The Orthogonality of Liberalism and Conservatism Among American Evangelical Protestants.

The article tests the theory that responses to conservative sociopolitical issues will be negatively correlated with responses to liberal issues among conservative Evangelical Protestants in the United States. In an attempt to measure sociopolitical conservatism and liberalism, many researchers have used scales that place these constructs at opposite ends of a single bipolar continuum. This practice is evidence of the widespread assumption that conservatism and liberalism are opposites and thus should be negatively correlated. Although this assumption makes intuitive sense, its validity has not been supported with all populations. The most significant finding of this study was that conservative viewpoints were not significantly negatively correlated with liberal viewpoints among this population. This finding supports what Kerlinger (1984) found in an "unbiased" sampling (one in which liberal views and conservative views have an equal chance of being represented). It does not confirm, however, what he posited to be true among a "biased" sampling: namely, that the polarized viewpoints of biased samples would cause responses to be negatively correlated.