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The Measurement of Core Beliefs and Values: The Development of Balanced Socialist/Laissez Faire and Libertarian/Authoritarian Scales

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Anthony Heath ,
Geoffrey Evans  and
Jean Martin
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Extract

It has become clear from national surveys, both in Britain and elsewhere, that the attitudes of the mass public towards social and political issues tend to group together in broadly predictable ways. Analyses of British Election Study data have consistently found that attitudes towards economic issues such as nationalization, income redistribution and government intervention go together and are largely unrelated to attitudes towards moral issues. There are of course variations in the results, depending on the items included for analysis, but it has become apparent that a rather persistent attitudinal structure, at least at the aggregate level, has characterized the British electorate. Similar findings have been reported for the United States.

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Notes and Comments
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , January 1994 , pp. 115 - 132
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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References

1 Heath, A. F., Jowell, R. M. and Curtice, J. K., How Britain Votes (Oxford: Pergamon, 1985)Google Scholar; Heath, A. F., Jowell, R. M., Curtice, J. K., Evans, G. A., Field, J. and Witherspoon, S., Understanding Political Change (Oxford: Pergamon, 1991)Google Scholar; Robertson, D., Class and the British Electorate (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984)Google Scholar; Rose, R. and McAllister, I., Voters Begin to Choose: From Closed Class to Open Elections in Britain (London: Sage, 1986)Google Scholar; Särlvik, B. and Crewe, I., Decade of Dealignment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Studlar, D. T. and McAllister, I., ‘A Changing Political Agenda? The Structure of Political Attitudes in Britain, 1974–87’, International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 4 (1992), 148–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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4 Converse, , p. 211.Google Scholar

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9 Interviewers were issued with 4,560 names and addresses. Subsequently 189 addresses were deemed out-of-scope and the remaining 4,371 addresses constitute the base for calculating the response rate. Full details of the 1989 BSAS are provided in Jowell, R. M., Witherspoon, S. and Brook, L., British Social Attitudes: The 7th Report (Aldershot, Hants: Gower, 1990).Google Scholar

10 Respondents from half the sampling areas used in the 1989 BSAS were intended to constitute the basis of the panel study. It subsequently proved impossible for practical reasons to include the areas in Greater London, and so the panel interviews were conducted in sixty-seven sampling areas. At the end of the original BSAS interview, respondents had been asked whether they were willing to be reinterviewed. Twelve per cent were not willing, and these respondents were excluded from the panel study.

11 See discussions of the role of test-retest reliability in, for example, Carmines, E. G. and Zeller, R. J., Reliability and Validity Assessment (Beverly Hills, Calif: Sage, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Bohrnstedt, G. W., ‘Measurement’, in Rossi, Peter, Wright, James and Anderson, Andy, eds, Handbook of Survey Research (New York: Academic Press, 1983), pp. 69–121.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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13 The items in the two versions were kept unchanged in the second round but the order and distribution of the items in the two booklets was changed in order to check for context effects.

14 In the analyses which follow we have assigned the ‘Don't knows’ to the middle category and have excluded other missing data.

15 Heath, A. F., Evans, G. A., Lalljee, M. G. and Witherspoon, S., ‘The Measurement of Left-Right and Liberal-Authoritarian Values’ (manuscript, Nuffield College (submitted for publication)).Google Scholar

16 For ease of presentation, Table Al and A2 show the results when the factors were limited to three. The unconstrained solutions did not show a substantially different picture. The results shown are those obtained after a varimax rotation. In principle an oblique rotation is to be preferred but for one of the analyses needed for these tables oblimin rotation failed to converge. We have therefore used varimax throughout in order to ensure comparability. In practice, where both could be run, the varimax and oblimin rotations told much the same story.

17 Even after taking account of question direction, there may still be some distinction between the concepts of equality, individualism and government control in the respondents' minds. For example the item on shares of the nation's wealth still loaded on the first factor (albeit not particularly strongly) even when it was worded in a right-wing direction. But it would need a larger number of items with alternative wording directions to determine how distinct these concepts are to the mass public in Britain.

18 Further analysis showed that the effect of question direction was much greater among the less educated respondents.

19 In the second round of panel interviews the mean of the six-item socialism scale was 17.3 (s.d. = 3.85; N = 277) and alpha was 0.67.

20 A LISREL analysis of the six items to test the goodness of fit of the one-dimensional model yielded a X2 of 24.0 with 9 degrees of freedom, goodness of fit index = 0.977. We are grateful to Karl Ashworth for carrying out the LISREL analyses in this Note.

21 In the second round of panel interviews the mean of the six-item libertarian scale was 19.4 (s.d. = 3.16; N = 276) and the alpha was 0.52.

22 The model which postulated correlated errors between the three liberal items yielded X2 of 19.08 with 6 degrees of freedom, goodness of fit index = 0.982.

23 The death sentence question was asked in the same agree/disagree format as the other items. The actual question wordings were, ‘The death penalty is never an appropriate sentence’ (Version Y) and ‘For some crimes, the death penalty is the most appropriate sentence’ (Version Z).

