No abstract

A criterial referents theory of attitudes was tested cross-culturally by administering a social attitude referents (single words and short phrases) summated-rating scale, suitably "transformed". to 500 graduate students of education in the United States, 470 mature students of psychology in Spain, and 270 students of the social sciences and a stratified random sample of 685 persons in the Netherlands. The theory claims a dualistic (two second-order factors) structure of social attitudes, thus challenging the common assumption of attitude bipolarity, which arises from the notion that differing attitude orientations oppose each other, e. g., conservatism versus liberalism. First-order factor analysis of the correlations among the items and second-order factor analysis of the correlations among the first-order obliquely rotated factors supported the theoretical predictions with certain exceptions. In general, the first-order factors of the referents scales contained only conservatism or only liberalism items; negative loading were mostly low in magnitude. Four similar

There are two "fundamental dimensions of ideological contro versy" in The Netherlands which are stable through the period 1970-85: socio-economic left-right, with egalitarian implications, and libertarianism-authoritarianism with the underlying value of freedom. Both dimensions are "belief systems" based on highly interrelated attitude scales, and both are "sustained" by stable philosophical dimensions: socialism and liberalism for the left-right dimension, conservatism and authoritarianism for the libertarian-authoritarian dimension. The ordering of political parties by means of average scores of their supporters is different on each dimension. Then, obviously, two sets of causal models can be developed, with party preference along each dimension as the dependent variable. The models developed in this study contain social characteristics (age, education, income, class and religion), philosophical dimensions, ideologi cal dimensions and, in addition, left-right and progressive-conservative self-identifications. The left-right vote is best predicted by left-right self- identification followed by a mixture of other determinants of about equal strength: left-right ideological position, socialism, liberalism, conservatism, religion, social class and income. The authoritarian vote is predominantly determined by religion, followed at some distance by left-right self- identification, libertarian-authoritarian ideology, conservatism, socialism, left-right ideological position and social class. Income and liberalism do not play an important role here. Age and educational level have negligible effects as predictors of either vote. The role of ideology as a determinant of the vote in a European context is contrasted with American evidence and the content validity of ideological self-identification in terms of left-right is questioned.

An attempt is made to bridge the gap between the 'theorists' and 'modellists' approaches to the conceptualization of theoretical constructs. The former approach assumes that every theoretical construct has a 'surplus meaning' over and above its operationalization and measurement as a 'concept'. The latter approach denies this: it only accepts 'theoretical constructs' as functions of relations between observations, i.e. measured concepts.This gap can be bridged by explicating the definition of a theoretical construct before making attempts to operationalize and measure it. An explicated definition should cover all relevant aspects (or: facets) of a construct, systematically brought together in an ideal type model. On this basis, operationalization of the construct can be directly linked to model elements, so that any possibly remaining 'surplus value' is made explicit. The distance between theoretical construct and the measured concept can then be made as small as seems feasible; in principle, the distance can be made 'zero'. The manner in which 'conservative ideology' is conceptualized in a longitudinal research project in the Dutch electorate is presented as an example of this strategy.

Abstract. Dekker and Ester's (1987) position regarding working class authoritarianism, using Wright's (1979, 1985) neo‐marxist class‐conceptualization, is challenged. It is shown in replication that Wright's class concepts are only weakly and non‐linearly related to ‘class‐proxies’such as income, wealth, educational level and subjective social class. Thus there is reason for doubt regarding the validity of Wright's class‐concept, which might be partly responsible for the weak associations found with authoritarianism and authoritarian attitudes. Nevertheless, we found that Dekker and Ester's (1987) hypotheses 1 and 2 cannot be rejected: the working class is somewhat more authoritarian than all other classes combined. We maintain that the well‐known relatively strong relationship between educational level and authoritarianism remains of major theoretical and social relevance.