Table 1 Awareness of the Republican Party Being More Conservative than the Democratic Party on Specific Issues, 1972-2000 (in percentages)

Issue and Group	1972	1976	1980	1984	1988	1992	1996	2000
Government Guarantee of Jobs
All Respondents	52	54	57	57	52	59	68	59
Strong Partisans	63	69	61	68	64	68	81	75
Weak/Leaning Partisans	51	53	59	57	52	59	64	56
Independents	32	29	42	31	22	40	39	36
Government Services and Spending
All Respondents			54	67	57	64	73	73
Strong Partisans			63	78	69	72	85	84
Weak/Leaning Partisans			56	68	56	64	71	74
Independents			28	42	25	47	44	38
Government Help for Blacks
All Respondents	41	42	62	55	46		63	56
Strong Partisans	44	53	64	62	60		75	72
Weak/Leaning Partisans	44	42	66	56	46		60	55
Independents	26	24	42	34	15		41	24
Government Health Insurance
All Respondents	35	46			51		68
Strong Partisans	41	58			63		76
Weak/Leaning Partisans	36	46			50		67
Independents	21	27			20		49
Women's Rights
All Respondents	20	23	43		33		52	33
Strong Partisans	23	27	45		40		57	38
Weak/Leaning Partisans	20	23	45		34		53	33
Independents	13	14	34		12		33	16
Abortion8
All Respondents		13	24			60	58	48
Strong Partisans		15	25			65	66	55
Weak/Leaning Partisans		14	25			60	57	47
Independents		8	15			48	35	33

Source: 1972-2000 National Election Studies

Note: Entries are the percentage of respondents who placed both parties on the particular issue and who placed the Republicans to the right of the

Democrats. Percentages in italics are based on placements of candidates when respondents were not asked to place the parties.

^aln 1976, respondents were asked to identify the party more likely to support a constitutional amendment outlawing abortion, rather than to place the

two parties on the NES abortion scale.

abortion, and the percentage of the electorate realizing that the Republicans are more opposed than the Demo­crats to abortion rights was only slightly lower in 1996 than in 1992. These percentages declined somewhat in 2000, perhaps due to George W. Bush's efforts to portray

a more moderate image of the Republican party, or to Al Gore's reputation as a leader of Democratic centrism, or to both. However, the electorate was more aware of party differences and their direction in 2000 than it was in the 1970s on every issue and in the 1980s on most issues.

candidates on those scales. When that is the case, we show, in ital­ics, the percentage of respondents placing the Republican candi­date to the right of the Democratic candidate on the issue. Based on an analysis of the twenty-eight instances from 1972 through 2000 in which the NES asked respondents to place both the two parties and their presidential candidates on the same issue, we are confident that the candidate-based measures produce estimates of awareness of party differences that are very similar to those that would be produced by party-based measures. The average correla­tion between the party-based measure and the candidate-based measure of awareness over those twenty-eight cases is .64 and the

average correlation for 1992 through 2000, the years where we have to turn to candidate-based measures, is .66. The difference between the percentage of respondents placing parties and candidates cor­rectly was small (an average of four percentage points) and not at all systematic in direction. In the twenty-eight cases, there were thirteen instances in which a higher percentage of respondents provided a correct relative placement of candidates than a correct relative placement of parties, fourteen instances in which more re­spondents correctly placed the parties than correctly placed the candidates, and one instance in which the exact same percentage of respondents correctly placed the parties and candidates.

CONFLICT EXTENSION IN THE U. S. ELECTORATE

791

This growth in awareness of party differences on multiple issue agendas should increase the proportion of party identifiers who move their own views toward the uniformly liberal or conservative stands of party elites. However, because the response should be limited to aware party identifiers, we should still observe a multidi­mensional issue space, but with a growing level of mass party polarization on those dimensions.⁵ To test this hy­pothesis, we first assess whether attitudes on racial, cul­tural, and social welfare issues form separate dimensions or combine to produce a single issue dimension and if the dimensionality of mass issue attitudes has changed over time. To that end, we conduct confirmatory factor analyses of all of the racial, social welfare, and cultural is­sues in all of the presidential-year NES surveys that con­tained questions about all three policy agendas: those from 1972 to 2000.⁶

We estimated three different measurement models in each year: one with all of the issues loading on a single latent variable, one with all of the social welfare and ra­cial issues loading on a single dimension and the cultural issues forming a separate dimension, and one with racial, social welfare, and cultural issues all loading on separate

