Value Choices and American Public Opinion

Abstract

Special thanks go to George Rabinowitz and Saundra K. Schneider; this project could not have been completed without their assistance. I would also like to thank Paul Sniderman for making me a part of the 1994 Multi-Investigator Study and for his continued interest in, and support of, this research. I appreciate very much the excellent comments and suggestions that were provided by Stanley Feldman, John Geer, George Marcus, Michael Martinez, David Peterson, Gregory Pettis, David Redlawsk, Darren Schreiber, Marco Steenbergen, Christopher Wlezien, the Politics Group of Nuffield College, Oxford University, the Fall 2003 New York Area Political Psychology Seminar, the University of North Carolina-Duke University American Politics Research Group, and the three anonymous AJPS referees. ABSTRACTIndividual preferences among core values are widely believed to be an important determinant of political attitudes. However, several theoretical perspectives suggest that people experience difficulties making choices among values. This paper uses data from the 1994 Multi-Investigator Study to test for hierarchical structure in citizens' value preferences. The empirical results show that most people make transitive choices among values and that their value preferences have an impact on subsequent issue attitudes. To the extent that citizens exhibit intransitive value choices and/or apparent difficulties in the "translation process" from value preferences to issue attitudes, it is due more to low levels of political sophistication than to the existence of value conflict.This paper examines value choices within the American mass public. The most fundamental reason for doing so lies in the fact that core values are widely believed to be important determinants of subsequent political orientations and behavior. But, a more immediate motivation stems from a contradiction that seems to be developing in the literature on this topic: On the one hand, longstanding social psychological theories about human values stress the importance of value structures-individuals' organized, consistent preferences across a range of separate values. On the other hand, recent political science research suggests that some people may be unwilling or unable to make "real" choices between values. The latter perspective not only calls into question the existence of hierarchical value preferences;It also has important consequences for understanding the nature and sources of American public opinion.At the present time, however, it is not clear which of these two general perspectives provides the most accurate representation of core values.The analysis presented below uses a unique dataset-the 1994 Multi-Investigator Study-to test the existence of value structures within the American public. The empirical evidence to be presented here suggests that most people do, in fact, make consistent, hierarchically-organized, choices across values.And, to the extent that some individuals do not exhibit fully-ordered value preferences, it is due to low levels of political soph...

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