Symbolic ideology in the American electorate

Abstract

Ideological self-identification in the United States is well measured for the period 1970 to the present. Many survey measures are available and they are posed with considerable frequency and regularity. It is thus a relatively straightforward methodological exercise to combine them into a single measure of the American public's latent disposition to identify as liberal or conservative. What is problematic about this state of affairs is that the availability of these good measures occurs after a number of important changes in the American political context, changes that, we argue, have affected how Americans conceive of ideological terms and how scholars think about self-identification in the modern electorate. This paper seeks to measure and explain ideological self-identification in the time before modern survey research. We undertake an historical analysis of scattered pieces of public opinion data before 1970, assembling the pieces to build a time series of self-identification from 1937 to 2006. We then begin attempts at explaining the now observable, and often dramatic, changes in this series.