Research Note
Culture war of the war of the labels?
For many years now the media have reported an escalating “culture war.”
But sociologists have found little evidence that Americans have become more widely
divided in their social views. Paul DiMaggio and his colleagues reported in the
1996 American Journal of Sociology that on most social issues Americans were no
more polarized in the 1990s than they were in the prior decade or two. How can
that be reconciled with the media coverage of an increasingly divisive culture
war?
Alan Miller and John Hoffman (Social Forces, December 1999) suggest one
answer. Using the General Social Survey’s quarter-century of polls, they
find that since the 1970s, the labels “liberal” and “conservative”
have become more polarized. Americans belonging to fundamentalist Protestant denominations
increasingly described themselves as “conservatives” and those belonging
to modernist denominations increasingly described themselves as “liberals”
— even though the differences between the two groups on social issues had
not changed. In the public debates and the media coverage, then, the tags, liberal
and conservative, have lined up more closely with positions on issues such as
church and state. Miller and Hoffman’s work implies that Americans have increasingly
used these words as battle flags, even if they did not really disagree any more
in the 1990s than they did before.
Reprinted from Contexts: Understanding People in their Social Worlds, Vol.
1, No. 1, 2002. © Copyright by the American
Sociological Association.