When it comes to the role of government (particularly its economic role), Republicans are supposedly the small government guys and Democrats the big government guys. In practice, we see that their voting records (or perhaps the size of government as a % of GDP under their watch) refute that. Though Republicans are outspoken against programs like socialized healthcare, they support increases in military spending, subsidies for corporations, etc. In other words, both parties are for big government: each just supports wealth redistribution for the benefit of different interest groups.

So what about the voters? We do live in what is supposedly a representative democracy, so assuming the system is “working” to any degree, the votes of the representatives should reflect in some manner the beliefs of the voters, right?

Here’s a little research I’ve recycled to explore that. The data is pulled from the 2004 National Election Survey. Here are two hypotheses, evaluated by the data, which are indicative of a general atmosphere of vague ideological definitions and, of course, fundamental similarities between both Democrats and Republicans in America.

Hypothesis 1: Voters registered as Republicans were more likely to consider themselves conservative, and voters registered as Democrats were more likely to consider themselves liberal on a Liberal/Conservative self-placement 7-point scale.

Though this seems like an intuitive hypothesis, it is important to test it and find some sort of relationship between party identities and some other, nonspecific scale. This is necessary to observe the relationships between party and particular issues that may act independently of the liberal/conservative placement. With a response of “4” being middle of the road, “1” being extremely liberal, and “7” being extremely conservative, 76% of registered Republicans chose “5” or higher, while 47.2% of registered Democrats chose “3” or lower. Given this information, the first conclusion to draw is that Republicans are more committed to conservatism than Democrats are to liberalism. Democrats had a higher percentage of “4” responses (35 to 19.4 percent for Republicans), and scores of “5” or higher than the Republicans had scores of “3” or lower. That is, 17.3% of Democrats were conservative as opposed to 4.6% of Republicans who were liberal. Independents were approximately evenly distributed, with 43.8% of its constituency at “middle-of-the-road.” The entire sample yielded 41.6% “5” or higher, 25.2% “3” or lower, and 33.2% “4” responses.

The implications of these numbers, of course, depends on the personal definitions (or feelings toward) the terms for each respondent. Generally, we can say that Americans in the aggregate consider themselves to be moderate, but leaning conservative. More investigation is needed, however, in order to glean the actual beliefs of each respondent.

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