As we have seen, the conservative label is popular among all types of citizens, regardless of whether they hold many, some, or no conservative policy views. But it is especially popular among those who hold conservative views on issues related to “culture” and traditional morality. Our task in this chapter is to understand the reasons behind the disproportionately strong connection between cultural preferences and conservative self-identification. The answer, as we will see, is grounded only tangentially and incidentally in the politics of abortion, gay marriage, or any of the other cultural conflicts that divide Democratic and Republican elites.

Citizens who are operationally conservative on cultural issues and operationally liberal on economic ones are often called “populists.” Many citizens – nearly one in four in our GSS sample – hold this “populist” combination of views, combining left-leaning preferences on economic and scope of government concerns with right of center cultural views.

There is, of course, nothing logically wrong with holding this particular combination of views. Aside from the current structure of political conflict in the United States, there is no a priori reason why, for example, support for lower levels of social spending should be connected to opposition to gay marriage. But the strong draw of the “conservative” label for these citizens poses a problem for understanding the nature of ideological identification in American politics.