Matthew Yglesias says:
I only wish the same level of scrutiny were applied to assertions about whether the public is “liberal” or “conservative” where I believe there’s strong circumstantial evidence that many people just don’t understand these terms in the way political and media professionals understand them. For example, when you break these things out by race you find that whites are more “liberal” than blacks, which simply doesn’t describe either voting behavior or views on issues correctly.
I am sympathetic to Matthew Yglesias' point, but looking at the General Social Survey he does seem incorrect in regards to his assertion that whites are more liberal than blacks. Rather, blacks seem a bit more liberal than whites, though not nearly as liberal as their voting for the Democratic party would suggest. But most humans not are very intelligent, and Americans are humans, so there's a good chance that they don't really know what liberal and conservative mean (here my liberal readers will observe that there's been nearly two generations of usage of the term "liberal" as an insult in American politics to the point where the public may be unaware of what liberalism even entails aside from sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll). To see if there is a strong relationship between avowed political ideology and particular policy positions I decided to look at the GSS. I limited the sample to the last 10 years of the GSS, 1998-2008. I focused on the POLVIEWS variable, which asks people their own political ideology, from a spectrum of very liberal to very conservative. I want to focus on those who admit to being rather ideological, so I'll focus on the very liberal and conservative, and those who assert that they're just liberal or conservative without qualifiers. This excludes those who are slightly liberal or conservative, as well as moderates. The sample size then is ~2,000 for liberals, and ~3,000 for conservatives at most most (some of the cross-tabs have way smaller N's as only a subset were asked both sets of questions). Next I want to compare these self-identifications with policy positions which I presume are ideologically polarized. But, I also want to see how the attitudes of liberals and conservatives change by intelligence and education. One assumes that the more intelligent and educated actually have a better coherent sense of their ideological orientation and how that orientation presumably aligns with policy. So I took the WORDSUM variable, which records results on a vocabulary test from to 10, as well as the DEGREE variable which records the highest education attained. I combined WORDSUM results 0-6, which is the bottom 60% of the distribution, and labelled it average. 7-10 is the top 40%, and I termed that intelligent. For education I combined those with no high school diploma all the way to those who had some higher education, but no four year bachelor's degree, as those without a college degree. Obviously the balance have a college degree (inclusive of those who have graduate degrees as well). Here are the results for a range of variables (I've given the variables in caps so you can look them up in the GSS yourself). From left to right the columns go from the average, to the intelligent, to those with no college degree, to those with college degrees. The rows alternate between liberals and conservatives as one goes down the variables.
Note: Recodes: POLVIEWS(r:1-2"Liberal";6-7"Conservative") WORDSUM(r:0-6"Average";7-10"Intelligent") DEGREE(r:0-2"No College";3-4"College")
AverageIntelligentNo College DegreeCollege Degree
ABANYSupports legal right to abortion for any reason
Liberal54735382
Conservative21182121
MARHOMOHomosexuals should have right to marry
Liberal52826085
Conservative15121511
HOMOSEXHomosexual sex not wrong at all
Liberal40724974
Conservative8141014
FEHOMEWomen should take care of home not country (leave running country to men)
Liberal192153
Conservative30132512
SEMIGUNSAllow semi-automatic guns to be sold to public
Liberal15222019
Conservative26272726
SPKRACAllow racist to speak in community
Liberal62816381
Conservative50695572
SPKCOMAllow Communist to speak in community
Liberal62926993
Conservative53795883
RACMARFavor law against racial intermarriage
Liberal102102
Conservative187174
CAPPUNFavor death penalty for murder
Liberal66476434
Conservative78827784
SPHLTHGovernment should spend much more on health care
Liberal5153
Conservative2510
NATFAREGovernment is spending too little on welfare
Liberal29342638
Conservative1911176
NATARMSGovernment is spending too little on military
Liberal1612187
Conservative36403840
NATARTSGovernment is spending too little on arts
Liberal2768
Conservative1416
NATCHLDGovernment is spending too little on childcare assistance
Liberal66676670
Conservative52385030
NATSCIGovernment is spending too little on scientific research
Liberal48554959
Conservative37363635
NATSCIGovernment is spending too little on highways and bridges
Liberal37393835
Conservative44414037
NATRACEGovernment is doing too little to assist blacks
(limited to whites for this question)
Liberal43554258
Conservative20131618
NATEDUCGovernment is doing too little to improve education
Liberal78857887
Conservative63616357
TAXFederal income tax is too high
Liberal67506341
Conservative65706767
