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Abstract
The public's preferences are the basis of democratic representation. Most researchers have found either non-attitudes or inconsistent attitudes among voters and attributed this to a lack of political ideology within the public's belief systems. This finding has led researchers to examine whether voters can form genuine and consistent issue attitudes and how mass attitude consistency can be increased.
Though most voters' belief systems lack left-right political ideology, they may have their own organizing principles on which they base their issue attitudes. A belief about the proper size and role of government—i.e., operational ideology—is one of those organizing principles. In this study, I tested whether politicians' operational ideology causes voters to align their attitudes to an operational ideology. To estimate presidential candidates' operational ideology, I conducted content analysis of their statements during election campaigns between 1980 and 2004. Using public opinion data, I estimated mass attitude consistency for the same period. The findings show that, when voters identify a candidate's operational ideology in the economic-social welfare dimension, liberals who self-identify as liberal and prefer economic liberalism tend to form attitudes congruent with the candidate's operational ideology, while conservatives who self-identify as conservative and prefer economic conservatism tend to form attitudes congruent with their own operational ideology. My survey experiment verified the causal relationship between politicians' operational ideology and voters' attitude consistency.
This study contributes to the understanding of issue attitude formation and the relationship between voters' issue attitudes and public policy. First, politicians' ideologically consistent issue positions lead voters to activate their own operational ideology or adopt the politician's. This is a different causal mechanism of mass attitude consistency than in existing scholarship. Second, instead of merely adopting their party's stance, voters can form consistent attitudes by applying an operational ideology to several issues. Third, unlike conservatives, liberals tend to integrate operational conservatism and split their ticket based on the newly-formed conservative attitudes. Hence, operational conservatism is more influential on American voters' issue attitudes than operational liberalism. This difference in influence between operational ideologies offers insights about why America has had less liberal public policies than other developed countries.
