The influence of values on hard issue attitudes

In light of extensive findings that Americans lack ideological structure to their attitudes, political scientists have turned to values as a source of attitudinal constraint in the mass public. However, most of this work has exclusively examined “easy” issues – those that are highly visible and familiar to voters. In this study, I conduct an original survey to investigate the extent to which values predict attitudes toward three “hard” issues: nuclear energy expansion, needle exchange programs, and laws that allow health care providers to opt out of providing medication that could terminate a pregnancy. Overall, I find that while values structure the attitudes of most individuals, those who are poorly informed about politics fail to mimic the patterns associated with the well-informed. These findings suggest that although values can be a source of attitudinal constraint in the general public, their influence is conditional upon political sophistication.