The “L” Word

Abstract

In recent years, the electorate has sorted along ideological lines. Republican identifiers have grown more likely to self-identify as conservatives. Democrats, however, have been slow to embrace the liberal label. And while many Americans are operationally liberal and express support for liberal policy positions, in symbolic terms, the American electorate is much more conservative in nature and appears reluctant to hew to the liberal label. The uneven nature of partisan sorting and the observed symbolic/operational divide have both been linked to Republican efforts at making "liberal" a dirty word, but researchers have yet to offer a direct test of the effects of exposure to anti-liberal rhetoric. In this study, I rectify this shortcoming using the 2004 University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW)/Brigham Young University (BYU) panel study coupled with data on the content of candidates' campaign advertising from the Wisconsin Advertising Project. I find that exposure to anti-liberal campaign messages had a direct effect on evaluations of Democratic candidates, vote intention, and vote choice, but only in senate races. At the same time, self-identified ideology was unmoved by elite efforts at disparaging the liberal label-thereby calling into question simple versions of a common explanation for the existence of conservative Democrats and "conflicted" conservatives.

Bridging Echo Chambers? Understanding Political Partisanship through Semantic Network Analysis

“…r/democrats and r/Republican are relatively similar in the terms of membership size (207k vs 165k) while ideological subreddits such as r/liberal and r/ conservative are more imbalanced (as of this writing, r/liberal has 114k members compared with r/conservative's one million members). This asymmetry could be partially attributable to the idea that "liberal" is sometimes considered a pejorative term in political discourse, while "conservative" doesn't necessarily carry the same negative connotation (Neiheisel, 2016). Left-leaning political discussions may also separate in ways that right-leaning political discussions don't.…”

Examining the Influence of Political Affiliation and Orientation on Political Tolerance

“…Although political liberals constitute the smallest group on the political continuum, support for liberal policies in the United States is much higher (Coggins and Stimson 2017). The discrepancy between liberal identity and support for liberal policies potentially stems from the stigmatization of the term liberal (Neiheisel 2016; Schiffer 2000).…”

“…In addition to divergent ideological perspectives, some Democrats may self-identify as moderate or even conservative because of the growing stigmatization of the term liberal over the past few decades (Coggins and Stimson 2017; Neiheisel 2016). This trend is even more prevalent for southern Democrats (Schiffer 2000).…”

“…This trend is even more prevalent for southern Democrats (Schiffer 2000). Republican voters and politicians have increasingly used the “L word” to denigrate Democrats politically, and in response, Democratic candidates have largely retreated from self-identifying as liberal while campaigning (Neiheisel 2016; Schiffer 2000). Coggins and Stimson (2017) asserted that the liberal label derives its negative connotation from divisive identity politics that focus on issues of race, religion, and feminism despite the popularity of liberal policies such as Medicare and Social Security.…”

“…In this article, we consider the complex interplay of political orientation and partisan identification as equally important concepts by using survey data to investigate how the intersections of orientation and partisanship motivate support for the civil rights of outgroups that have been traditionally marginalized in the United States. Following research suggesting that Democrats are quite diverse in terms of orientation and coalition composition (e.g., Coggins and Stimson 2017; Neiheisel 2016; Schiffer 2000), while Republicans have become far more unified in their policy positions (e.g., Hacker and Pierson 2016; Thomsen 2014), we test the overarching hypothesis that political orientation is strongly associated with political tolerance among Democrats but less so among Republicans.…”