Public Attitudes Toward Church and State by Clyde Wilcox & Ted G. Jelen

Author:Clyde Wilcox & Ted G. Jelen [Wilcox, Clyde & Jelen, Ted G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781315485478
Google: zMMYDQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-09-16T12:56:55+00:00

The Structuring of Church—State Attitudes

Research on public opinion has generally shown that the public is not especially consistent in its opinions. Philip Converse (1964) established this lack of horizontal constraint (i.e., connections between opinions at the same level of generality) in the mass public, and although a variety of later studies have offered revisionist interpretations, there is general consensus among political scientists and sociologists that individual attitudes are not highly correlated in the mass public (Erikson, Luttbeg, and Tedin 1991).

Yet later research has also shown evidence of a surprising level of vertical constraint (i.e., connections between abstract principles and concrete issue positions) among the mass public (Conover and Feldman 1984; Hurwitz and Peffley 1987). For example, in the foreignpolicy domain, Hurwitz and Peffley reported that "core values ... are important determinants of individuals' preferences across a wide range of specific policies" (1987,1113—14).

Vertical constraint arises from connections between abstract values and orientations and concrete-issue positions. For a few citizens, this constraint arises from a conscious attempt to apply their abstract values to political issues. Yet most citizens with constrained belief systems have not reasoned through the logic of the connection for themselves. Instead, political and social elites create packages of positions and communicate them to their followers. Various political and social groups endorse packages of issues that may or may not have logical links between abstract and concrete elements. Members of these groups learn to support the issue package of their group through socialization.

Discussions of the sophistication and constraint of the American public generally resemble arguments about the amount of Starbucks coffee in a mug. For some, it is interesting just how much coffee actually is in the mug while for others it is striking just how much of the mug is empty. Most empirical investigations of the structuring of public opinion find that the public does appear to distinguish between different types of issues, but many Americans hold packages of opinions that political scientists find to be inconsistent.

If the public is responding randomly to questions of religious separation, then we would expect very low correlations among responses to these items. To determine the level of horizontal and vertical constraint, we calculated gamma correlations between the items measuring abstract establishment orientations and concrete applications and among the various concrete questions. The results suggest that there is appreciable horizontal structuring to public sentiments on establishment questions.

In both surveys, the correlations are high for most questions. Only the question on Buddhist chaplains did not fit with the other concrete applications in the Williamsburg Charter data, doubtlessly because of religious particularism among Christians.4 Although many Christians see Judaism as a cognate religious tradition (and Jews as the chosen people of their God), Buddhism is probably perceived as part of a larger set of "other" religious traditions.

For respondents to the Williamsburg Charter survey, the average gamma correlation between the various concrete establishment questions (excluding funding for Buddhist chaplains) listed in Table 4.1 was a substantial .48. The average correlation between the concrete applications and the abstract items was substantially lower—.

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