Views of Government or Danger? Re-Examining Ideologies in the U.S. Public

• In Event: Political Trust and Tolerance

Abstract

When it comes to liberal-and-conservative ideologies in the U.S. public, do scholars have a good understanding of “what goes with what and why” (Converse 1964)? I argue that the amount of scholarly consensus on this question (e.g., Lee 2009) has been overstated. On one hand, a mainstream view (e.g., Kinder and Kalmoe 2017) holds that liberals and conservatives disagree primarily about the proper role of government. But a rival account has gained a good deal of scholarly support, in which liberals and conservatives hold conflicting views about the extent to which the world is inherently dangerous and competitive (e.g., Huntington 1957; Lakoff 1996; Haidt 2012; Hetherington and Weiler 2018; Oliver and Wood 2018). These two perspectives though have not explicitly been evaluated against one another. I fill this gap with a series of experiments that test whether treating belief systems as grounded in views about danger better explains political attitudes than conventional treatments of operational or symbolic ideology. A key element of the design is that I test issues in which racial attitudes should be minimally salient or irrelevant – guns, white collar crime, and animal rights. Evidence that perceptions of danger divide the public would help scholars and practitioners more successfully bridge political divides and promote dialogue across ideological-and-partisan affiliations.

Author

• Jeremy Levy, Northwestern University