Nathan Kalmoe and Donald Kinder are the authors of Neither Liberal or Conservative: Ideological Innocence in the American Public (University of Chicago Press, 2017). Kalmoe is an assistant professor of political communication at Louisiana State University and Kinder is the Philip E. Converse Distinguished University Professor at the University of Michigan. Neither Liberal or Conservative looks straightly at what we have known in the past about ideology and the formation of ideology.
Kalmoe and Kinder take up the seminal research of Phillip Converse on “ideological innocence.” What they find largely supports this historic finding that Americans are not that ideological. Several decades later, most of the country remains innocent of ideology. With the exception of some highly engaged and informed individuals, partisanship remains the central organizing feature of political life and identification for most Americans.
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The University of Chicago Press Podcast