WEEK 5

Personality, Values & Ideology

Objectives

• Identify important personality and value dimensions that shape public opinion

• Describe the implications for these personality and value dimensions for politics and elections

• Explain the ideological innocence thesis and its limitations

• Understand how conceptions of left-right ideology map onto values and partisanship

• Describe the scale and scope of partisan-ideological polarization in Canada

Personality

Personality Traits

• Personality traits --> stable characteristics of individuals that are a result of genetics and socialization

The "Big Five"

• Most important set of personality traits in social-psychology is the Big Five

• Researchers found that many of these traits loaded onto five distinct factors: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (OCEAN)

• Openness --> respond positively to a wide range of new experiences; appreciate complexity and novelty

• Conscientiousness --> engage in socially-prescribed impulse control; appreciation for rules and norms

• Extraversion --> are active and energetic, sociable and outgoing

• Agreeableness --> kind and communal nature; they are not antagonistic towards others

• Neuroticism --> frequently experience negative emotions such as anger, worry, and sadness, and are interpersonally sensitive

Political Implications of the Big Five?

Openness --> political participation, social and economic liberalism

Conscientiousness --> social and economic conservatism

Extraversion --> political participation

Agreeableness --> social conservatism, economic liberalism

Neuroticism --> economic liberalism

The "Authoritarian Personality"

• Authoritarian Personality: "those who value sameness and conformity to group norms"

• Characteristics: submissiveness to authority, desire for strong leaders, favouring harsh punishments and strict adherence to tradition

• Highly stable trait, rooted in childhood socialization

• Typically measured by asking people about their child-rearing preferences

• Authoritarians are more likely to be racially, morally, and politically intolerant

Limitations

• Assumption that personality traits are casually prior to political attitudes, but…

• Hard to establish causality

• Many other personality traits out there!

Values

• Values more directly get to the point of politics: they are "stable and enduring standards about how the world should work"

• Some values are instilled in early stages of socialization and are highly stable

Egalitarianism vs. Individualism

Most important dimensions:

• Egalitarianism --> the belief that all citizens should be equal regardless of their personal characteristics

• Individualism --> the belief that citizens should be able to get ahead by virtue of their hard work

Moral Traditionalism

• Adjacent to egalitarian-individualism is moral traditionalism --> underlying predispositions on traditional family and social organization

• Privileging of heteronormative relationships and the nuclear family

Populism

• Populism --> seeing the primary axis of political conflict as being between a virtuous citizenry and a corrupt elite

• Caused by declining socio-economic conditions and changing cultural conditions

• Implications --> liked to support for direct citizen involvement in politics; less trust and confidence in political institutions, news media, and experts

Populism

• Considered to be unrelated to  left-right political conflict

• However, there are sub-types of populism that may be more strongly related to left-right ideology

• Right-wing populism tends to target political and scientific elites, while left-wing populists focus on economic elites

Value Change

• Ronald Inglehart was the pioneer of the post-materialism thesis

• He argued that societal values are changing from a materialist orientation prioritizing economic and physical security

• A post materialist focus on autonomy and self-expression

The Post-Materialism Thesis

There are two fundamental components to this theory:

1. The Scarcity Hypothesis --> when scarcity prevails, people will be concerned principally with economic and physical security

   • As these issues are resolved, people will be more concerned with "higher order" goals, as per Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

2. The Socialization Hypothesis -->  values are shaped in adolescence, so level of scarcity in early years imprints on people's values in a durable fashion

The Post-Materialism Theis - Evidence

• We do see successive generations becoming more post-materialist

The Post-Materialism Thesis - Implications

Implications

• Rise of culture war issues (e.g., abortion, drugs, gun control)

• Growth of post-materialist parties (e.g., Greens)

• Rise of the "new left" and "new right" less concerned with old economic debates

Limitations

• No consensus on measuring value dimensions that are valid over time and across countries

• A lot more values identified with a lot of overlap = little ability to synthesize and accumulate knowledge

