A Short Scale of Economic Conservatism

Abstract

Previous measures of economic conservatism can be considered dated in the wake of the collapse of communist systems and the embrace of free market policies by social democrat political parties, arguably reflecting rejection of many left-Liberal positions. Testing of a traditionally worded 20-item scale of economic values on an Australian sample of 260 indicates poor reliability (alpha = .53), apparently because many items do not reflect contemporary ideological differences. Higher reliability (alpha = .65) is found in a two-factor eight-item scale involving attitudes to political action and social welfare. The short scale correlates significantly with other measures of conservatism (Pearson r with declared political leaning = .26, r with social conservatism .48).

Neoliberal Ideology and the Justification of Inequality in Capitalist Societies: Why Social and Economic Dimensions of Ideology Are Intertwined

“…Correlations are italicized when symbolic and operational measures of ideology are matched in terms of domain specificity. EV = Everett (); FJ = Feldman and Johnston (); HC = Henningham (); IPB = Inbar et al. (); ZB = Zell and Bernstein ().…”

“…Issue‐based ideological preferences were assessed using five different instruments: (1) the Core Domains of Social and Economic Conservatism Scale, which contains four items measuring economic conservatism and three items measuring social conservatism (Feldman & Johnston, ); (2) the Pew Research Center's “Core Issues in American Politics” scale, which is comprised of 12 items (e.g., “The government needs to do more to make health care affordable and accessible”; Zell & Bernstein, ); (3) the Social and Economic Conservatism Scale, which includes five economic and seven socially conservative values (e.g., “Traditional values”; Everett, ); (4) the Political Issue Statements, which is comprised of 10 items measuring political orientation in left‐right ideological space (e.g., “A woman should have the right to choose what to do with her body, even if that means getting an abortion”; Inbar, Pizarro, & Bloom, ); and (5) an adapted 16‐item version of Henningham's (, ) Social and Economic Conservatism scales, which are contemporary versions of the “classic” Wilson and Patterson () scale for measuring liberalism‐conservatism. Scale reliabilities we obtained for Samples 1 and 2 are listed in Table (see Supplementary Materials for a full list of items).…”

The Paranoid Style in American Politics Revisited: An Ideological Asymmetry in Conspiratorial Thinking

“…Issue‐based ideological preferences were assessed using five different instruments: (1) the Core Domains of Social and Economic Conservatism Scale, which contains seven items measuring economic conservatism and three items measuring social conservatism (Feldman & Johnston, 2014); (2) the Pew Research Center's “Core Issues in American Politics” scale, which is comprised of 12‐items (e.g., “The government needs to do more to make health care affordable and accessible”; Zell & Bernstein, 2014); (3) the Social and Economic Conservatism Scale, which includes five economic and seven socially conservative values (e.g., “Traditional values”; Everett, 2013); (4) the Political Issue Statements which is comprised of 10‐items measuring political orientation on the left‐right ideological space (e.g., “A woman should have the right to choose what to do with her body, even if that means getting an abortion”; Inbar, Pizarro, & Bloom, 2009); and (5) an adapted 16‐item version of Henningham's (1996, 1997) Social and Economic Conservatism scales, which are contemporary versions of the “classic” Wilson and Patterson (1968) scale for measuring liberalism‐conservatism (see the online supporting information for the full list of items).…”

The ideological basis of antiscientific attitudes: Effects of authoritarianism, conservatism, religiosity, social dominance, and system justification

“…Issue-based ideological preferences were assessed using five different instruments: (a) the Core Domains of Social and Economic Conservatism Scale, which contains seven items, four measuring economic conservatism and three measuring social conservatism (Feldman & Johnston, 2014); (b) the Core Issues in American Politics Scale, which is comprised of 12 items (e.g., "The government needs to do more to make health care affordable and accessible"; Zell & Bernstein, 2014); (c) the Social and Economic Conservatism Scale, which includes five economic and seven socially conservative items (Everett, 2013); (d) the Political Issue Statements Scale, which is comprised of 10 items measuring political orientation on the left/right ideological space (e.g., "A woman should have the right to choose what to do with her body, even if that means getting an abortion"; Inbar et al, 2009); and (e) an adapted 16-item version of Henningham's (1996Henningham's ( , 1997 Social and Economic Conservatism Scales, which are contemporary versions of the "classic" Wilson and Patterson (1968) scale for measuring liberalism-conservatism (see Azevedo et al, 2019, for the full list of items).…”

“…Results of this analysis revealed that seven of the predictors were significantly related to skepticism about science in general. They were education, religiosity, partisanship, scores on three of the operational measures of ideology (Everett, 2013;Henningham, 1996Henningham, , 1997Zell & Bernstein, 2014), distrust of climate science, and RWA. Model tuning parameters yielding the lowest root mean square error (RMSE) yielded α = .10 and λ = 0.001, indicating a heavier ridge (vs. lasso) penalty.…”