It turns out there is a weak relationship between how much a person identifies as a conservative or liberal and how conservative or liberal their views actually are; in both cases it’s about a 0.25 correlation, which is a lot lower than the perfect correlation many of us imagine. One reason policy is not the true driver of political disagreement is most people don’t have very strong views about policy unless they have been pushed to do so. We are operating in groups, not in policy white papers. This strikes me as a real blind spot for many progressives.
Yes! How have I never heard of this before??
