Suchergebnisse

Introduction: Ideology and American foreign policy -- I. Concepts -- Liberals, conservatives, and foreign affairs -- Beyond red and blue: four dimensions of American ideology -- The moral foundations of ideology and international attitudes -- The foreign policy orientations of liberals and conservatives: internationalism, realism/idealism, and nationalism -- Partisan elites and global attitudes: ideology in social context -- II. Cases -- Latin America: liberal and conservative moralities of immigration and foreign aid -- Europe: socialist France, Mother England, Brother Germany, and the E.U. antichrist -- The Middle East: Christian Zionism, the Israel lobby, and the Holy Land -- East Asia: Red China, free Asia, and the Yellow Peril -- International organizations and treaties: blue helmets, black helicopters, and satanic serpents -- Conclusion: Ideology -- why politics does not end at water's edge.

ObjectiveThis study revisits the idea that the American public is moderate or nonideological. In this longstanding view, only informed elites maintain consistent ideologies that constrain their political attitudes and behaviors; the mass public is driven instead by partisan identities that they are socialized into. The study explores whether the public's liberal‐to‐conservative self‐placement is temporally stable, and whether it is predictive of political attitudes when pit against partisanship.MethodsThe study examines data from the 2010 American National Election Survey and the 2008–2012 General Social Survey longitudinal panel.ResultsThe American public today maintains coherent and consistent ideologies that systematically divide them in their sociopolitical attitudes and policy preferences.ConclusionWhile partisanship is a powerful top‐down driver of the American public's attitudes and policy preferences toward overtly partisan issues and behaviors like Obamacare and voting, on broader sociopolitical issues like abortion, ideology is a powerful bottom‐up driver of attitudes.

Based on a 2011 national survey, I argue that while US conservatives feel somewhat cooler toward the East Asian democracies than US liberals do, they feel much cooler toward China. Greater average conservative than liberal prejudice lingers, cooling attitudes toward the "Yellow Peril" of all Asian countries, but communism is a larger source of ideological differences over China. For cultural, social, economic, and political reasons, conservatives feel substantially cooler than liberals toward both communist countries in general and "Red China" in particular. I conclude by suggesting that with gerrymandering and ongoing ideological sorting, these ideological differences over China on Main Street may come to play a greater role in the making of US China policy.