A growing literature tells us that politically engaged Americans are polarizing, or at least sorting, along ideological lines. Republicans now identify as conservatives and Democrats now identify as liberals. Meanwhile, the Tea Party movement and the short-lived Occupy movement have enlivened activists at each end of the ideological spectrum. Yet amid all this talk of ideology much also remains unchanged. Thus far, sorting and increased activism have been confined to a relatively small and politically sophisticated segment of the electorate, but what about the rest of America? Ideology in America by Christopher Ellis and James Stimson offers an original and long-overdue investigation into what people mean when they refer to themselves as conservatives or liberals. Their findings overturn much of what we thought we knew about this vitally important topic, making it a must-read for anyone attempting to understand what to make of contemporary American politics.
From a structural standpoint, Ellis and Stimson were quite savvy in structuring this relatively short book. They confine the more methodologically tedious portion of their story to Chapters 2 and 3, thereby reserving Chapters 4 through 8 for substantive discussion. Thus, researchers get the level of detail they want, while the book’s accessibility to upper-division undergraduates and first-year graduate students is maintained. The only downside of the presentation is that many of the results are reported as logistic regression coefficients rather than predicted probabilities.
Chapter 1 begins by stating a fundamental yet rarely acknowledged fact: “Fifty years after the masterful undertaking of Campbell, Converse, Miller, and Stokes (1960) we still do not know how to characterize American ideology” (p. 1). Are we a liberal nation or a conservative nation? To answer this question, we must understand what people mean when they use these labels, and as Ellis and Stimson point out, there is no reason to assume that these meanings must be constant across the electorate. To elites, liberalism and conservatism mean what we would expect them to mean, but to average voters, the authors find, there exists a critical distinction between “symbolic” and “operational” ideology. More specifically, Americans tend to identify with the term “conservative” and the symbolism with which it is associated, while simultaneously expressing policy preferences traditionally associated with liberalism.
Chapters 2 and 3 focus on the data and methods used to estimate operational ideology. Because relatively few Americans fully grasp how ideological terms map onto policy positions, operational ideology constitutes a latent construct. The authors use Stimson’s method of measuring “public mood” (Public Opinion in America: Moods, Cycles, and Swings, 1991) to estimate the operational ideology of the American public from 1952 to 2009. They show that operational ideology fluctuates over time but almost always falls on the liberal side of the spectrum.
Chapter 4 shifts focus to symbolic ideology. This is a more readily measurable concept because it can be obtained through self-reports. The authors construct a symbolic ideology time series using questions obtained from surveys dating back to the “prehistory” of survey research. These data reveal two important trends: First, symbolic liberalism has declined precipitously since the 1930s. Second, despite Americans’ operational liberalism, symbolic liberalism has always held minority status during this time period.
In Chapter 5, the authors begin to consider the “operational-symbolic disconnect” in American politics. Looking for the first time at individual-level data, they show that most Americans—nearly 60%—fall into one of two categories: consistent liberals or operationally liberal and symbolically conservative. Consistent conservatives constitute only about 15% of the population, and those who are operationally conservative but symbolically liberal constitute less than 5%. Looking over time, Ellis and Stimson show that the rise of elite party polarization has not diminished this ideological disconnect. If anything, the percentage of individuals identifying as operationally liberal and symbolically conservative has risen over time.
In Chapters 6 and 7, the authors seek to explain why this seemingly awkward combination of issue positions and ideological self-identification is so common. They find that for many self-identified conservatives, this identification is not rooted in policy preferences at all. Instead, their understanding of conservatism is rooted in lifestyle preferences. They believe in a conservative interpretation of the Bible and conservative parenting, and so they identify as conservatives without realizing what political conservatism actually entails. In one particularly insightful set of analyses, the authors show that among the ideologically aware—those who successfully identify the Republican Party as the more conservative party in American politics—biblical conservatism, economic conservatism, and cultural conservatism all predict conservative identification. However, among those who are unaware of the way that ideology maps onto party, neither policy dimension predicts conservative identification. Instead, conservative identification is predicted by biblical conservatism and belief in conservative parenting.
In Chapter 7, the authors shift focus to elite influence, arguing that conservative office seekers commonly deride liberalism, but liberal office seekers rarely speak of ideology in general terms, focusing instead on policy specifics. Because the media often relay arguments directly from elites to the public, conservatism tends to be framed in a more positive light than liberalism, but liberal policies tend to be framed in a more positive light than conservative policies. Thus, conflicted conservatism is a natural outgrowth of elite political discourse. The authors present content analysis data illustrating the media’s tendency to frame liberalism more negatively than conservatism. Then, building on John Zaller’s Receive Accept Sample (RAS) model (The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinions, 1992), they show that media exposure leads to conflicted conservatism among individuals who are moderately knowledgeable about politics.
The story concludes in Chapter 8, where the authors examine the electoral effect of conflicted conservatism, present trends in the relationship between operational and symbolic ideology over time, and reflect on the implications of their findings. The discussion of electoral effects is particularly welcome given that the reader will have undoubtedly been wondering about this. The authors show that conflicted conservatives tend to vote Republican, but they are also more likely than other voters to cast votes for the eventual winner in presidential elections.
Overall, the reader will likely find little to quibble with in this relatively short and empirically dense yet highly accessible, persuasive, and engaging book. Of course, despite the authors’ earnest efforts to understand the way average Americans think about ideology, additional questions remain, providing opportunities for future research on this topic. Through careful investigation, Ellis and Stimson arrive at a highly compelling theory as to how a larger number of puzzle pieces fit together: operational ideology, symbolic ideology, conservative lifestyle, party identification, political awareness, and so on. Nonetheless, readers may wonder whether the pieces might also fit together in other configurations. For example, Republican identification appears to dwarf the effect of all other variables in explaining conflicted conservatism among operational liberals (p. 172). This suggests that much of the operational-symbolic disconnect may result from citizens’ ability to understand that Republican and conservative go together, without understanding which policy preferences map onto these labels. The authors’ story may be correct, but how much variance does it explain relative to other possibilities?
Readers may also wonder whether conflicted conservatism results primarily from a bottom-up process or from a top-down process. Chapter 6 suggests that conflicted conservatives choose to label themselves as conservatives due to their conservative lifestyle, but Chapter 7 suggests that this disconnect results from the way that the media frame political discourse. Again, both stories are compelling, but the reader may wonder which explains more variance.
In the end, of course, no book—especially one written on a topic so encompassing and central to our understanding of American politics—can answer every question. Ideology in America makes an enormous contribution by reinvigorating the dialogue over citizens’ understanding of ideology. I encourage people to buy this book and assign it in their courses. I expect that its impact on public opinion research will be felt for many years to come.
