Toward a Comprehensive, Data-Driven Model of American Political Goals: Recognizing the “Values” and “Vices” Within Both Liberalism and Conservativism

Abstract

When a person indicates they are “liberal” or “conservative,” an important part of what they are communicating is their goals for how they would like society to be structured. However, past theories have described these goals in dramatically different fashions, suggesting that either conservativism or liberalism reflects a divisive or unifying goal. To help overcome this impasse, we systematically compared a broad, representative sample of all possible higher-order goals (drawn a previous lexical investigation of more than 1,000 goals) to the political ideology of American adults (total n = 1,588). The results of five studies suggested that proposals from competing theories are all partially correct. Conservativism simultaneously reflects the unifying “value” of Tradition, as well as the divisive “vice” of Elitism; while Liberalism simultaneously reflects the unifying “value” of Inclusiveness, and the divisive “vice” of Rebellion. These results help to integrate proposals from previous competing theories into a single framework.