What are the public opinion consequences when public policy moves in a more liberal or conservative direction? The accepted wisdom on ideology in public opinion is that it is largely ephemeral for most people. While this is undoubtedly true, it is also possible that the relative salience of ideology could vary over time. As ideological distinctions become more important in political debate, ideology itself may come to mean more to the mass public. In addition, while ideology may be a nebulous concept for individuals to grasp, perhaps on average it is sensitive to shifts in public policy.

This paper represents an initial investigation of these questions, with an emphasis on the first question. It finds—tentatively—that as Congress and the President produce more major legislation that is polarized along ideological lines, people increasingly have ideologies, and those who have ideologies are increasingly polarized towards the ends of the scale.

Prepared for delivery at the Colloquium on American Politics, October 31, 2005

Recent successful tests of the Theater High-Altitude Air Defense System (THAAD) and the Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle (EKV) against simulated incoming ballistic missiles have again thrust the issue of ballistic missile defense (BMD) into the policy spotlight. Scholars have typically included defense spending in studies of distributive politics. This paper studies the determinants of ballistic missile policy in Congress, distinguishing between the public sphere of floor voting and less-visible activism as measures of policy support. Many theories exist that purport to explain support for defense projects, yet few of them distinguish between different kinds of support. This paper advances the theory that funding support in Congress cannot be easily measured, and that voting is expected to show signs of rigid partisanship while cosponsorship–a better measure of true policy activism–reflects more nuanced influences. This theory is then tested against the data on Congress in the 1990s.

There are numerous models predicting the partisan distribution of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives using national-level variables. The partisan distribution in Congress is simply an aggregation of 435 separate elections. This paper is an attempt to formulate measures of differential partisan vulnerability in elections from individual election results. The measures constructed are compared to models in the literature. Findings indicate that either the measures are not indicative of the exposure thesis or that, similar to the literature on sociotropic versus “pocketbook” economic voting, the district-level causal mechanism is complex and unclear.

What are the public opinion consequences when public policy moves in a more liberal or conservative direction? The accepted wisdom on ideology in public opinion is that it is largely ephemeral for most people. While this is undoubtedly true, it is also possible that the relative salience of ideology could vary over time. As ideological distinctions become more important in political debate, ideology itself may come to mean more to the mass public. In addition, while ideology may be a nebulous concept for individuals to grasp, perhaps on average it is sensitive to shifts in public policy. This paper represents an initial investigation of the these questions, with an emphasis on the first question. It finds—tentatively—that as Congress and the President produce more major legislation that is polarized along ideological lines, people increasingly have ideologies, and those who have ideologies are increasingly polarized towards the ends of the scale.