Liberal-conservative Continuum Research Articles

CEO Political Ideology: Revisiting its Responsibility Implications

As an integral component of their value system, CEOs’ political ideology—their stance along the liberal–conservative continuum—has come to be regarded a major determinant for (ir)responsible behavior. Yet, prior work remains inconclusive on whether a more liberal or a more conservative ideological leaning induces CEOs to engage in more or less (ir)responsible behavior. Applying an upper echelons perspective to assess the effect of CEO political ideology on a highly controversial corporate practice, earnings management, we argue that what distinguishes the (ir)responsibility of liberal versus conservative-leaning CEOs may at times rather be its configuration than its degree and depend on the context in which managerial action occurs. Analyzing a panel dataset of 872 S&P 1500 CEOs, we find considerable support for our arguments that liberal-leaning CEOs particularly prefer to inflate reported earnings in line with their preference for current achievement. Conservative-leaning CEOs likewise engage in earnings management, yet particularly tend to deflate reported earnings in line with their preference for inhibition to forestall potential future ambiguity. We show how this ideological inclination to manage earnings varies along contextual characteristics inducing variance in CEOs’ short-term versus long-term orientation and thus offer a comprehensive contribution to our understanding of the irresponsibility of liberal and conservative-leaning CEOs.

Benjamin Netanyahu as a mobilizing symbol in ethno-class divisions among Jewish Israelis, 2009–2021

ABSTRACT The public discourse over Israel’s unprecedented political crisis in 2019–2021 (four general elections in only two years) has focused on the personality and actions of one person: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Relying on a series of public opinion polls during Netanyahu’s second term (2009–2021), we examine the triadic relationship between the following components: (1) sentiments toward Netanyahu, (2) affiliation with ethno-class Jewish status groups, and (3) political attitudes along the liberal-conservative continuum. We show that while there are real socio-political divisions behind the controversy over Netanyahu, the conflict around his public image reflects and shapes the boundaries between various Jewish ethno-class status groups and enables alignments along these boundaries. The centrality of Netanyahu’s image in Israeli politics, we argue, substitutes substantive political discussions and has stemmed from the failure of some political actors, and especially the Secular Ashkenazi group, to articulate a coherent political vision.

Game on: CEO Political Ideology and the Numbers Game

It is commonly known that CEOs manage corporate earnings and thus expose their firm, its shareholders, and stakeholders to potential harm for their personal benefit. To better understand the drivers of such unethical behavior, we take an upper echelons perspective and consider CEOs’ political ideology, i.e., their stance on the liberal–conservative continuum, as a fundamental determinant of personal preference that becomes reflected in firms’ earnings management. Analyzing a panel dataset of 872 S&P 1500 CEOs, we find considerable support for our arguments that more liberal CEOs prefer to improve (and more conservative CEOs to diminish) reported earnings and show how this inclination varies along a set of contextual characteristics demarcating the diverse preferences as CEOs’ dedication to the firm and its performance endures, increases, and escalates.

Culture Moderates the Relation Between Gender Inequality and Well-Being

Research on the relation of gender inequality and subjective well-being (SWB) has produced inconsistent results. We suggest that culture moderates this relation such that inequality has a greater adverse effect in liberal than in conservative societies. The present studies, using aggregate data from 86 countries (Study 1) and 145,975 individuals’ data from 69 countries (Study 2), support this notion. Among liberal countries, inequality was negatively related to SWB for both men and women; there was some evidence that this relation was stronger for women. In conservative countries, the relation was not significant. Previously, the same liberal–conservative continuum moderated the relation between income inequality and SWB for groups with both high and low socioeconomic status (SES) but particularly for the low-SES group. The similarity in results across two different studies strongly supports the notion that the relation between inequality and SWB is contingent on where specific cultures are located on the liberal–conservative continuum.

