Posted on 03/06/2014 7:50:44 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
A couple months ago, a Gallup poll recorded a small uptick in the percentage of Americans who identify as liberal to 23 percent, or what Gallup, eliding the margin of error in the poll, called a new high. My Post colleague Chris Cillizza wondered if liberal was no longer a dirty word.
We will see. After all, there were far more conservatives in that Gallup poll, which, for some, means were still a center-right nation. But whether people call themselves conservative isnt necessarily that telling in the first place. A recent book by two political scientists shows that liberal may be a dirty word, but liberalism is alive and well even among people who call themselves conservative.
In Ideology in America, Christopher Ellis and James Stimson describe a striking disjuncture. When identifying themselves in a word, Americans choose conservative far more than liberal. In fact they have done so for 70 years, and increasingly so since the early 1960s.
But when it comes to saying what the government should actually do, the public appears more liberal than conservative. Ellis and Stimson gathered 7,000 survey questions dating back to 1956 that asked some variant of whether the government should do more, less, or the same in lots of different policy areas. On average, liberal responses were more common than conservative responses....
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
That’s why I prefer the term “Constitutionalist”. That simplifies the question.
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