Conflict, Fusion, or Coexistence? The Complexity of Contemporary American Conservatism

Others have of course turned to the NES in similar contexts. Bartels (2006) draws on NES data to refute the common claim that “values voting” among the less affluent led to George W. Bush’s 2004 victory. Layman and Carmines (1997), assessing NES data from four presidential election years from 1980 through 1992, find that the Republican party is becoming the political home of religious traditionalists while religious liberals and secularists are increasingly attracted to the Democratic party. In his 2001, book Layman employs NES measures to demonstrate that both the Republican and Democratic parties have become more internally homogeneous over the last several decades. Layman’s analyses further demonstrate that both parties have become more distinctive with respect to issues relating to traditional morality on issues such as abortion, women’s roles, pornography, gay rights, as well as others.

Ellis and Stimsom (2007a) seek to explain the increasing tendency of Americans to identify themselves as conservative. Ellis and Stimson (2007b) explores the complex and conflicted interplay of symbolic identification and policy preferences for three types of conservative identifiers: constrained conservatives, moral conservatives and conflicted conservatives.

Here compare Stimson’s (2004, 94) discussion of the political strategies suggested by the existence of “conflicted conservatives.” Democratic elites, seeking to appeal to the “operational” preference of conflicted conservatives for liberal policies will “emphasize the specific” by discussing particular public policies. Republican elites will avoid discussing particular policy proposals and aim to activate conflicted conservatives’ attachment to symbols of conservatism. By contrast, the type of conflict and fusion we consider here has strategic implications not for whether elites discuss issues or deploy symbols, but rather for what issues they discuss.

Time-Sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences administered the study for us via the Internet through Knowledge Networks. A national sample of 451 adults was taken. The sample is comprised of 48% males and 52% females. Seventy percent of the sample is white, 11% African-American and 12.5% Hispanic. The average age of the respondents is 46. Thirty-seven percent of respondents identified as Republican, 25% as Independent and 28% as Democratic. Completion Rate of 71.2% and an AAPOR RR3 rate of 31.1%.

See again Bartels’ (2006) argument that the 2004 NES data provide little support for Franks’ claim that low-income citizens vote against their economic self-interest by voting for candidates who espouse conservative positions on cultural issues.

Taken from the White House website, http://​www.​whitehouse.​gov.

Ellis and Stimson (2007b) explore traditional conservatism as one of three “pathways” to conservative self-identification, emphasizing the complex (and, they contend, confused) relationship between religion, moral belief and politics. They argue that religious conservatives often translate their religiously conservative self-identity into politically conservative self-identity, though many do not understand what political conservatism means: “because politics is so peripheral for so many, even many citizens who hold doctrinally “conservative” positions on issues such as abortion and sexual morality may be largely unaware that these positions also happen to be politically conservative—for them, the attitudes are religious, not political ones” (p. 13).

We include a measure of respondents’ populist attitudes in order to test the general idea that the appeal of contemporary conservatism rests in part on a backlash against the perceived machinations of liberal elites and, more particularly, to further explore the idea that “market populist” appeals to the market work alongside an emphasis on empowering ordinary citizens against domineering elites, with the market as a supposed instrument of that empowerment. Our populism question was worded as follows: “To what extent do you agree or disagree that many of America’s problems could be solved if the political system just paid more attention to the thinking of ordinary people?” As the analyses below make clear, our data in the end offer little support for the notion that market conservatism is uniquely populist in orientation as Frank (2004) suggests.

All three measures are accorded equal weight in the construction of the economic conservatism variable.

Because cultural conservatism has been so closely identified with religious beliefs and expressions over the last several years, we accord equal weight to the religion questions in the construction of the cultural conservative index variable. Moreover, giving less weight to the religion measures relative to the more traditional values questions does not alter our findings. On the complex interaction of religion, moral traditionalism, and politically conservative beliefs, see Ellis and Stimson (2007b). Indeed Ellis and Stimson (2007b) similarly combine these items into a dimension they label “traditional moral.