What goes with what and for whom? How political sophistication shapes the structuring of economic and cultural beliefs

Recent studies have acknowledged the heterogeneity in the way citizens make sense of their economic and cultural beliefs, thus calling to question the conventional assumption that political views are organized along a single liberal-conservative dimension and connected accordingly with left–right identifications. Our article contributes to this stream of research. Primarily highlighting the influence of political sophistication on attitude consistency, we show that only the most interested in politics associate their economic and cultural attitudes in accordance with the liberal-conservative continuum and are able to combine them in a coherent fashion with their ideological identifications. In contrast, large segments of the French public do not respond to the dominant framing of the political debate.

Culture Moderates the Relation Between Income Inequality and Subjective Well-Being

Liberal ideology promotes equality whereas conservative ideology justifies inequality. Four studies examined whether the liberal–conservative continuum moderates the relation between inequality and subjective well-being (SWB). All four studies found a significant moderator effect such that higher inequality was related to greater SWB in conservative countries. In liberal countries, the corresponding relation was mostly reversed but did not reach significance. Studies 2 and 3 also showed that the moderator effect of liberalism was itself moderated by socioeconomic status (SES)—it was stronger among lower SES individuals. These two studies also found that the moderator effects of both liberalism and SES were partially or fully mediated by financial satisfaction. The current findings explain why previous research on the relation between income inequality and SWB produced inconsistent results.

The Differential Effects of Actual and Perceived Polarization

Recent work on the nature of mass polarization has revealed that individuals perceive more polarization than actually exists, meaning they assume that out-party members are farther from them on the liberal-conservative continuum than they actually are according to measures of their personal preferences. But what are the consequences of this biased perception, and how do they differ from the consequences of actual polarization? In this paper, we use American National Election Studies data to estimate actual and perceived polarization at the individual level from 1972–2012. We find that the two types of polarization, while related themselves, are differentially related to other attitudinal and behavioral outcomes of normative interest. Namely, we find that perceived polarization is more strongly related to negative affective evaluations of out-parties and out-party candidates, voting, participation, trust, and efficacy than is actual polarization, which shares much weaker relationships with these constructs.

The Structure of Political Ideology Varies Between and Within People: Implications for Theories About Ideology's Causes

Prominent theories about the link between threat and political ideology are grounded on two assumptions. First, popular threat and ideology theories assume that people typically use the liberal–conservative continuum as their ideological framework. Second, theorists construe ideology as characterized by intraindividual homogeneity (individuals are identified as inhabiting one deeply ingrained position on the liberal–conservative continuum that shapes their positions across issues). Working from these assumptions, theories posit that people's responses to threat causally influence their deeply ingrained liberal–conservative political ideology. In this review, we question these assumptions. We describe evidence that the structure of ideology varies between people (i.e., some people use the liberal–conservative continuum and some use other ideological frameworks) and within individuals across issues (e.g., a person may use the liberal–conservative continuum for some issues but other ideological frameworks fo...

Managers’ Political Beliefs and Gender Inequality among Subordinates: Does His Ideology Matter More Than Hers?

To explore whether managers’ beliefs and attitudes influence gender inequality among their subordinates, we theorize about the relationship between managers’ political ideology, situated on a liberal–conservative continuum, and differences in the hiring, work team selection, and promotion of male versus female subordinates, as well as how a manager’s gender moderates this relationship. We analyze novel microdata from the U.S. legal industry from 2007 to 2012 and find that large law offices whose partners are more liberal hire a larger percentage of female associates, that more-liberal partners are more likely to select female associates to be members of their client teams, and that associates whose supervising partners are more liberal have greater gender parity in promotion rates. Further, we find that the ideology of male partners is significantly more influential than the ideology of female partners in affecting these differences. We find little evidence that sorting on the part of higher-quality female associates drives the results.

Political orientations, ideological self-categorizations, party preferences, and moral foundations of young Turkish voters

ABSTRACTPolitical ideology is often characterized along a liberal–conservative continuum in the United States and the left–right continuum in Europe. However, no study has examined what this characterization means to young Turkish voters or whether it predicts their approach to morality. In Study 1, we investigated in two separate samples the relation between young Turkish participants’ responses to the one-item left-to-right political orientation question and their self-reported political ideologies (conservative, socialist, etc.). In Study 2, we investigated the relation of moral dimensions as defined by Moral Foundations Theory to political party affiliation and political ideology. Results revealed that CHP, MHP, and AKP voters display a typical right-wing profile distinct from HDP voters. Findings regarding political ideology measures were consistent with party affiliations. Taken together, the findings reveal the distinctive nature of young Turkish people’s political orientations while supporting the predictive power of the one-item political orientation question.

