JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This content downloaded from 137.Butler and Stokes' authoritative analysis of the British electorate concluded that in general voters' political attitudes were poorly formed and, in consequence, unstable and inconsistent. This paper re-examines this question by developing and evaluating multiple-item scales of two core dimensions of mass political beliefs: left-right and libertarian-authoritarian values. The scales are shown to have respectable levels of internal consistency, high levels of stability over a one-year period, and to be useful predictors of support for political parties. In these respects they compare favourably with other commonly used indicators of political attitudes, values and ideology (left-right self-placement, postmaterialism and attitudes to nationalization). This superiority applies across different levels of political involvement. Contrary to the conclusions of earlier research into mass political ideology in Britain, therefore, it is contended that in general the electorate has meaningful political beliefs. Moreover, as the scales developed in this research form part of the British and Northern Irish Social Attitudes Series and recent British Election Studies, they provide an important resource for further studies of political culture in the UK. IN'I'RODUC'I'IONTraditional approaches to attitude measurement in public opinion surveys and election studies have typically involved a single forced-choice question or a short battery on each topic. The latter are often constructed from a more or less ad hoc combination of items included in the surveys. Even where questions have been designed to provide multiple indicator measures of political attitudes, they have focused on contemporary political issues rather than underlying dimensions of ideology and values. Consequently, the selection of attitude items has not usually been directed towards the construction of reliable and valid scales of central political beliefs, but rather towards topicality (for an exception see Feldman 1988).An alternative approach has focused upon respondents' judgments of the meaning of abstract terms such as 'left-right' or 'liberal-conservative', often with the use of visual self-placement scales. Again, however, these approaches are flawed in that they assume high levels of sophistication Psrit.Jtzl. OJSoc. Volutneno.47 1.s5ue rlo. I Marcll /996 1K4iNN()()()7-1315 (C)I.on(lonzichool oJl:cotzomic.s 1996 This content downloaded from 137.

No abstract

It has been suggested that unconditional respect for persons, i.e. respect that is due to everyone simply as a function of their being persons, is the most fundamental kind of respect. Showing unconditional respect towards someone involves recognizing their integrity as a person and their status as an autonomous rational actor. This idea is a cornerstone of much moral, social and political theory. While the idea implicitly underlies some contemporary psychological work on respect, for the most part this fundamental moral orientation has been neglected in psychology. The concept needs clear explication and measurement if its explanatory and predictive value is to be fully realised. This paper will explore the concept of unconditional respect, describe a scale for measuring individual differences in this attitude, and then go on to position unconditional respect, both conceptually and empirically, amongst other relevant social psychological constructs such as Social Dominance Orientation, Right-Wing Authoritarianism, Empathy and Perspective-taking. We then provide some evidence on, as well as speculation about, the role of unconditional respect in interpersonal and intergroup relations.

The New Age has been reported to be an exemplary religion of modernity, that emphasizes the importance of autonomy and self-development. Attempts to establish whether New Age ideas and practices were oriented toward self-transcendence or if, instead, they reinforced secular individualistic values and behaviors have become a central point of debate among researchers. In order to bring some new light to this debate we compared New Age with Roman Catholic and atheist/agnostic participants on a battery of social-psychological measures, including values, self-concepts, and individualism/collectivism. Results indicate that New Age individuals adopt an individualist outlook similar to that of nonreligious people, but also define themselves using a set of abstract holistic self-concepts, show avoidance of competitive goals, and stress values of universalism. We call this pattern "holistic individualism" for its fusion of an individualistic value orientation with highly abstract holistic perceptions of the self.

Investigated the relationship between social representations, intergroup causal attributions and the search for a positive social identity in two rival groups fromResults are discussed in terms of the influence of social representations on both causal attributions and intergroup differentiation; the existence of intergroup biases in achievement attributions; and the different modes of differentiation chosen by the different status groups. Social Identity Theory is seen as a valuable framework with which to consider these findings.