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Senior Citizens Most Dominant in 'Populist"
Political Camp
Pew Research
Center looks at American political ideology
April 13, 2006 – A survey by the Pew Research
Center finds "many Americans simply do not fit well within either the
conservative or the liberal ideological camps, instead falling into one
of the two other important U.S. political traditions - libertarian and
populist." Senior citizens, they found, were more dominant in the
populist camp than those of liberals, conservatives, libertarians or
ambivalents.
Based on their analysis, almost six-in-ten
Americans fall into one of the four ideological groups; 18% are
liberals, 15% are conservatives, 16% are populists, and 9% are
libertarians. The remainder included people with a mixture of views, or
who declined to offer opinions on several of the six questions in the
test; this large non-ideological group (42%) is labeled the "ambivalents."
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"But while there is little question that U.S.
politics have become more polarized in recent years, the red-blue
political shorthand is far from adequate to describe the full spectrum
of Americans' political views," according to the authors.
"Judging by their opinions on a number of issues,
many Americans simply do not fit well within either the conservative or
the liberal ideological camps, instead falling into one of the two other
important U.S. political traditions - libertarian and populist - or
defying attempts to pigeon-hole them."
"Americans espousing a 'libertarian' ideology
oppose government regulation in both the economic and the social
spheres. 'Populists,' by contrast, favor an active role for government
in both the economic and the social spheres. Still more Americans are
distinctively non-ideological in their political outlook, and so don't
fit neatly into any of the four ideological camps," they say.
Using data from a December 2004 Pew Research Center
survey of 2,000 people, the authors of the study looked at a range of
questions that tap opinions in both the economic and the social issue
spheres, and chose three questions from each category. In the economic
sphere, they picked questions about government regulation, government's
role in providing health insurance, and the creation of private accounts
in Social Security. In the social sphere, they chose questions about gay
marriage, banning books with "dangerous ideas" from school libraries,
and the role of government in promoting morality.
People were sorted into the four categories based
on the combination of socially liberal (or conservative) and
economically liberal (or conservative) answers they gave. To be included
in one of the four groups, a person needed to provide at least two
answers consistent with either the social or economic dimension and at
least one consistent answer in the other dimension - while also giving
no more than one inconsistent answer in each dimension.
"In other words, liberals tended to give
consistently liberal responses to the six questions we chose, while
conservatives gave consistently conservative responses," explain authors
Scott Keeter and Greg Smith.
"Populists, by contrast, gave conservative
responses to the social issue questions but liberal responses to the
economics questions. Libertarians took the opposite approach, giving
conservative responses to the economic questions and liberal responses
in the social issue sphere."
|
This
shows the composition of the ideologies by % by gender and age |
|
|
All |
Libertarians |
Conservatives |
Ambivalents |
Liberals |
Populists |
|
|
% |
% |
% |
% |
% |
% |
|
Males |
48 |
59 |
51 |
46 |
47 |
46 |
|
Females |
52 |
41 |
49 |
54 |
53 |
54 |
|
AGE |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
18-29 |
21 |
33 |
15 |
22 |
25 |
14 |
|
30-49 |
39 |
36 |
44 |
38 |
42 |
39 |
|
50-64 |
22 |
21 |
23 |
22 |
22 |
23 |
|
65+ |
16 |
9 |
17 |
16 |
11 |
23 |
While dividing the public into liberal and
conservative camps may be useful for helping to simplify and understand
American politics, this analysis shows that most Americans defy such
easy categorization.
Only about a third of the public holds consistently
liberal (18%) or consistently conservative (15%) opinions on political
issues. Nearly one-in-four Americans are ideologically consistent in
their outlook, but don't fit the liberal or conservative labels (9% are
libertarians who consistently oppose an active government in both the
economic and the conservative spheres, and 16% are populists who
consistently favor an active role for government). And the large
plurality of Americans (42%) are in the ambivalent middle, and do not
hold ideologically consistent views at all.
The analysis, "In Search of Ideologues in America,"
is by Scott Keeter, Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, and
Greg Smith, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
Their analysis goes into details of the ideological
groups, including more on the demographics.
To read the complete report –
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