Liberal-conservative Dimension Research Articles

American politics in 3D: measuring multidimensional issue alignment in social media using social graphs and text data

A growing number of social media studies in the U.S. rely on the characterization of the opinion of individual users, for example, as Democrat- or Republican-leaning, or in continuous scales ranging from most liberal to most conservative. Recent works have shown, however, that additional opinion dimensions, for instance measuring attitudes towards elites, institutions, or cultural change, are also relevant for understanding socio-informational phenomena on social platforms and in politics in general. The study of social networks in high-dimensional opinion spaces remains challenging in the US, both because of the relative dominance of a principal liberal-conservative dimension in observed phenomena, and because two-party political systems structure both the preferences of users and the tools to measure them. This article leverages graph embedding in multi-dimensional latent opinion spaces and text analysis to propose a method to identify additional opinion dimensions linked to cultural, policy, social, and ideological groups and preferences. Using Twitter social graph data we infer the political stance of nearly 2 million users connected to the political debate in the U.S. for several issue dimensions of public debate. We show that it is possible to identify several new dimensions structuring social graphs, non-aligned with the classic liberal-conservative dimension. We also show how the social graph is polarized to different degrees along these newfound dimensions, leveraging multi-modality measures in opinion space. These results shed a new light on ideal point estimation methods gaining attention in social media studies, showing that they cannot always assume to capture liberal-conservative divides in single-dimensional models.

Moderates

Moderates are often overlooked in contemporary research on American voters. Many scholars who have examined moderates argue that these individuals are only classified as such due to a lack of political sophistication or conflicted views across issues. We develop a method to distinguish three ways an individual might be classified as moderate: having genuinely moderate views across issues, being inattentive to politics or political surveys, or holding views poorly summarized by a single liberal–conservative dimension. We find that a single ideological dimension accurately describes most, but not all, Americans’ policy views. Using the classifications from our model, we demonstrate that moderates and those whose views are not well explained by a single dimension are especially consequential for electoral selection and accountability. These results suggest a need for renewed attention to the middle of the American political spectrum.

The Rural-Urban Continuum and the 2020 U. S. Presidential Election

Abstract The question, “What is rural?”, has become increasingly salient to scholars of American politics over the past decade, especially after the 2016 election of Donald Trump. While social and political tensions between urban and rural residents of the United States are now widely recognized, rural cannot simply be defined as the antithesis of urban. Using survey data and voting returns from the 2020 election, we illustrate how urban-rural differences are best understood not as a dichotomy, but as a continuum. Large metropolitan core counties comprise one pole of this continuum: their residents are most likely to vote Democratic, and to express liberal attitudes on a variety of topics. At the other pole are counties far from urban areas with no towns, where conservative attitudes are widespread and Republican majorities are substantial. Between the two poles lie a continuum of counties with widely varying positions along the liberal-conservative dimension and voting records to match. We find this urban-rural continuum provides considerable analytical utility even in a multivariate spatial regression model that incorporates numerous other important demographic, economic, and social variables. Our analytical framework takes a step beyond the bipolarity that typically characterizes the discussion of urban and rural America.

It’s Only You and Me and We Just Disagree: The Ideological Foundations of Affective Polarization

Abstract Using the extensive battery of issue questions included in the 2020 ANES survey, I find that a single underlying liberal-conservative dimension largely explains the policy preferences of ordinary Americans across a wide range of issues including the size and scope of the welfare state, abortion, gay and transgender rights, race relations, immigration, gun control and climate change. I find that the distribution of preferences on this liberal-conservative issue scale is highly polarized with Democratic identifiers and leaners located overwhelmingly on the left, Republican identifiers and leaners located overwhelmingly on the right and little overlap between the two distributions. Finally, I show that ideological preferences strongly predict feelings toward the parties and presidential candidates. These findings indicate that polarization in the American public has a rational foundation. Hostility toward the opposing party reflects strong disagreement with the policies of the opposing party. As long as the parties remain on the opposite sides of almost all major issues, feelings of mistrust and animosity are unlikely to diminish regardless of Donald Trump’s future role in the Republican Party.