⁵ The degree to which the mass response to elite unidimensionality and polarization is limited depends in part on whether the size of the group most likely to exhibit that response—strong party iden­tifiers who are aware of party polarization on multiple issue di­mensions—has become a larger part of the electorate over time. From 1972 to 2000 the percentage of strong party identifiers in­creased from 25.4 to 30.6; the percentage of weak partisans and in­dependents who lean toward a party declined from 61.3 to 58.6; and the percentage of independents who do not lean toward either party declined very slightly, from 13.3 to 10.8. The percentage of the electorate that identifies with a party and is aware of party dif­ferences on all three issue agendas (measured by awareness on gov­ernment responsibility to provide jobs, government help for blacks, and women's rights) exhibited greater change, increasing from 13.7 in 1972 to 34.4 in 1996, then declining to 22.5 in 2000. The percentage of the electorate made up by strong party identifi­ers who are aware of party differences on all three agendas in­creased from 4.3 in 1972 to 14.7 in 1996, then declined to 9.8 in 2000. So, there has been a noticeable increase in the size of the group most likely to respond to elite-level developments. However, that group remains a small proportion of the electorate, justifying our expectation of a limited mass response.

⁶We do not exclude missing values from our analyses. We estimate our models using Amos 4.0, which computes full information maximum likelihood (FIML) estimates even in the presence of missing data (Andersen 1957). Wothke and Arbuckle (1996) de­scribe the FIML procedure used by Amos and show that the esti­mates produced by it are more consistent and efficient than those produced by methods using pairwise or listwise deletion of miss­ing observations. The specific issue questions used vary from year to year because NES did not ask the same set of questions in each survey. This makes it more difficult to compare results across years, but was necessary in order to extend the analysis back to 1972. Subsequent analysis avoids this problem by shortening the time frame.

latent variables.⁷ To address the question of dimensional­ity, we turn to the chi-square difference test, which is the difference between the chi-square test of overall fit for a model with more latent factors and that for a model with fewer latent factors. This difference itself follows the chi-square distribution with degrees of freedom equal to the difference in the degrees of freedom between the more and less restricted models and indicates whether the model with more factors explains a significantly larger proportion of the variance in the observed indicators than does the model with fewer factors (Kline 1998). In the interests of space, we present, in Table 2, the full re­sults of these analyses only for 1972 and 2000.

In both years, a three-factor solution captures do­mestic issue attitudes better than does a one- or two-fac­tor solution. The indicators of attitudes on cultural issues like abortion and women's rights load much more strongly on their own factor than they do on a single fac­tor with racial and social welfare attitudes. In 1972, the standardized loadings for social welfare attitudes are also stronger on a separate factor than in the single-factor model. In 2000, both social welfare and racial attitudes load somewhat more strongly on their own separate fac­tors than they do on a single factor. Most importantly, the chi-square tests of the difference in the goodness of fit between the three-factor solution and both the one-and two-factor solutions reach very high levels of statisti­cal significance (p<.0001) in both years. That is also true of the chi-square difference tests in every year between 1972 and 2000.⁸ It is clear that the issue space of the mass public has not come to parallel the unidimensional structure displayed by party elites. Mass policy prefer­ences have been and continue to be multidimensional.

⁷For each model, we take into account measurement error in each observed indicator, and when there is more than one latent vari­able, we assume that each one covaries with every other latent vari­able. To provide a scale for the latent variables, we constrain the factor loading for one observed indicator to be equal to one. For the single-factor model, that indicator is attitude toward govern­ment responsibility to ensure jobs and a good standard of living. For the two-factor model, we set to one the loadings of the govern­ment ensuring jobs indicator on the social welfare factor and the abortion indicator on the cultural factor. For the three-factor model, we set to one the loadings of the government help for blacks indicator on the racial factor, the government ensuring jobs indicator on the social welfare factor, and the abortion indicator on the cultural factor. All observed indicators are coded to range from-l (most liberal) to 1 (most conservative).

⁸ The chi-square difference test between the three-factor and one-factor solutions is 530.83 in 1976, 359.21 in 1980, 492.68 in 1984, 731.81 in 1988, 3,347.19 in 1992, and 736.64 in 1996. The chi-square difference test between the three-factor and two-factor so­lutions is 126.46 in 1976,105.10 in 1980,203.22 in 1984,424.33 in 1988, 1,010.28 in 1992, and 256.85. The factor loadings for 1976-1996 are available from the authors upon request.

792

GEOFFREY С. LAYMAN AND THOMAS M. CARSEY