Values Shape Voter Policy Views as Much as Party Labels

Background: This article asks which long-standing predispositions actually move voters' policy attitudes: core political values or more commonly cited anchors like partisanship and symbolic ideology. It focuses on two specific value orientations—traditionalist and egalitarian—and asks whether these values lead voters to change their issue stances over time, including on new issues that emerge in public debate.

Methods: The article tests these questions using six panel surveys drawn from the American National Election Studies (ANES) and the General Social Survey (GSS) spanning 1992–2020. The analysis traces within-voter change — not just cross-sectional correlations — and reports results across multiple model specifications to assess robustness.

• Data: Six ANES and GSS panel waves (1992–2020).
• Key independent variables: traditionalist and egalitarian value orientations.
• Comparators: partisanship and symbolic ideology.
• Strategy: within-respondent (panel) models that identify how shifts in values relate to shifts in policy attitudes, plus targeted tests on emergent issues.

Findings: The results show that values systematically predict within-voter changes in policy positions. Several clear patterns emerge:

• Changes in traditionalist and egalitarian orientations are associated with subsequent shifts in relevant issue stances.
• These value effects persist across multiple model specifications and are not limited to long-established issues.
• On emergent policies—tested here with welfare reform in the 1990s and transgender-related policy debates in the 2010s—values help shape opinion even before partisan or ideological anchors have fully formed.
• Across models, the influence of values on individuals' attitudes is as large as, and often larger than, the effects attributed to partisanship or symbolic ideology.

Conclusion and Significance: The article concludes that political values operate as a core predisposition that citizens use to interpret and update their views on policy. By leveraging panel data and examining both established and emergent issues, the study strengthens causal claims about values' role in opinion formation and suggests that scholars should treat values as a central explanatory factor in political behavior and public opinion research.