Updating Supreme Court Legitimacy: Testing the 'Rule, Learn, Update' Model of Political Communication

One of the more important innovations in the study of how citizens assess the U.S. Supreme Court is the ideological updating model, which assumes that citizens grant legitimacy to the institution according to the perceived distance between themselves and the Court on a unidimensional ideological (liberal-conservative) continuum. Moreover, citizens are thought to update this calculation with every new salient Supreme Court decision. The model’s requirements, however, do not seem to square with the long-established view that Americans are largely innocent of ideology. Here, we conduct an audit of the model’s assumptions using five empirical tests applied to a nationally representative sample. Our general conclusion is that the ideological updating model, especially when supplemented with the requirement that citizens must become aware of Court decisions, simply does not square with the realities of American politics. Students of Supreme Court legitimacy may therefore want to search for other theories of legitimacy updating.

Managerss Political Ideology and Gender Inequality within Organizations

Significant prior research has examined the role that managers play in producing gender inequality in organizations, but little work has directly explored the role of managers’ beliefs and attitudes. We bring managers’ beliefs and attitudes to the fore by theorizing about the relationship between managers’ political ideology, situated on a liberal-conservative continuum, and the level of gender inequality among their subordinates. Using novel microdata from the legal services industry, we find that law offices whose partners are more liberal have lower rates of gender inequality in the hiring and promotion of associate attorneys. Further, examining the interaction between partners’ gender and partners’ political ideology, we find that the political ideology of male partners is significantly more powerful in affecting these differences as compared with the ideology of female partners. Finally, we do not find evidence that these differences are driven by selection, in the form of higher quality female associates choosing to work for more liberal partners. We discuss the implications of our theory and findings for individual careers and firm performance.

Political ideology is contextually variable and flexible rather than fixed

Hibbing et al. argue that the liberal-conservative continuum is (a) universal and (b) grounded in psychological differences in sensitivity to negative stimuli. Our commentary argues that both claims overlook the importance of context. We review evidence that the liberal-conservative continuum is far from universal and that ideological differences are contextually flexible rather than fixed.

The political (and physiological) divide: Political orientation, performance monitoring, and the anterior cingulate response

Our goal was to test a model of sociopolitical attitudes that posits a relationship between individual differences in liberal versus conservative political orientation and differential levels of anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) responsivity. We recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) while participants who varied along a unidimensional liberal-conservative continuum engaged in a standard Go/NoGo task. We also measured component attitudes of political orientation in the form of traditionalism (degree of openness to social change) and egalitarianism (a preference for social equality). Generally, participants who reported a more liberal political orientation made fewer errors and produced larger ACC-generated ERPs (the error-related negativity, or ERN and the NoGo N2). This ACC activation, especially as indicated by a larger NoGo N2, was most strongly associated with greater preference for social equality. Performance accuracy, however, was most strongly associated with greater openness to social change. These data are consistent with a social neuroscience view that sociopolitical attitudes are related to aspects of neurophysiological responsivity. They also indicate that a bidimensional model of political orientation can enhance our interpretation of the nature of these associations.

You May Think You’re Right … Young Adults Are More Liberal Than They Realize

Do people have biased perceptions of their political orientation? Based on the link between political conservatism and in-group loyalty, we predicted that people would underestimate their liberalism and that this effect would be more pronounced among political conservatives. Young adults indicated their self-perceived political orientation and completed an objective measure of political orientation, which placed them along a liberal-conservative continuum by comparing their attitudes on 12 core issues (e.g., gay marriage, welfare) to population norms. Participants showed a significant bias toward perceiving themselves as more conservative than they actually were, and this effect was more pronounced among independents and conservatives than liberals. Further, biased self-perceptions of political orientation predicted voting behavior in the 2012 Presidential Election after controlling for objective political orientation scores. Discussion highlights theoretical implications for self-knowledge research and practical implications for American politics more broadly.

