demands riots and protests p 86 Weakly symbolically liberal when Democrats take power over time they become weakly symbolically conservative as the images associated with liberalism become unfavorable or time worn and vice versa p 96 Those who on balance want to increase spending on more programs than they want to cut it except for national defense are considered operational liberals those who want to cut more than increase are operational conservatives This classi cation system ignoring for a time symbolic moderates and those who fall at the neutral point on the operational scale creates four possibilities citizens who hold liberal or conservative beliefs in both the operational and symbolic domains and citizens whose preferences mix support for liberal policies with a conservative identi cation or vice versa p 98 We know from a long history of mass opinion research that citizens generally do not think about politics in ideological terms or understand the political meanings of ideological language p 99 moderates For a very large number of citizens it appears rather that they are approaching the choice of ideological identi cation and the choice of operational preferences through fundamentally different pathways pathways that lead them to identify with the conservative label perhaps sincerely and deeply perhaps sincerely and deeply p 104 Those who have relatively moderate preferences are more likely to pair operational liberalism with symbolic conservatism p 115 the conservative label is popular among all types of citizens regardless of whether they hold many some or no conservative policy views But it is especially popular among those who hold conservative views on issues related to culture and traditional morality The answer as we will see is grounded only tangentially and incidentally in the politics of abortion gay marriage or any of the other cultural con icts that divide Democratic and Republican elites Citizens who are operationally conservative on cultural issues and operationally liberal on economic ones are often called populists p 116 we posit that the strong connection between cultural views and ideological labels is re ective of a broader social and personal identity an identity not necessarily driven by politics at all but by lifestyle behavior and religious preference The label that citizens give to this extrapolitical identity conservative is then translated to political identi cation often without an understanding of what the label means for political issue positions When asked to identify politically these citizens choose the label that best re ects the way they see themselves at home in church and with family The end result is that the label conservative is popular as a political identi cation at least for some not necessarily because of the particular issue Week 5 Page 1 The end result is that the label conservative is popular as a political identi cation at least for some not necessarily because of the particular issue preferences that it represents but rather because of the popularity of an extrapolitical conservative religiously and socially traditional lifes As for labels For a very large number of citizens it appears rather that they are approaching the choice of ideological identi cation and the choice of operational