According to a study by Christopher Ellis and James Stimson, which I have not read, many Americans who identify as conservative actually hold liberal policy positions. From the book’s Amazon page:
Public opinion in the United States contains a paradox. The American public is symbolically conservative: it cherishes the symbols of conservatism and is more likely to identify as conservative than as liberal. Yet at the same time, it is operationally liberal, wanting government to do and spend more to solve a variety of social problems. This book focuses on understanding this contradiction. It argues that both facets of public opinion are real and lasting, not artifacts of the survey context or isolated to particular points in time. By exploring the ideological attitudes of the American public as a whole, and the seemingly conflicted choices of individual citizens, it explains the foundations of this paradox. The keys to understanding this large-scale contradiction, and to thinking about its consequences, are found in Americans’ attitudes with respect to religion and culture and in the frames in which elite actors describe policy issues.
Pointer from Lillian Mason’s book, Uncivil Agreement, that I recently raved about.
One can interpret this sort of study in either a liberal-favoring way or a conservative-favoring way. The liberal-favoring way would be to say that conservatism is a form of “false consciousness.” People have been manipulated into identifying as conservatives, even though what they really want are liberal policies.
The other interpretation is that, as someone (help me out, I am forgetting who) once said, people are conservative about what they know best. They want government to get involved in issues that they know least about.
Robert Conquest said it.
Here’s a link:
http://www.isegoria.net/2008/07/robert-conquests-three-laws-of-politics/
Your last statement makes perfect sense: People who know about cars want to fix their own cars; people who know about computers want to fix their own computers. People who don’t know about them need someone to help identify a trustworthy expert.
Doesn’t public choice resolve this paradox? As I understand it, public choice makes no reference to ideology, quite the opposite. Public choice predicts all sorts of Big Government policies due to concentrated benefits, dispersed costs, and rational ignorance, *regardless of ideology*. So, Americans’ ideology largely favors smaller government while public choice delivers Big Government. Put another way, public choice theories predict that democratic collective decision making leads to bigger government than voters’ actual ideological preferences would otherwise merit, and one can interpret the so-called paradox instead as empirical confirmation of these predictions. The corollary is that we need some sort of correction mechanism to that Big Government bias to properly reflect voters’ actual preferences.
I once heard a speech by the founder of Southwest Airlines who said all his marketing people would bring him surveys showing how customers wanted this extra service or that. But he said if you ever ask if they want to pay an extra 15 bucks for that service, they would say no. I suspect the surveys showing the American public with liberal policy positions is a bit like the marketing surveys at Southwest. Asked if you want government to solve this problem or that, they will say yes. Ask if you understand the cost is higher taxes you may have to pay, or slower economic growth if you do not have to pay the taxes directly, and the government may not really solve the problem but make it worse, or solve that problem but create another, and the survey results would be quite different.
Another distinction is between “social insurance” and “welfare”. In social insurance people are in favor of programs in which:
1) Most individuals are expected to pay in roughly what they take out.
2) Thought there is extra for those that have some unfortunate event (like becoming disabled, the insurance part).
3) Everyone is more or less supposed to play by the rules (no faking disability).
You can sometimes accuse people of being deficient on details (most people think of Social Security as being sufficient for #1, but actuaries know its not over generations). However, this attitude generally holds. Social welfare works much better in places like Scandinavia where these points are more commonly true about their programs.
Straight up welfare is very unpopular. You can also see people change their opinions over time as they see real life results. The Scots-Irish of Appalachia used to support social programs more, but as they observed abuse of the system more often they gradually turned against it, “cousin Jimmy fakes disability and is high on Oxy playing video games all day.”
If you stuck in the ideological frame of “government coercion” then social welfare and welfare welfare seem the same, but its an important difference to normal people.
+1
The trouble with this kind of thesis and analysis is that there is a lot of room to play with the definitions of what you might call the “True Scotsman” versions of ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’, and a little interpretive or semantic play in either direction can make shaky claims – like “it’s all about the symbolism,” – look solid. I downloaded the free excerpt of this book, and that’s my assessment of what’s happened in this “study.”
Indeed, part of the trouble, especially with regards to “conservatism” is that there has been a long-standing gap and many fronts of conflict between the ‘populist’ base-conservatism and the elite-conservatism of intellectual opinion-makers. Immigration policy makes for a good recent example where this split has been wide and evident for some time yet still ignored by the establishment (and, suffice it to say, quite consequentially!) The positions are practically opposite, from the WSJ’s famous “there shall be open borders” Amendment proposal, to the more recent, “The wall just got ten feet higher.”
So, when interpreting survey results, which take on immigration is the “True Scotsman” form of ‘conservatism’, and which one is the ‘liberal’ position, when both sides genuinely self-identify as conservatives and insist their version is the one that is really the ‘conservative’ one? (This reminds me of one of those Hollywood scenes where a Real McCoy and identical-looking imposter are trying to convince some nervous third party with a gun to shoot the other guy.)
Bottom Line: Sometimes there’s no way to describe an animal except to actually describe the animal as it actually exists, in all it’s weird details, however hard it is to make it fit into intellectually coherent boxes and models. It’s like trying to decide whether it’s better to describe a platypus as either a mammal or a bird, or calling it a ‘paradox’ that it doesn’t present itself as cleanly one or the other.
To elaborate on your Bottom Line: The first sentence reminds me of the quip about Marxism: “Great idea. Wrong species.” The second sentence reminds me of how one wag responded when asked to describe a camel: “A horse designed by a committee.”
Given how disengaged and poorly informed most voters are, why would anyone take seriously polls of random voters’ self-descriptions of themselves as either “conservative” or “liberal”? What’s more interesting is to see how people vote, regardless of these often meaningless self-descriptions.
Also, as Handle points out, the abstract seems to regard the central issue between left and right as whether the government should be “activist.” That has not really been true for decades. The current and immediately previous GOP presidents, in particular, have not stressed reducing government spending, to put it mildly – particularly the kind of spending that benefits middle class people likely to think of themselves as “conservative.”
After submitting the above comment, I recalled that GW Bush made a brief attempt at entitlement reform, which went nowhere. That aside, the Bush II administration certainly did nothing about reducing federal spending.
Speaks more to the inability of “experts” to grasp any sort of nuance at all. The fact that there are people in this country who can utter the phrase “political science” with a straight face tells us just how degraded and corrupt our society has become.
When you say that liberals want government spending, etc. to solve problems you are not quite correct. Or at least you are setting up a false comparison. From recent politics, a liberal is someone who wants to spend 80 billion on food stamps while a conservative is someone who wants to spend 75 billion on food stamps.
Your post implies that to be a conservative, you’d want to get rid of the food stamp program, and if you don’t want to get rid of it, you must not really be a conservative.