Prius Or Pickup?: How the Answers to Four Simple Questions Explain America's Great Divide

by Marc Hetherington

Biopolitics research finds that liberals are different on average from conservatives in the way they react to the world. But the terms “liberal” and “conservative” are more slippery than one might realize. In truth, there are two versions of both categories, one type that is more operational (signifying whether a person values more government taxing and spending, or less of both) and one type that is more symbolic (signifying whether someone values order and tradition, or individual autonomy and the freedom to challenge tradition). The more important of these two versions for most people, the version that defines their political identities, is the second one—the symbolic one. In fact, it is very common for Americans to label themselves symbolically as conservative, but express operational policy preferences that are actually liberal, and vice versa. That is because a staggering percentage of Americans don’t understand what it means to be an operational conservative or liberal. This is an important point that we will return to later, but the upshot for now is that, if researchers like us want to study people’s actual ideologies, we need to be careful, and very specific, about the sorts of questions we ask.