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Analyzing and Predicting Hypocrisy in the Electorate

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Hypocrisy in American Political Attitudes

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Abstract

In three studies of the American electorate, I utilize every available metric in the American National Election Studies data since 1990 to explore what, exactly, has been and continues to be associated with and predictive of attitudinal hypocrisy of several different types: individual hypocrisy “scores,” overall hypocrisy, and total horizontal constraint—operationalized here as its inverse of “logical anti-constraint.” As hypothesized, traditionalist Christian religiosity, racial resentment, and egalitarianism have strong and robust effects, especially for social issues; while measures of sophistication are limited in their explanatory power, at best. The results, altogether, paint a contextualized, and unfortunately more convoluted, portrait of what the EPDAM’s central expectations are.

If you know the position a person takes on taxes, you can tell their whole philosophy. The tax code, once you get to know it, embodies all the essence of life: greed, politics, power, goodness, charity.

—Sheldon Cohen (Birnbaum & Murray, 1987, p. 289)

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  1. Political Science, St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota, USA

    Timothy P. Collins

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Collins, T.P. (2018). Analyzing and Predicting Hypocrisy in the Electorate. In: Hypocrisy in American Political Attitudes. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54012-2_5

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