(No) Politics at work? The relevance of political ideology for startup VC financing

Access to venture capital is critical for startups to overcome the ‘valley of death’, i.e., the funding gap in the technology development and commercialization phase, and to meet rapid growth demands. While prior research has extensively examined factors that influence investors’ decisions to fund new ventures, there is little understanding of the relevance of investors’ political ideology for startup financing. Drawing on a panel of 415 US fintech and cleantech startups between 2008 and 2018, we assess the importance of investors’ political ideology, conceptualized on the liberal-conservative dimension, for their investment commitments. Our findings suggest that conservative investors are less likely to fund new ventures, and that this effect is contingent on later investment stages and ideological congruence of (i) startups’ and investors’ political ideology and of (ii) the external political environment of the startups and investors’ ideology. Our paper extends political ideology literature by addressing the impact of political ideology in an entrepreneurial setting. Our research further contributes to the entrepreneurship literature in two important ways. First, we identify the importance of investors’ political ideology as a relevant factor that shapes startup financing. Second, we demonstrate that ideological differences between conservative and liberal investors may also lead them to attach differential importance to the same attributes of new ventures.

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.

Generational Differences in Work Values: Moderating Effect of U. S. States’ Liberalism-Conservatism

Generational differences in work values have received significant attention in recent years. Researchers have focused most intensively on generational differences in the U.S., with particular emphasis on the differences between Millennials and other generations. In addition, researchers have typically assumed that generational differences will hold true across the country as a whole, and have thus neglected the possibility that such differences may vary as a function of geographical region or cultural variables within the country. In this paper, we address this gap by investigating generational differences in work values as a function of U.S. state political environment. We propose that the prevailing ideology of U.S. states, along a liberal-conservative dimension, moderates the relationship between generation and work values. We collected data from 960 GenX and Millennial employees from four clearly liberal and four clearly conservative states, selected on the basis of the 2016 election results. As hypothesized, multi-level analysis revealed that differences between GenX and Millennial employees were found only in liberal states. Specifically, in liberal states, cognitive values (e.g., creativity, challenge) were significantly higher among Millennial employees, and instrumental values (e.g., benefits, job security) were significantly higher among GenX employees. In contrast, these differences were not significant in conservative states. We highlight the theoretical and practical implications of our findings and suggest avenues for future investigation.

Liberal–conservative dimension of moral concerns underlying political faction formation in Taiwan

Moral foundations theory provides a framework for understanding the traditional liberal–conservative dichotomy in political factions. Typically, factions on the liberal side are more concerned with individualizing foundations—including care/harm and fairness/cheating—for the protection of individual rights and welfare whereas factions on the conservative side are concerned with both individualizing and binding foundations—including loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation—for the maintenance of existing social ethics. Our research extended this framework to the analysis of Taiwanese political factions, which are not distributed conspicuously along the liberal–conservative line but instead on whether Taiwan should become a legally independent state or unify with the People's Republic of China (Mainland China). Our results indicate that despite the scarce use of the terms liberal or left and conservative or right in common communication, a liberal–conservative dimension underlies the Taiwanese political spectrum. Specifically, supporters of Taiwan independence exhibit liberal‐like moral concerns whereas supporters of China unification and the status quo demonstrate conservative‐like moral concerns. Moreover, indirect effects exist through moral foundations from political factions to stances on social issues; this is especially prevalent in the case of Taiwan independence camp's clear support for the legalization of same‐sex marriage, a stance resulting from anti‐authoritarian moral and political characteristics.

What Does the Liberal-Conservative Scale Measure? A Study among Clergy and Laity in the Church of England

Abstract The Liberal-Conservative (LIBCON) scale is a seven-point semantic differential scale that has been widely used to measure identity within the Church of England. The history of the development of liberalism in the Church of England suggests that this scale should be associated with specific beliefs and attitudes related to doctrine, moral issues and church practices. This study tests this idea among a sample of 9339 lay and ordained readers of the Church Times (the main newspaper of the Church of England) using twelve summated rating scales measuring a range of beliefs and attitudes. Of these twelve variables, eleven were correlated with the LIBCON scale. Discriminant function analysis produced a linear function of these variables that correctly identified 35% of respondents on the scale, and 69% to within one scale score. The best predictors were scales related to either doctrine or moral issues, and these performed consistently across traditions (Anglo-catholic, Broad church or Evangelical) and between clergy and laity. Scales related to church practices suggested ‘conserving tradition’ was also involved in the liberal-conservative dimension, but this was less so for clergy and for Evangelicals. The scale is commended as an empirical measure of one dimension of Church of England identities, especially if used alongside a parallel scale measuring church tradition.

