Why most conservatives are secretly liberals

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 we’re still a “center-right nation.” But whether people call themselves “conservative” isn’t 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. This has been true in nearly every year since 1956, even as the relative liberalism of the public has trended up and down. For decades now there has been a consistent discrepancy between what Ellis and Stimson call symbolic ideology (how we label ourselves) and operational ideology (what we really think about the size of government).

more here http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/03/06/why-most-conservatives-are-secretly-liberals/