Ideological Identification and the American Voter

This article explores the utility of respondent self-evaluation of ideological position on a liberal-conservative scale as a predictor of vote relative to two other types of predictors: party identification and issue positions. The general conclusion is that ideological self-evaluation identifies an effect that is independent of the other two predictors in the electorate as a whole but that the extent of this effect can vary substantially, depending on the context of the campaign and the social grouping being considered. As expected, its effect was more pronounced in 1972 than 1968, or 1964. John D. Holm is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Cleveland State University. John P. Robinson is Director of the Communication Research Center and Professor of Communication at Cleveland State University. The authors are listed alphabetically to indicate equal co-authorship. Public Opinion Quarterly ? 1978 by The Trustees of Columbia University Published by Elsevier North-Holland, Inc. 0033-362X/78/0042-0235/$1.75 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.103 on Thu, 20 Oct 2016 03:58:37 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 236 HOLM AND ROBINSON qualitative coding of voters' open-ended responses to questions regarding their attitudes toward the parties and presidential candidates in order to determine the extent to which these responses are ideological in nature (Campbell et al., 1960; Field and Anderson, 1969). This approach assumes that the voter is aware of and can articulate the ideological element in his thinking, a consideration questioned by many (see especially Mannheim, 1936). The second approach to policy orientation uses issue positions as indicators of ideological position or thinking. The most elaborate and compelling version of this approach is provided by Nie and his associates (1976), who constructed an ideological index from a number of issues and then correlated the index with the person's actual voting decision. The more consistent or intensive the respondent was in taking a liberal or conservative position on the various issues constituting the scale, the higher or lower he placed on the liberal-conservative continuum. The Nie et al. approach in essence measures the extent to which the voter's particular policy positions are constrained by an underlying liberal or conservative orientation. The issues chosen in this approach have generally been those generating the most conflict prior to and during the election campaign. Since politicians often emphasize interest-group aspects of issues, e.g., class, race, or occupation, they may obscure the extent to which issue positions can be used to identify ideological orientation. Both approaches do provide unique insights into the voter's policy orientation. The open-ended approach indicates the extent to which voters consciously think of their voting behavior and perceptions in ideological terms. As such it gives a conservative estimate of the role of ideology. The issue-consistency approach, on the other hand, allows the analyst to identify a connective attitude structure or belief system which is preverbal or difficult to verbalize. Also since it focuses on policy questions of current debate, the closed-ended approach ought to identify those aspects of voter ideology most germane to the decisions which elected officials are likely to make. Neither approach directly probes a voter's overall ideological identification or the extent to which such basic beliefs influence his voting decision. This article explores the viability of a measure of ideological identification using explicit voter self-evaluations of ideological position as an alternative approach to existing implicit measures. Explicit ideological identification is useful in several ways. First, it concentrates on how the voter sees himself or herself and not on whether his or her thinking matches up with a socially defined model. Second, the question can be general enough to include various forms of ideological thinking, ranging from those who think through policy questions only in ideological terms to those who simply use liberal and This content downloaded from 207.46.13.103 on Thu, 20 Oct 2016 03:58:37 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms IDEOLOGY AND THE AMERICAN VOTER 237 conservative as labels to attach to candidates in lieu of time-consuming evaluations of candidate positions (Popkin et al., 1976). Third, this indicator is more suitable for comparison with party identification than the other policy orientation indicators. Like party, ideological identification allows voters to align themselves straightforwardly with respect to a dimension of perception potentially affecting their vote.2 The weaknesses of this explicit approach vis-a-vis the other two approaches are readily apparent. Respondents can align themselves on an ideological scale with no indication of how able or willing they are to use ideology in determining their behavior. Different respondents can place themselves at the same point on the scale using vastly different definitions of liberal and conservative. Finally, the scale excludes voters who de facto have an ideological orientation in thinking about political issues but are not conscious of the fact. This paper examines the performance of self-perceived ideological identification as a predictor of vote in the 1972 election. Our major hypothesis is that among groups in the population more likely to be sensitive towards ideology, i.e., independents, the educated, the informed, and youth, ideological identification should be a better predictor than among partisans, the less educated, the ideologically uninformed, and senior citizens. We further hypothesize that among the former groups, it will be a better predictor of vote than party identification.3 After exploring the extent to which this hypothesis holds, we seek to elaborate the relation of ideological identification to two significant contextual questions, namely, whether ideology has any separate significance from issues and partisanship in a campaign and whether ideology varies depending on the character of the campaign conducted. 2 The levels of conceptualization approach used in The American Voter revealed that 13 percent of open-ended responses relating to party and presidential choice had some significant ideological orientation compared to only 4 percent reflecting a party orientation. However, the operationalization used by the Michigan researchers to capture impact of party identification was the respondents' own direct indication of party orientation and not simply whether party was mentioned in the context of an open-ended question. 3 These hypotheses are suggested by various discussions of the decline of party identification as a predictive variable and of the rise of policy-oriented voting. For instance, with regard to education and information, Miller et al. (1976; 770) comment: "As the focus of analysis moves across education levels from grade school to college, the bulk of the explanatory power shifts from candidate image to issues and ideology. Voters with a college education are better informed politically, generally more cognizant of policy differences between candidates and, therefore, more likely to make a vote decision on the basis of policy preferences." Miller et al. further state with regard to Independents that an "additional explanation for the decreased predictive power of party identification is that partisan attachment itself had declined significantly in the population by 1972" and thus "issues can be expected to play an increasingly significant role" (1976: 771). The age hypothesis was suggested most particularly by Paul R. Abramson's (1976) study which shows the decline in party identification to be in part a generation effect. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.103 on Thu, 20 Oct 2016 03:58:37 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 238 HOLM AND ROBINSON