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More than Ideology: Conservative–Liberal Identity and Receptivity to Political Cues

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Abstract

To many commentators and social scientists, Americans’ stances on political issues are to an important extent driven by an underlying conservative–liberal ideological dimension. Self-identification as conservative vs. liberal is regarded as a marker of this dimension. However, past research has not thoroughly distinguished between ideological identity (a self-categorization) and ideology (an integrated value system). This research evaluates the thesis that conservative–liberal identity functions as a readiness to adopt beliefs and attitudes about newly politicized issues that one is told are consistent with the socially prescribed meaning of conservatism–liberalism. In Study 1, conservative–liberal identity, measured in 2000, had an independent prospective effect on support for invading Iraq in 2002 and support for the Iraq war in 2004, controlling for substantive ideology, party identity, and demographics. In Study 2, conservative- and liberal-identifiers adopted stances on farm subsidy policy based on randomly varied cues indicating which ideological group supports which stance. This cue-based influence was mediated by adoption of attitude-supportive beliefs. Discussion addresses the joint impact of political discourse and identity-based social influence on the organization of political attitudes.

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Notes

  1. This is not to say that the American general public is politically polarized (see Fiorina, Abrams, & Pope, 2006, for a detailed discussion of this question).

  2. See http://www.electionstudies.org/studypages/2000prepost/2000prepost.htm.

  3. The political individual differences entered into these equations were moderately to strongly inter-correlated, and this raises the possibility that multicollinearity renders the regression coefficients uninterpretable. To determine whether or not multicollinearity was presently an issue, tolerance statistics were computed for Conservative-Liberal Identity, Party Identity, Unidimensional Substantive Ideology, and each of the three ideology subscales. Tolerance statistics range from 0 to 1, and tolerance of <.1 is generally regarded as signifying multicollinearity. Not a single tolerance statistic fell below .43. The political constructs under investigation are sufficiently distinguishable, and multicollinearity is not a problem in the present analyses.

  4. Data collected by Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences, NSF Grant 0818839, Jeremy Freese and Penny Visser, Principal Investigators.

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  1. Yeshiva College, Yeshiva University, 2495 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY, 10033, USA

    Ariel Malka

  2. Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, USA

    Yphtach Lelkes

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  1. Ariel Malka
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Malka, A., Lelkes, Y. More than Ideology: Conservative–Liberal Identity and Receptivity to Political Cues. Soc Just Res 23, 156–188 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-010-0114-3

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