Revolution, Rebellion and a Rajah from Rohilkhand: Recontextualizing Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah

SONJA LAWRENSON Revolution, Rebellion and a Rajah from Rohilkhand: Recontextualizing Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translation ofthe Letters ofa Hindoo Rajah A ppearing over two centuries after translation of the letters of .a Hindoo Rajah was first published in 1796, Pamela Perkins and Shan­ non Russell’s latest edition ofthis text has undoubtedly succeeded in rekin­ dling interest in an author whose literary reputation was, hitherto, all but extinguished. Indeed, since its republication in 1999, Elizabeth Hamilton’s earliest fiction has increasingly garnered the attention of a small yet bur­ geoning contemporary readership intrigued by the narrative’s forthright and detailed explorations of key Romantic-era debates concerning female education, the revolution in France, and the nine-year-long impeachment trial of Warren Hastings. Presented in an epistolary format, the text fol­ lows the adventures of Zaarmilla, Rajah of Almora and “a native Prince of Rohilcund [Rohilkhand].”1 In the first volume Zaarmilla determines to visit England after a British soldier unveils to him “the grandeur of sublim­ ity and the simplicity oftruth” contained within the bible (TLHR 83). The second volume delineates his voyage to, and period of residence in, Eng­ land, where his encounters with slave owners, capricious aristocrats, skepti­ cal philosophers and belligerent women results in his eventual disillusion­ ment with English culture. By explicitly commenting upon British society The author wishes to acknowledge the receipt of an award from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences in support of this research. 1. Elizabeth Hamilton, Translation ofthe Letters ofa Hindoo Rajah, eds. Pamela Perkins and Shannon Russell (1796; Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 1999), 244. Hereafter cited as TLHR. SiR, 51 (Summer 2012) 125 126 SONJA LAWRENSON in the aftermath of the French Revolution and in the face of accelerated imperial expansionism in the East, Hamilton’s Translation clearly speaks to recent feminist and postcolonial concerns regarding women’s complex and fraught negotiations with the emerging imperialist and nationalist ideolo­ gies of late eighteenth-century Europe. However, while the critical methodologies applied by both feminist and postcolonial scholars have indubitably opened up a new and vital discursive field for the exploration of female responses to the evolving concepts of empire and nationhood, Hamilton’s location within our literary discussions of this period remains at best problematic and at worst untenable. For, as Anne Mellor observes in a 2005 essay entitled “Romantic Orientalism Be­ gins at Home,” such criticism has “tended to reduce the novel to imperial­ ist and anti-feminist stereotypes, thus erasing the complexity of Hamilton’s satire.”2 Mellor’s observation here serves as a timely reminder of Janice Thaddeus’s earlier objection that second-wave feminism had imposed an anachronistic interpretative lens upon Hamilton’s works, thereby obfuscat­ ing the equivocal and oft-contradictory position of a writer such as Hamil­ ton in relation to the dominant discourses of this period. In “Elizabeth Hamilton’s Domestic Politics” (1994), Thaddeus lambasts these scholars for stereotyping Hamilton’s work as “conservative,” arguing that twentiethcentury feminists’ own ideological investment in the revolutionary debates ofthe 1790s had led to an unscrupulous conflation ofanti-jacobinism, con­ servatism, and patriarchalism on the one hand and Jacobinism, liberalism, and feminism on the other: The fact is that the liberal versus conservative yardstick—no more than the Jacobin/anti-Jacobin one—simply does not adequately meas­ ure women’s politics. To place Hamilton on the liberal conservative continuum, to judge her by these rules, is like trying a woman from one country by the laws of another.3 Here, Thaddeus renders Hamilton’s dislocation from the masculine realm of British politics into a simile of national alterity. Inadvertently, however, she also touches upon an issue that could pose an even greater threat to these neat dichotomies than Hamilton’s gender—namely, the cultural dif­ ference signified by her Ulster-Scots background. Born in Belfast, but raised for the most part in the hinterlands of Stirling, Scotland, Elizabeth Hamilton’s cultural identity and its colonial 2. Anne K. Mellor, “Romantic Orientalism Begins at Home: Elizabeth Hamilton’s Trans­ lation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah,” SiR 44, no. 2 (2005): 152. 3. Janice Farrar Thaddeus, “Elizabeth Hamilton’s Domestic Politics,” Studies in EighteenthCentury...