The Structure of Municipal Political Ideology

Conventional wisdom holds that municipal politics is nonideological. Recent scholarship challenges this perspective, finding representation on a liberal–conservative dimension in municipal politics. This article re-evaluates these findings using a set of questions that includes questions on land use. Evidence is shown for a multidimensional municipal ideological space with a liberal–conservative dimension and another dimension that corresponds to citizens’ preferences for balancing community needs with individual rights on land use. The results support a characterization of municipal politics as being ideological but also show that a single liberal–conservative dimension is inadequate for characterizing the municipal ideological space.

Relationship of Moral Foundations to Political Liberalism-Conservatism and Left-Right Orientation in a Finnish Representative Sample

Abstract. In moral foundations research, two single-item measures of political orientation – with anchors labeled “liberal-conservative” or “left-right” – have been alternatively used. Using a Finnish representative sample, we employed both measures. High conservatism was associated with binding foundations (loyalty, authority, and sanctity), while the associations with the individualizing foundations (harm and fairness) were practically zero. By contrast, the left-right dimension was not associated with the sanctity foundation, but was associated with all other foundations. The measures of political orientation were interchangeable only for fairness; harm was more strongly associated with the left-right dimension, and all binding foundations were more strongly associated with the liberal-conservative dimension. This suggests that at least in some countries, the liberal-conservative and left-right measures are not interchangeable.

Religiosity, political conservatism, and support for legalized abortion: A bivariate ordered probit model with endogenous regressors

Using pooled data from the General Social Surveys, we estimated a bivariate ordered probit model of support for legalized elective- and traumatic- based abortions. Unlike past literature, we treat religiosity (practice and salience), religious orthodoxy, political ideology, and party identification as endogenous regressors. Religious orthodoxy is found to reduce the probability of supporting legalized abortions while religiosity increases it. Increases in political conservatism reduce the probability of supporting legalized abortions by substantial amounts. Surprisingly, movement along the party identification spectrum from strong Democrat to strong Republican increases the likelihood of supporting legalized abortion, likely reflecting the greater importance attached to limited government and the preservation of individual freedoms, after controlling for religious orthodoxy and self-placement along the liberal conservative dimension. Quantitatively, however, the negative impacts of increased political conservatism are dominant

An Experimental Approach to Measuring Ideological Positions in Political Text

Though powerful as general tools, automated measures of position-taking in text often perform poorly when models of speech are difficult to develop or theoretically contested. Rather than model text, I develop an experimental approach to measure perceptions of partisanship in speech, with an application to 2008 Congressional advertisements. I randomly assign ads to subjects recruited in a large-N survey, and ask them to ‘guess’ the party of featured candidates, with ads scored as their average party inference. These party perception scores are empirically synonymous with a liberal-conservative dimension, and highly reliable across samples and experimental conditions. Party identity has little impact on guesses, indicating the inferential task significantly mutes partisan bias. For validation, I assess which words influence guessing, and whether ad-scores correspond to expectations about how candidates target voters. Importantly, this experimental approach can augment or validate automated text analysis, and generalize to study speech across many other contexts.

Dimensionality of Policy Space in Consociational Northern Ireland

A criticism of consociational power sharing as an institutional response to violent conflict is that it buttresses rather than ameliorates the underlying (linguistic, religious or ethno-national) divide, hence prohibiting the emergence of new dimensions of political competition (such as economic left-right or moral liberal-conservative dimensions) that are characteristic of ‘normal’ societies. We test this argument in the context of the illustrative Northern Ireland case, using data from expert coding of party policy documents and opinion data derived from two Voter Advice Applications (VAAs). We find evidence for a moral liberal-conservative dimension of politics in addition to the ethno-national dimension. Hence, we caution against assuming that consociational polities are unidimensional.

The Dimensionality of Congressional Voting Reconsidered

This article reports findings for a decomposition of the roll-call voting record of the U.S. Congress to determine the effect of the level of aggregation on the observed dimensionality of the policy space. In doing so, we identify some but certainly not all of the ways in which the aggregation of the voting record affects the observed dimensionality of the policy space. For the 1955 to 2008 period (84th-110th Congresses), we apply optimal classification (OC) to votes aggregated to the level of the individual bill and policy area to measure dimensionality. We examine the marginal proportional reduction in error (MPRE) across dimensions. Our results demonstrate that complexity in voting patterns of individual bill episodes is the norm, that aggregating to higher levels reduces the observed dimensionality, and that the liberal–conservative dimension appears more dominant in more highly aggregated analyses. These results call into question many of the conclusions from the theoretical and empirical literature on the U.S. Congress that uses a unidimensional model.

