This is a study on the inclusion of Muslims in liberal democracies in the presence of value conflict. We focus on handshaking controversies that appear to pit gender equality against religious freedom. The possible outcomes seem mutually exclusive: either conservative Muslim minorities must conform to the norms of the majority culture, or non-Muslim majorities must acquiesce to the legitimacy of conservative Muslim ideas. Using a trio of experiments to replicate our results, we demonstrate the efficacy of introducing alternative gestures of respect. Presented with a substitute gesture of respect – placing the ‘hand on heart’ – non-Muslim demands for Muslim conformity drop dramatically. The results of the handshaking experiments call out a general lesson. Thanks to the ingenuity and versatility of cultural customs to signal respect, value conflicts can be open to resolution in everyday encounters without minorities or majorities having to forsake their convictions.

The Ithiel de Sola Pool Award is for work throughout my career—work that I have done with many and with the help of so many more. I thank the committee for this honor and, with it, the opportunity to honor another: Merrill Shanks.

Political scientists often use measures such as the Brief Implicit Association Test (BIAT) and the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP) to gauge hidden or subconscious racial prejudice. However, the validity of these measures has been contested. Using data from the 2008–2009 ANES panel study—the only study we are aware of in which a high-quality, nationally representative sample of respondents took both implicit tests—we show that: (1) although political scientists use the BIAT and the AMP to measure the same thing, the relationship between them is substantively indistinguishable from zero; (2) both measures classify an unlikely proportion of whites as more favorable toward Black Americans than white Americans; and (3) substantial numbers of whites that either measure classifies as free of prejudice openly endorse anti-Black stereotypes. These results have important implications for the use of implicit measures to study racial prejudice in political science.

The purpose of this article is to present a methodology for better gauging the nature and dynamics of social and political attitudes. Starting from a particular view of attitude assessment, we show how computer-assisted interviewing can help transform the survey interview from a passive to an interactive process. Since the ultimate test of a methodological approach is its substantive yield, we shall present both specific measurement procedures and illustrative substantive results. The methodology itself, however, is quite general and readily applied to other substantive areas, thanks both to the generality of the theory of measurement of which it is a part and to the flexibility of the technology in which it is embedded.

Most Americans support liberal policies on the social welfare agenda, the dominant policy cleavage in American politics. Yet a striking feature of the US party system is its tendency to equilibrium. How, then, does the Republican Party minimize defection on the social welfare agenda? The results of this study illustrate a deep ideological asymmetry between the parties. Republican identifiers are ideologically aware and oriented to a degree that far exceeds their Democratic counterparts. Our investigation, which utilizes cross-sectional, longitudinal and experimental data, demonstrates the role of ideological awareness and involvement in the Republicans’ ability to maintain the backing of their supporters even on issues on which the position of the Democratic Party is widely popular. It also exposes two mechanisms, party branding and the use of the status quo as a focal point, that Democrats use to retain or rally support for issues on the social welfare agenda on which the Republican Party’s position is widely popular.

Language rights represent claims of entitlement not only on behalf of individuals, but also on behalf of linguistic communities. As such, they raise deep questions of identity and affinity for Canadians. This study, the first report of the Charter Project, investigates mass and elite attitudes toward language rights in Canada. Beginning with the problem of double standards—whether anglophones and francophones want to affirm certain rights for their own group but not for the other—this study finds that attitudes toward language rights are shaped by an interplay between core values to which citizens subscribe and their concern for the status of the groups, both linguistic and partisan, with which they identify.

Americans appear to be more tolerant of deviant opinions and life-styles now than they were a generation ago. Recent research by Sullivan and his colleagues suggests, however, that this apparent change is largely illusory – a product not of an increase in principled support for tolerance, but rather of shifts in public dislike for, and hence intolerance of, particular political groups. An alternative account of tolerance is proposed which shows that citizen attitudes on issues of tolerance are remarkably consistent – far more so than has been commonly appreciated. In particular, the empirical analysis distinguishes two kinds of consistency – ‘principled’ and ‘situational’. Using log-linear techniques, it demonstrates that substantial numbers of the general public now support a variety of forms of tolerance consistently; and do so, not for reasons peculiar to each, but rather on principle.

The broader implications of the results for the study of public opinion and democratic theory are noted.

This paper began by reviewing several major conceptual and methodological difficulties surrounding the measurement of political alienation/allegiance and proceeded to describe the level and the sources of alienation (as measured by our preliminary indicator, the PAI) within the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area. We defined political alienation as a relatively enduring sense of estrangement from or rejection of the prevailing political system and emphasized the importance of distinguishing this attitude from disapproval of incumbent officeholders.

Citizens do not choose sides on issues like busing or abortion whimsically. They have reasons for their preferences – certainly they can give reasons for them. But how is this possible? Citizens as a rule pay little attention to politics, indeed take only a modest interest in it even during election campaigns when their interest in politics is at its height. And since they pay little attention to politics, it is hardly surprising that they know little about it. Many, in fact, are quite ignorant of basic facts of political life – such as the identity of the party that controls Congress or indeed the name of the congressman who represents them. Which, of course, raises a question of some interest: how do citizens figure out what they think about political issues, given how little they commonly know about them?

To live is to have problems. However the country as a whole fares, the individual has bills to pay, work to do, children to worry about – to mention only a few of the commonplace problems that people face in their daily lives. Commonplace or not, these are problems that people must wrestle with. They are immediate, inescapable, and serious, far more so for most than the ‘large’ issues facing the country. Students of voting have long suspected that such problems may influence political choices, but key questions remain unanswered. Which personal problems are taken to be political and which non-political? Do personal problems have an impact on voting behavior only if they are taken to be political? When and how do personal problems become translated into political choices? In this paper we shall address such questions as these.

Since the seminal studies of Stouffer and McClosky it has become accepted that political elites are markedly more committed to civil liberties and democratic values than is the public at large; so much so that political elites should be recognized, in McClosky's words, as ‘the major repositories of the public conscience and as carriers of the Creed’. The argument of this article is that previous analyses have erred by focusing on the contrast between elites taken as a whole and the mass public. The crucial contrast is not between elites and citizens, but rather between groups of elites that are competing one with another for political power.

Drawing on large-scale surveys of two modern democracies, Canada and the United States, this article demonstrates that differences among elites in support for civil liberties eclipse, both in size and political significance, differences between elites and citizens. The fallacy of democratic elitism, as this study shows, is its indifference to which elites prevail in the electoral competition for power.

Alienation, if sufficiently pervasive and profound, poses obvious dangers to a democratic political order. But obvious dangers are not the only dangers. Indeed, allegiance may pose at least as serious a threat to democratic politics as alienation, as I shall attempt to show in this paper.