24 Bishop, G., ‘The Effects of Education on Ideological Consistency’, Public Opinion Quarterly, 40 (1976), 337–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25 See in particular the ‘black-white’ model of attitude change developed by Converse in ‘The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics’.

26 Klingeman, , ‘Measuring Ideological Conceptualizations’.Google Scholar

27 There were eleven boxes in the first round and ten in the second round, due to an administrative error.

28 See Butler, D. E. and Stokes, D., Political Change in Britain, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1974)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; but compare Luttbeg, N. R. and Gant, M. M., ‘The Failure of Liberal/Conservative Ideology as a Cognitive Structure’, Public Opinion Quarterly, 49 (1985), 80–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29 LISREL analyses of Inglehart's measures have of course shown much higher stability over time in the underlying values measured (see de Graaf, N. D., Hagenaars, J. and Luijkx, R., ‘Intragenerational Stability of Postmaterialism in the United States, West Germany and the Netherlands’, European Sociological Review, 5 (1989), 183–201)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and we do not wish to claim that the underlying values measured by the libertarian scale are any more stable than are those measured by the postmaterialist values index. The difference in the observed correlations over time for the various measures are, we believe, largely due to the measurement errors associated with each instrument.

30 Class identity has been treated as a five-point scale, namely unprompted middle class, prompted middle class, neither middle nor working class, prompted working class and unprompted working class. For party identity we constructed a scale like that used in much American research, namely strong Conservative, weak Conservative, neither Conservative nor Labour, weak Labour, strong Labour (very and fairly strong responses were combined).

31 Of course, the higher correlations obtained for the Likert scales may be due to their having a greater range of scores than the abstract, class and party identification scales (25 points possible for the six-item Likert scales but 11 for the abstract scale and only 5 for the class and party identification scales). However, even when the Likert scales are condensed into scales of equivalent range to the other measures, they still exhibit higher levels of stability.

32 Luttbeg, and Gant, , ‘The Failure of Liberal/Conservative Ideology as a Cognitive Structure’, p. 91.Google Scholar

33 Years of education are not a good predictor in Britain because of the many changes in the minimum school-leaving age. We have therefore used a variable which measures respondent's highest qualification. People with low education are defined as those with qualifications no higher than CSE grade 2. People with better education are defined as those with CSE grade 1 or above. (A CSE grade 1 is recognized as equivalent to an Ordinary level pass at the General Certificate of Education, which in turn is a prerequisite for continuing one's academic education to Advanced level and thence on to university.)

34 Becker, H. S., Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (New York: The Free Press, 1963).Google Scholar

35 See, for example, Marsh, A., Protest and Political Consciousness (London: Sage, 1977)Google Scholar; Heath, A. F. and Topf, R. G., ‘Political Culture’, in Jowell, R., Witherspoon, S. and Brook, L., eds, British Social Attitudes: The 1987 Report (Aldershot, Hants: Gower, 1987).Google Scholar

36 These analyses were conducted using the LOGIT option within the SPSSX PROBIT procedure. Note that SPSSX multiplies the parameters by 2 and adds 5 to the constant.

37 The 1992 British General Election Study was conducted jointly by Nuffield College, Oxford, and SCPR. It was directed by Anthony Heath, Roger Jowell, John Curtice, Lindsay Brook, Gillian Prior and Bridget Taylor, and was funded by the ESRC (grant Y304253011) and by the Sainsbury Charitable Trusts. For technical details see Brook, L., The 1992 British General Election: Technical Report (London: SCPR, forthcoming).Google Scholar

38 These are measured as follows. The SPSS variable names are given in brackets, and full details of the coding are given in the codebook to the 1992 British General Election Study, which is available from the ESRC Data Archive; class (V905.P): 11 categories following the revised Goldthorpe class schema (see Goldthorpe, John H. and Heath, Anthony, ‘Revised Class Schema 1992’, JUSST working paper no. 13 (Oxford: Nuffield College, 1992)Google Scholar; income (V921): fifteen bands; tenure (TENURE2): five categories; qualifications (HEDQUAL): six ordered categories; age (V915c): years; trade-union membership (V903c): three categories, namely, trade-union member, staff association member, not a member; gender (V915B): two categories, namely male, female; religion (V916): recoded into seven categories, namely no religion, Catholic, Church of England, Presbyterian, Nonconformist, other Christian, other non-Christian; church attendance: six ordered categories.

39 The eta coefficient in analysis of variance is the equivalent to multiple R in an ordinary least squares regression analysis using dummy variables to represent the categorical independent variables.

40 This is also illustrated by a multivariate analysis of the effects of class and qualifications on the values scales, in which we found that the partial association of qualifications with the socialism scale drops to 0.07 (class = 0.26), while the partial association of class with the libertarian scale drops to 0.09 (qualification = 0.27).

41 McClosky, H. and Zaller, J., The American Ethos: Public Attitudes towards Capitalism and Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984).CrossRefGoogle Scholar