IDEOLOGICAL STRUCTURE IN THE 1996 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN: COMMUNITY AND INDIVIDUAL COMPONENTS

Ideology has both individual and aggregate components—it exists in the minds of individuals as well as in a shared community dialogue. Individual Differences Scaling (INDSCAL) has been shown to be useful in studying ideological structure at both levels. However, few, if any, attempts have been made to employ INDSCAL in large-scale survey research. In a national telephone survey during the 1996 presidential campaign, we used INDSCAL to ascertain the ideological structure of the American electorate and the individual variations around that structure. In the aggregate, we find that the national political community arrayed the candidates, parties and issues in the campaign in a reasonably predictable and rational manner. It is clear that one dimension, the traditional liberal-conservative continuum, which more or less coincides with the political party spectrum, provides the common structure for political evaluation and communication. However, individuals vary widely in their ability to spatially array political objects in a manageable intellectual space and their participation in the dominant ideological paradigm. We find these variations to be related to strength of partisan attachment and level of education, respectively.

The Relation Between Sexual Behavior and Religiosity Subtypes: A Test of the Secularization Hypothesis

Previous literature on religion and sexual behavior has focused on narrow definitions of religiosity, including religious affiliation, religious participation, or forms of religiousness (e.g., intrinsic religiosity). Trends toward more permissive premarital sexual activity in the North American Christian-Judeo religion support the secularization hypothesis of religion, which posits an increasing gap between religious doctrine and behavior. However, the recent rise of fundamentalist and new age religious movements calls for a reexamination of the current link between religion and sexual behavior. The use of dual definitions of religiosity, including religious affiliation and dimensional subtypes, may further characterize this link. The present cross-sectional study evaluated patterns of sexual behavior in a young adult sample (N = 1302, M age = 18.77 years) in the context of the secularization hypothesis using religious affiliation and a liberal-conservative continuum of religious subtypes: paranormal belief, spirituality, intrinsic religiosity, and fundamentalism. Results indicated few affiliation differences in sexual behavior in men or women. Sexual behaviors were statistically predicted by spirituality, fundamentalism, and paranormal belief, and the endorsement of fundamentalism in particular was correlated with lower levels of female sexual behavior. The secularization hypothesis was supported by consistent levels of sexual activity across affiliations and is contradicted by the differential impact of religiosity subtypes on sexual behavior. Findings suggested that the use of religious subtypes to evaluate religious differences, rather than solely affiliation, may yield useful insights into the link between religion and sexual behavior.

Searching for Voters along the Liberal-Conservative Continuum: The Infrequent Ideologue and the Missing Middle

This article presents a new method of measuring the ideological orientation of the American electorate, using four variables found in the American National Elections Studies. The measure is tested for validity by examining its relation to a list of fundamental beliefs that we would expect a liberal and a conservative to hold. The proportions of liberals, conservatives and middle-of-the-roaders among the electorate over the past several decades are delineated. Both ideological orientation and party identification are then examined to determine the extent to which both of these predispositions coexist among the electorate. As of 2004, only 7.4 percent of potential voters were found to be both strong conservatives and strong Republicans, while 3.2 percent were strong liberals and strong Democrats. The majority of the electorate had neither strong predisposition. This majority should not be considered middle-of-the-roaders since they have little or no cognizance of the liberal-conservative continuum. The implications of these findings for party and candidate strategies, as well as for the assumption that voters need an ideological orientation in order to make sophisticated decisions, are discussed.

Comment on "Searching for Voters along the Liberal-Conservative Continuum"

The RePass article (The Forum, Vol. 6, Issue 2, 2008), continues the tradition of writers using the National Election Survey data of defining "ideology" as the answer to the liberal-conservative self-labeling question, and fails to consider the structure of substantive public policy attitudes and values as a necessary indicator of ideology.