Replication Data for: Are Local Policy Attitudes Distinct?

There is broad consensus that Americans’ attitudes toward national issues are strongly influenced by left-right ideology, but scholars disagree as to whether attitudes toward local issues are structured similarly and whether local policy attitudes are related to national policy ideology. In this study, we use two surveys of American adults to assess whether and to what extent Americans’ local policy attitudes exhibit a similar structure as do national policy attitudes. We find that items asking about local policy are just as likely to reflect a latent dimension of policy preferences as those asking about national policy. Additionally, when local and national items are scaled separately, those scales are highly correlated. In sum, our findings indicate that attitudes toward many local issues are aligned with national ideology. A smaller subset of attitudes about local issues appears weakly correlated with attitudes toward national issues, which suggests that some attitudes are distinctively local and possibly structured by non-ideological cleavages.