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Patterns of Support for Democratic and Capitalist Values in the United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Dennis Chong ,
Herbert McClosky  and
John Zaller
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Extract

Two major traditions of belief, democracy and capitalism, have dominated American public life from its inception. Although they have not always coexisted in perfect harmony – indeed their union has often been torn by conflict – they have managed to accommodate to each other with sufficient flexibility to have forged a viable political culture.

Type
Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 13 , Issue 4 , October 1983 , pp. 401 - 440
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1983

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References

1 Hartz, Louis, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955), p. 89.Google Scholar

2 Rossiter, Clinton, Conservatism in America (New York: Vintage, 1962), pp. 66, 68.Google Scholar

3 Hofstadter, Richard, The American Political Tradition, second edn (New York: Vintage, 1972), p. XXXVII.Google Scholar

4 See especially Sniderman, Paul M., Personality and Democratic Politics (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1975)Google Scholar; McGuire, William, ‘The Nature of Attitudes and Attitude Change’, in Lindzey, G. and Aronson, E., eds., The Handbook of Social Psychology, 2nd ed., Vol. III (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1969), pp. 136–314Google Scholar; and Di Palma, Giuseppe and McClosky, Herbert, ‘Personality and Conformity: The Learning of Political Norms’, American Political Science Review, LXIV (1970), 1054–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 We wish to express our gratitude to the Gallup Organization for assistance in the administration of the national general population survey. Gallup interviewers took our lengthy questionnaire into the field and distributed it, after appropriate instructions, to a cross-section area probability sample of 1,456 adult Americans, nearly two-thirds of whom completed the questionnaire and returned it.

6 Details of the PAB surveys and samples can be found in McClosky, Herbert et al. , ‘Issue Conflict and Consensus Among Party Leaders and Followers’, American Political Science Review, XLIV (1960), 406–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and in McClosky, Herbert, ‘Consensus and Ideology in American Polities’, American Political Science Review, LVIII (1964), 361–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 The results of this survey are reported in McClosky, Herbert and Brill, Alida, Dimensions of Tolerance (New York: Basic Books, 1983).Google Scholar

8 For a list of the items included in the democracy and capitalism scales, see Appendix I.

9 In the civil liberties survey, a ten-item measure was constructed to assess each respondent's knowledge of American legal norms relating to civil liberties. As expected, awareness and understanding of these norms was positively correlated with formal education, political participation, and an index of factual information about politics. Other evidence from the several surveys we have conducted clearly show that each of these variables could stand by itself as a valid indicator of awareness.

10 See Prothro, James W. and Grigg, C. W., ‘Fundamental Principles of Democracy: Bases of Agreement and Disagreement’, Journal of Politics, XXII (1960), 276–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McClosky, , ‘Consensus and Ideology in American Politics’Google Scholar; and Westie, Frank R., ‘The American Dilemma: An Empirical Test’, American Sociological Review, XXX (1965), 527–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 For a fuller treatment of American attitudes toward capitalism, see McClosky, Herbert and Zaller, John, The American Ethos: Public Support for Capitalism and Democracy (New York: The Twentieth Century Fund, forthcoming)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Chapters 4 and 5, and passim.

12 Any procedure for representing the scatterplots in tabular form is to some degree arbitrary. We began by trichotomizing scores on the capitalism and democracy scales, using the 33rd and 67th percentiles of the mass distribution as cutting points. We next classified respondents as follows: respondents scoring in the top third on the values of one tradition, and high or moderate on the values of the other, were counted as nineteenth-century liberals. Those scoring high on democracy and low on capitalism were counted as strong welfare-state liberals; those scoring low on democracy and high on capitalism were counted as strong conservatives. And finally, those scoring low on the values of one tradition, and low or moderate on the values of the other, were counted as falling within the anti-regime cell. Respondents scoring in the middle third of both scales have been excluded from the analysis as ambiguous cases, unclassifiable for our purposes.

This method of classification was designed to highlight the tendencies which exist in the data. The asymmetrical grouping of cells reflects our judgement that the people who fall into cells that are off the main liberal-conservative diagonal hold positions other than strong liberalism or strong conservatism.

