Ideological Consistency and Partisan Politics

One of the bloggers at The Economist's DiA, E.G., has flagged a recent Gallup poll showing what is, to her, the unexpected convergence of Americans' ideological self-identification on economic and social issues:

ONE of the features of the American political landscape is that fiscal conservatives are, for the most part, socially conservative too. According to a recent Gallup poll, 31% of Americans identify themselves as both, making economic and social conservatives the biggest ideological bloc in the country. ... Incidentally, we see a similar connection between fiscal and social issues on the Democratic side: 15% of Americans, according to the Gallup poll cited above, identify as both economically and socially liberal. Another 15% are moderate on both counts. In total, as Gallup puts it, 61% of Americans are "ideologically consistent".

Here's the chart from Gallup (with the "convergent" or "consistent" categories highlighted):

E.G. is puzzled by this: "It's not as if gay marriage causes inflation. And while de-funding Planned Parenthood may result in smaller budgets in the short term, there's a strong case that limiting access to contraception and other family planning services will lead to greater government spending in the future."

So what's going on?

Her commentators have a number of interesting/plausible hypotheses.

Commentator pun.gent argues that the convergence is simply the semi-arbitrary outcome of contemporary political coalition building:

Rich business interests need votes, and aren't too concerned about social issues. The are typically good salesmen, and understand the principles of market segmentation. [ ] Social Conservatives have numbers, passion, and organization. They'll vote primarily on those social issues. [ ] Said business types simply do that math, and add up a coalition. [ ] The Democratic equivalents have been urban professionals (money, talent), union members (numbers, passion, organization) and minorities (numbers)[.]

This is essentially the What's the Matter with Kansas? argument, combined with a complementary What's the Matter with New York? counter-narrative (although the electoral calculus that purportedly underlies the modern Democratic coalition is not particularly well described nor prima facie apparent).

Commentator publius50 also focuses his attention on the conservative side of the spectrum and argues that the convergence is largely the result of historical contingency: "The coalition of free enterprise and faith made perfect sense in the eighteen-sixties, considering both were opposed to slavery. And we've stayed together through better and worse, that is cutting taxes and prohibiting liquor respectively." He further argues that this combination makes some "logic[al]" sense insofar as "having less government does require that individuals take more responsible for caring for themselves and for each other." (This latter argument echoes those made by the Texas Republicans interviewed by E.G. in the blog post itself.)

Finally, commentator Ursprache cites the academic work of philosopher Michael Huemer to argue that ideological convergence, although real, is purely arbitrary, i.e., that "the etiology of [an individual's] beliefs is personal/social/historical, not rational." In this view, convergence may result not because of any coherence between economic and social conservatism (or economic and social liberalism), but rather because of ideological sorting and in-group (partisan) tribalism:

The social role of political beliefs probably goes a long way towards explaining the clustering of logically unrelated beliefs. People with particular political orientations are more likely to spend time together than people with divergent political orientations. Quite a lot of evidence shows that people tend to conform to the beliefs and attitudes of those around them, particularly those they see as similar to themselves. Thus, people with a substantial degree of initial political agreement will tend to converge more over time--although what particular collection of beliefs they converge on may be largely a matter of historical accident (hence the difficulty of stating a general principle that unites either conservative or liberal beliefs) or the desire to project a certain self-image.

Yale Law School professor Dan Kahan has further fleshed out this theory (which he calls "cultural cognition") and has done original empirical work to substantiate its claims.

My own two cents:

Various discrete issues appear to be rather arbitrarily assigned to one or the other ideological rubrics under which Americans tend to categorize their political beliefs.

For example, support for marriage equality is currently a litmus test for whether one is "socially liberal" or "socially conservative" (at least in the United States), but the case can easily be made that the inclusion of gay and lesbian couples in the institution of marriage is fundamentally conservative as social policy. Another example, this one from the "economic" side of the divide: Support for a robust welfare state, fully funded by staunchly progressive taxation, is considered economically "liberal," while support for a robust military-industrial complex, funded through government debt, is considered economically "conservative."

I would argue that the seemingly arbitrary division of these issues can best be understood as a function of party politics. That is, the position that the Republican Party takes on any given issue (whether due to material self-interest, historical contingency, electoral strategy, etc.) gets categorized as "conservative," while the opposite position (which may or may not be taken by the Democratic Party) gets categorized as "liberal."  As a result, the terms "conservative" and "liberal" tend to obscure more than to elucidate.

Seen in this light, it is hardly surprising that 31% of Americans self-identify as both "economic conservatives" and "social conservatives," as I would suspect that this cohort is largely coterminous with the 28% of Americans who, according to a contemporaneously conducted Gallup poll, self-identify as Republican. Stated differently, the Gallup data does not necessarily demonstrate any ideological convergence, but rather just demonstrates respondents' partisan identification with the Republican Party.

And what about purported liberal/moderate ideological convergence? I would argue that such a phenomenon simply is not borne out by the data. Take another look at the Gallup chart posted above. While it is true that 82% of self-identified social conservatives also identify as economic conservatives (31/38), only 54% of self-identified social liberals identify as economic liberals (15/28), and only 50% of self-identified social moderates identify as economic moderates (15/30). In other words, "convergence" simply is not happening among liberals and independents.  Again, this makes sense through the lens of partisan politics: compared with the contemporary Republican coalition, the contemporary Democratic coalition is far more demographically diverse and far less ideologically rigid.

The bottom line: Ideological convergence of the form posited by E.G. is not occurring (and hence need not be explained as a phenomena in itself). Rather, all the Gallup data is demonstrating is Americans' increasing polarization along partisan lines, primarily due to the rightward tilt of the GOP.