Why do new issues arise in the conflict between parties? What hap-
pens to them when they do? And how many dimensions structure public
opinion in American politics? These are the questions for this paper. It will
weave together the three questions and argue that they are highly related
facets of a set of other questions about the nature of issue spaces in two-party
politics. Then I turn to partially related questions about the mismatch of
ideology as organized preferences and ideology as self identification. I begin
with theory.
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The Issue Evolution Theory of Issue Alignment
A large and complex society has immense possibilities for producing conflicts
over public policy.
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Every time a diverse and dynamic economy rubs against
the public domain it generates issues for the public order. In principal the
number of public issues is almost boundless. While one might imagine an
administrative structure that could deal with almost boundless controver-
sies, for example, the whole rule-making and rule-enforcing structure of all
the administrative agencies of the federal government, it is hard to imagine
a political structure that deals with numerous unrelated issues.
Politics has limits. If we conceive it in democratic terms as a dia-
logue between voters and government, then the channel capacity of that
dialogue has stark constraints. A citizenry that is mainly not interested in
public life—which pretty much has to be the case if that same citizenry is
productively employed doing something else—can not ponder a long list of
controversies. Legislatures can deal in hundreds of issues at most. There
are not enough days in the calendar for thousands or tens of thousands or
more.
But more than all these, the central mechanism for deciding public
controversies, the election, is an extraordinary issue bottleneck. The number
of things that can be talked about in a campaign is small (if that talk has
1
This paper, the opposite of the customary scenario in which ideas are tried out in
papers and eventually become articles or chapters, is a mildly revised version of what is
in the first instance Chapter 3 of my book, Tides of Consent: How Opinion Movements
Shape American Politics, currently under review. The book is written for general readers
and thus the paper will not have the familiar flavor of an academic exercise.
2
This argument builds upon a joint effort with Ted Carmines in our 1989 book, Issue
Evolution: Race and the Transformation of American Politics. The theory has been
extended to cover the abortion controversy by Greg Adams (1997) and to women’ rights
by Christina Wolbrecht (2000). Some elements are new in this treatment.
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Convention