Operational Ideology in America: A Latent Class Analysis

• In Event: New Perspectives on Ideology

Abstract

Current work has struggled to understand the structure of Americans’ operational ideology - their tendency to support liberal or conservative policies. Although recent work suggests that attitudes towards race and immigration may play an important role in American political attitudes, most analyses of the latent structure of operational ideology have only included questions about attitudes towards economic and moral issues. Current work has also yet to explore whether the structure of operational ideology has changed over time, a possibility that has important implications for analyses of partisan-ideological sorting. In this paper, we address both of these issues by including attitudes towards race and immigration alongside traditional economic and moral issues in an analysis of the structure of American operational ideology. We then test whether this structure has changed between 2008 and 2016. To accomplish these goals, we deploy a new method, Latent Class Analysis (LCA), which avoids a number of problems associated with earlier approaches based on factor analysis. Using data from the American National Election Study (ANES) we use LCA to extract latent variables measuring operational ideology in both 2008 and 2016, and analyze the relationship between these constructs and partisan and ideological self-identification in both years. Our findings suggest that, between 2008 and 2016, the structure of American operational ideology has become more complex and can no longer be effectively described as comprising only economic and moral dimensions. In 2008 and especially 2016, there exist distinct classes of voters whose partisan and ideological self-identity are more aligned with their views on race and immigration than their views on economic or moral issues. Our analysis, therefore, provides a more accurate representation of the ideological structure of the American electorate, and a new understanding of the complex form of partisan-ideological sorting that has taken place in recent years.

Authors

• Graham W. Wright, Brandeis University

• Sasha Volodarsky, Northeastern University