Political Attitudes and the Ideology of Equality: Differentiating support for liberal and conservative political parties in New Zealand.

POLITICAL socialization; POLITICAL participation; EQUALITY; POLITICAL affiliation; COLLECTIVE representation

A new scale summarizing the central and core elements of a social representation of individual versus group-based entitlement to resource-allocations in New Zealand (NZ) is presented. Item content for the Equality Positioning Scale was drawn from qualitative analyses of the discourses of NZ's citizens, its political elites, and the media. As hypothesized, equality positioning differentiated between Pakeha (NZ European) undergraduates who supported liberal versus conservative political parties. People who positioned equality as group-based tended to support the Labour and Green parties and those who positioned equality as meritocracy tended to support the National and NZ First parties. Regression models predicting political party support in the two months prior to the 2005 NZ general election demonstrated that the effects of equality positioning on political party preference were unique, and were not explained by universal (Study 1: Big-Five Personality, Social Dominance Orientation, Right-Wing Authoritarianism, liberalism-conservatism) or culture-specific; Study 2: pro-Pakeha ingroup attitudes, support for the symbolic principles of biculturalism) indicators derived from other theoretical perspectives. Taken together, these findings indicate that the Equality Positioning Scale provides a valid and reliable measure that contributes to models of the psychological and ideological bases of voting behaviour in NZ. Moreover, our findings suggest that the positioning of equality provided an axis of meaning that aided in the creation and mobilization of public opinion regarding resource-allocations, land claims, affirmative action programs, and a host of other material issues in the months leading up to the 2005 NZ election. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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