13 Although the measures of support for democracy and capitalism in the PAB and OVS studies are composed of different items, their general content is very similar. They may therefore be considered comparable measures of the same basic concepts. Since measures of political knowledge and participation were not included in the PAB study, we have relied, in this table, on the best available indicator of political awareness, namely, education.

14 We are not, of course, claiming that residents of rural areas read less or watch less television than residents of urban areas, but rather that they are exposed to a less varied and smaller number of communications about public affairs.

15 McClosky, Herbert, Political Inquiry (New York: Macmillan, 1969), pp. 86–7Google Scholar. For items in the inflexibility scale, see Appendix II.

16 For a fuller discussion of the relationship between psychological inflexibility and other personality characteristics as they affect conformity to national norms, see Di Palma, and McClosky, , ‘Personality and Conformity: The Learning of Political Norms’Google Scholar; Crutchfield, R. S., ‘Conformity and Character’. American Psychologist, X (1955), 191–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Di Vesta, Francis and Cox, Dandon. ‘Some Dispositional Correlates of Conformity Behavior’, Journal of Social Psychology, LII (1960), 259–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for related articles see Hovland, C. I. and Janis, I. L., eds, Personality and Persuasibility (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1959)Google Scholar; and McGuire, William, ‘Personality and Susceptibility to Social Influence’, in Borgatta, E. F. and Lambert, W. W., eds, Handbook of Personality Theory and Research (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1968), Chapter 2.Google Scholar

17 370 U.S. 421, 1962.

18 For further information on the construction of these measures, see Appendix III.

19 As a result of this shift, the correlation between sophistication and gay rights among the general public, negligible to begin with, became significant by the end of the campaign. For a fuller discussion of the Briggs campaign, see McClosky, and Zaller, , The American Ethos: Public Support for Capitalism and DemocracyGoogle Scholar, Chapter 8. See also the Poll, California, San Francisco Chronicle, 6 10 1978.Google Scholar

20 Converse, Philip E., ‘The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics’, in Apter, David, ed., Ideology and Discontent (New York: Free Press, 1964), pp. 206–61.Google Scholar

21 Ibid., pp. 234–5.

22 Adorno, T. W., Frankel-Brunswick, Else, Levinson, Daniel J. and Sanford, R. Nevitt, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper, 1950).Google Scholar

23 Hyman, Herbert H. and Sheatsley, Paul B., ‘“The Authoritarian Personality” – A Methodological Critique’, in Christie, R. and Jahoda, M., eds., Studies in the Scope and Method of ‘The Authoritarian Personality’ (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1954), pp. 50–122.Google Scholar

24 Brown, Roger, Social Psychology (New York: Free Press, 1965).Google Scholar

25 The measure of association we have used for measuring consistency is gamma. This coefficient is symmetrical and relatively insensitive to the shape of the distribution. See Weisberg, Herbert F., ‘Models of Statistical Relationship’, American Political Science Review, LXVIII (1974), pp. 1638–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26 Converse, Philip E., ‘Attitudes and Non-Attitudes: Continuation of a Dialogue’, in Tufte, Edward R., The Quantitative Analysis of Social Problems (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1970). pp. 168–89Google Scholar; Achen, Christopher, ‘Mass Political Attitudes and the Survey Response’, American Political Science Review, LXIX (1975), 1218–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Erickson, Robert S., ‘The SRC Panel Data and Mass Political Attitudes’, British Journal of Political Science, IX (1979), 89–114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27 The formula we have used is , where k is the number of items in the scale, and is the average inter-item correlation among items included in the scale. See Nunnally, J. C., Psychometric Theory, 2nd edn (New York: McGraw Hill, 1978).Google Scholar

28 ‘Neither’ and ‘Undecided’ response alternatives were also provided for each item in the democratic values and capitalist values scales.

29 See footnote 28.

30 ‘Neither’ and ‘Undecided’ response alternatives were also provided for all the items in the Inflexibility Scale.

31 The calculation of these percentages has been based on respondents who selected one of the two substantive alternatives.