Ideological (In)consistency in Attitudes toward Federalism in the United States

• In Event: Political Attitudes, Voters, and Voting in the States

Abstract

Existing research on American public opinion has long shown that liberals are more likely to have their policy preferences align with their ideological self-identification than conservatives. In this paper, we explore whether that asymmetry in consistency applies when it comes to more general attitudes toward government authority and structure. Our focus is liberal and conservative attitudes toward federalism, a remarkably unstudied topic. Using multiple national surveys, including an original module on the 2020 Congressional Election Study, we find that it is conservatives who are more likely to exhibit consistency than liberals. Conservatives tend to prefer a devolution of power to state and local jurisdictions, even if doing so might make it harder to achieve conservative policy aims, whereas liberals are more likely to prioritize policy aims and will support whichever level of government seems most likely to achieve them given the timing and/or wording of the survey. We then examine reasons why conservatives might display a strong adherence to the federalist structure of American government. We find that the idea of “states rights” continues to loom large for self-identified conservatives as does a generalized level of trust toward political units described as small versus large.

Authors

• Deborah Schildkraut, Tufts University

• James M. Glaser, Tufts University

• Jeffrey M. Berry, Tufts University