The Shifting Sands of Conservatism in US Opinion and Politics

• In Event: Negative Partisanship, Affective Polarization, and Political Divisions

Abstract

Political science research shows that ideological conflicts between Democratic and Republican politicians have historically been organized around a single fiscal factor (e.g., redistributive/size of government
policies), with issues like civil rights and the environment eventually incorporated into this underlying economic dimension. The upshot is that Americans have primarily understood labels like “liberal” and “conservative” in terms of “spend vs. save” considerations. This paper, however, draws on a long line of public opinion research to argue that recent developments in American politics have fundamentally altered this longstanding understanding of ideology among Republicans at both the elite and the mass levels.

Donald Trump’s rise to the top of the Republican Party is the most important cause of this ongoing ideological reshuffling. His rhetoric and policies as a candidate and president rejected the GOP’s “broad conservative ideological consensus” in favor of heterodox positions on government spending and restricting free markets. He also appealed more explicitly to voters’ racial, ethnic, and religious grievances than recent Republican leaders. Conservative politicians and media outlets soon followed suit. This paper’s content analyses, in fact, found that both Fox News and GOP politicians have increasingly emphasized identity-inflected issues (e.g, immigration, critical race theory, gender identity, etc.) over fiscal policies since 2015.

Trump’s influence on the ideological orientations of the mass public has been even more widespread. The paper’s analyses of two large nationally representative panel surveys show that attitudes about race and ethnicity have increasingly displaced economic issues in how Republicans identify ideologically. Or more simply put, Republicans’ identities as conservatives now have much more to do with race/ethnicity and a lot less to do with fiscal policy conservatism than they did back in 2016. Indeed, Trump’s influence on ideology has been so pervasive that the paper concludes with new repeated cross-sectional data showing that conservatism is becoming increasingly synonymous with Trumpism in the minds of voters.

Author

• Michael Tesler, UC Irvine