On Libertarians and Tea Party supporters
A colleague at ACC and I have been conversing via a
departmental Google+ site about the Tea Party and the positions of its members
on social issues. We agree that Tea Party members are economic conservatives
and that economic issues are most important to them; however, we disagree on
whether Tea Party supporters are conservative on social issues (my position) or
that many of them are liberal on social issues (and thus libertarians), which
is his position. I am familiar with Abramowitz’s argument that Tea Party
supporters are conservative on both economic and social issues and a similar
finding by the Pew Center study,
which states that “In addition to adopting a conservative approach to the
economy, Tea Party supporters also tend to take socially conservative positions
on abortion and same-sex marriage.”
My colleague did not provide the basis for his belief, but I
subsequently found the following sources, which support his position. David
Kirby and Emily Ekins wrote a report
for the Cato Institute that claims that one-half of Tea Party supporters are
libertarians. Emily Ekins had made a similar claim in an earlier working paper. David Kirby had also collaborated with David
Boaz on a Cato Policy Analysis that considered the voting behavior of libertarians. The
Boaz and Kirby policy analysis also provides the framework for their typology
of ideologies, which is from Maddox and Lilie’s Beyond Liberal and Conservative: Reassessing the Political Spectrum (1984),
which greatly influenced my ideas about ideologies in the United
States.
So, do these studies actually substantiate their claim that
one-half of Tea Party supporters are libertarian ideologically (that is, economically
conservative but socially liberal)? By their measure of what constitutes a
libertarian, they come close to substantiating their claim. But the rub is that
their measure of libertarianism is very lax. In fact, I would contend that
because of their methodology, their results are flawed. Here’s what I mean. By
definition, an ideology involves a set of consistent and interrelated attitudes
on a particular public policy dimension. Thus, any measure of ideology should
include several questions on a particular dimension of public policy. Maddox
and Lilie, for example, used three questions relating to government’s economic
role and three questions relating to government’s social role to determine a
person’s ideology. In most of the surveys that Kirby and Ekins use, they
consider only one question relating to the social role of government. How can
consistency be demonstrated using only one question? Second, that one question
is whether government has a role in promoting moral values or not. This
question is highly abstract. In only one survey do they use a specific question
about a social issue, and the so-called “liberal” response on same-sex
relationships is whether civil unions—not marriage—should be permitted for
same-sex couples. In American Grace: How Religion
Divides and Unites Us, Putnam and Campbell note that two issues are most
important to the Religious Right: abortion and same-sex marriage. These issues with
whether one supports same-sex marriage and a women’s right to choose an
abortion should have been used to determine whether there is a 50/50 split
between libertarians and conservatives among Tea Party supporters. I contend
that the so-called libertarians in the Tea Party are not really “liberal” on
social issues; they are, by the most generous standards, somewhat less
conservative on the social issues. Thus, they are not truly libertarian.
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