Political Identity Versus Policy Preferences

NYT: As G.O.P. Seeks Spending Cuts, Details Are Scarce

...which, you know, isn't all that surprising according to James Stimson's book "Tides of Consent." I have some issues with the book as a whole, but one interesting bit of information arises when Stimson talks about people's policy preferences versus their self-identifications. As it turns out, Americans generally prefer to identify as "conservative" rather than "liberal", but prefer "liberal" policies (expansion of government services) to "conservative" ones.* Thus, the GOP emphasizes symbols of conservatism while downplaying actual policy details, while Democrats avoid the the symbol "liberal" while emphasizing what they're actually going to do. Hence the phenomenon documented in the linked article: Republican candidates emphasizing cuts to "bloat", "waste", "overspending", and so forth, without any real explanation of what these cuts will entail.

*The lack of real investigation into why this is the case is one of my problems. Stimson seems to attribute it to the more positive meaning of "conservative" as opposed to "liberal" in nonpolitical settings. I would have wanted to see some consideration of "liberal" as a stigmatized identity in the US, especially after the era of McCarthyism, but that's just me.