Ideology

Ideology --> "an interrelated set of attitudes and policy beliefs about the proper goals of society and how they should be achieved"

• Typically characterized along a single dimension from left (liberal/progressive) to right (conservative)

• Values are intuitive, broad orientations based on how society should work

• Ideology is a configuration of ideas that are bound together by constraint or functional interdependence

Ideological Innocence

• Philip Converse pioneer of the "ideological innocence" thesis

• Three main points of evidence

• People usually do not use ideological terms to describe the political parties

• Many people (40%) cant even identify left and right. Many more incorrectly use the terms (17%) or only use them in superficial ways (29%)

• Only weak correlations between issues (i.e., constraint), and over time (i.e., consistency)

Qualifications

Some qualifications:

1. Multi-dimensional nature of ideology

2. Symbolic ideology and values

3. Rising importance of ideology?

Conceptualizing Ideology

• Ideology may be categorical (e.g. environmentalist, libertarian, Marxist) or multi-dimensional (social and economic)

• Example: Gidengil et al. identify two ideological dimensions: market liberalism, moral traditionalism that influence support for the Conservatives and NDP

Symbolic Ideology

• Citizens are increasingly aware of ideological distinctions (i.e., left v. right)

• People are also more likely to identify themselves in ideological terms now than in the past

• Called symbolic ideology

• Symbolic ideology may not exactly conform to people's beliefs in specific policies - or their operational ideology

• Symbolic ideology endorsement does matter for vote choice

• Lesson: symbolic ideological orientations matter, not just policy attitudes

Ideological Polarization

Polarization Definitions

When scholars speak of ideological polarization, they can mean different things:

1. Ideological consistency

2. Ideological extremity

3. Partisan polarization

Ideological Consistency

• Ideological consistency --> citizens are becoming more consistently left-wing or right-wing in their policy attitudes

• Similar to Converse's notion of constraint

Ideological Extremity

• Ideological Extremity --> citizens are becoming increasingly extreme in their ideological and policy beliefs

• Distributions of policy beliefs and ideology should become double peaked

Partisan Polarization

• Partisan Polarization --> partisan groups are becoming dissimilar in their ideology and policy beliefs

• Partisans more divided (Republicans v. Democrats, Conservatives v. Liberals/NDP)

Important!

These are not the same thing!

1. You can become more consistent in your beliefs without being more extreme and vice versa

2. You can become more "sorted" without becoming more extreme or consistent

Polarization in the U.S.

• A large scholarship is exploring the nature of polarization in the U.S.

• The textbook takes a rather dim view of the role of ideology in public life - the reality is perhaps a bit more complex

• Is ideology on the upswing?

Ideological Consistency

• Modest increases in ideological consistency

• Correlations between issue pairs increased from 0.12 in 1980 to 0.22 in 2004

• Even stronger increases since 2004

Ideological Extremity

• Large debate as to whether Americans have become more ideologically extreme

• Best evidence is that the answer is "yes" but only to a small degree

• Chart plots the bimodality of American ideology (Lelkes, 2016)

Partisan Polarization

• In contrast, there is overwhelming evidence of partisan polarization

• Democrats and Republicans are much farther apart on a host of policy questions and in their reported ideology

Evidence on Ideological Consistency

• What about Canada?

• Canadians are becoming more ideologically consistent

• Increasing correlation between benefits: 0.12 in 1993 to 0.3 in 2019

Evidence on Ideological Extremity

• No meaningful gravitation towards the extremes

• Ideological distributions have not become notably more bimodal

Evidence on Partisan Polarization

• Conservatives are becoming increasingly ideologically dissimilar from Liberals and NDP

• Liberals and NDP are converging

Why Partisan Polarization?

• Evidence from coding of party platforms that Liberal Party has moved to left and Conservatives to the right

Lessons

• The public does not have tightly constrained and consistent ideological beliefs (at least those with little political knowledge)

• But things seem to be changing in the last couple of decades in the U.S. and Canada

• Values and ideology matter