Ideological Warriors and Constituent Servants: Understanding the Determinants of Participation on Health Care Legislation in the Polarized Senate

Recent scholarship on the Senate indicates that partisanship and polarization have fundamentally changed the dynamics and the nature of policy making in the institution. To understand how senators balance their roles as constituent servants and partisan warriors, we examine senators’ participation in floor amending on major health legislation over a 10-year period (2000–2010). Health care is central to the ideological divide over the nature of the welfare state and has a significant impact on constituents. Unlike previous studies, we develop a fuller picture of the factors that motivate senators to participate by analyzing both amendments filed to a bill and amendments considered on the floor. We find that minority party status and ideology, both the liberal-conservative dimension and ideological extremism, are important indicators of participation. Furthermore, senators elevate ideology in comparison to constituent need when an issue is a presidential priority. Finally, the influence of constituency factors varies by party. For Democrats, their ideological commitment to the social welfare state makes them more likely to participate on health issues regardless of constituent need. However, Republican senators become more likely to sponsor amendments as the level of observable constituent factors increases.

A longitudinal test of the gender turnover model among U.S. House and Senate members

This study builds on previous research by examining the impact of gender when predicting roll call voting behavior in the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate over several recent congresses. In order to unearth gender effects, it employs a longitudinal design based on turnover in the membership of both the House and the Senate. Through a comparison of the voting records of members of Congress representing the same geographic territory it holds constituency constantly while allowing for gender and party to vary. It does so with models including dependent variables that measure roll call ideology and support for women's issues exhibited in the voting records of members in both institutions. The results show that male and female members in each chamber representing the same constituency amass virtually indistinguishable voting records on the liberal-conservative policy dimension. However, on votes dealing with issues of concern to women, female senators tend to be more supportive than the male senators they replace and male senators tend to be less supportive than the female senators they replace.

Reexamining the “Racial Gap” in Political Knowledge

Scholars have long lamented the low levels of political knowledge in the American public, particularly the “racial gap” in the rates of knowledge between racial/ethnic minorities and whites. This article examines whether the racial gap is an artifact of perceptual biases or differential item functioning, brought about by the distinct political experiences of racial/ethnic minorities in the United States. In analyzing data from the 2008 American National Election Studies, the raw responses to political knowledge questions indeed reveal a discrepancy in blacks’ and Latinos’ placements of prominent political figures when compared to whites. However, once these perceptual biases are corrected for, the racial gap dissipates. Blacks and Latinos are able to accurately identify the positions of prominent political candidates and parties on a range of policies across the liberal-conservative dimension. These findings pose several implications for our current understanding of the uneven distributions of political k...

Identifying Latent Policy Dimensions from Public Opinion Data: An Inductive Approach

A common way of classifying policy dimensions is by means of a two-dimensional model, based on one economic (Left/Right) dimension and one liberal–conservative dimension that Marks et al. (2006) refer to as Tan/Gal. However, as Lipet and Rokkan (1967) note, voter alignments developed in different ways in different European countries, so the dimensions that define the respective policy spaces may vary from country to country. In this paper, I test the two-dimensional model on opinion data from four European territories using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and go on to develop alternative “better fit” models using a combination of exploratory factor analysis and CFA. I find that the two-dimensional model is appropriate in some but not all the cases and suggest that a more context-sensitive approach is needed to identify the dimensionality of the policy space.

The Polarization of Contemporary American Politics

Political elites of the United States are deeply polarized. Polarization of the Democratic and Republican Parties is higher than at any time since the end of the Civil War. This essay describes how the modern polarization trend emerged and its implications for mass political behavior and public policy outcomes. We contend that contemporary political polarization must be understood in terms of both the ideological divergence of the parties and the expansion of the liberal–conservative dimension of conflict to a wider set of social and cultural conflicts in American society. We close with the speculation that the Republican Party has become the more fractured of the parties along the liberal–conservative dimension at both the elite and mass level.