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Volume Number

54

Issue Number

1

Abstract

The ability of the American electorate to understand, identify with, and apply ideological terms has long been criticized and underestimated by political scientists. This has largely occurred due to an insistence on traditional conceptualizations of ideological terms, such as “liberal” and “conservative,” in the face of an ideologically evolving electorate. While American citizens are displaying a growing political interest in social issues, research tasked with quantifying and explaining these developments lags behind. This project seeks to offer a new perspective of how ideology operates and is understood by the electorate in-practice, building on recent findings that suggest that social issues are increasing in importance for how people think about politics. After conducting an analysis of the importance of several issue-position variables for how people identified ideologically during the 2020 election, results showed that issues like abortion and immigration—in combination with other factors, such as consumption of political news and identification with evangelical Christianity—influenced people’s ideological identifications more than traditional issues like the size of government. While the implications of these findings are limited due to the representability of the model and its correlation values, the results suggest that particular social issues were primary factors in how people identified ideologically in the 2020 election.

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