The Role of Coherence in the Development of Ideologies: A Case Study of Conservative Thought on Immigration from 1995 to 2000

Dissertation

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By Sergio Pablo D´ıaz Sierra, B.A. Graduate Program in Political Science

The Ohio State University 2017

Dissertation Committee: William Minozzi, Advisor and Co-chair Jack R. Wright, Co-chair Gregory A. Caldeira Michael Neblo Copyright by Sergio Pablo D´ıaz Sierra 2017 Abstract

How are ideologies created and how do they develop? Noel points to ideological elites and public intellectuals as responsible for the development of ideologies. Through deliberation and debate with each other, they help define, clarify, and explain what their ideological allies should believe and why. However, what precisely happens as they engage in this process remains a mystery. In this dissertation, I propose a resolution to this mystery by suggesting that the development of ideologies is one of a persistent drive to improve coherence. Coherence is a cognitive property; it is the degree to which elements in belief systems make sense together (Thagard, 2000). Through coherence, we make sense of competing explanations of the world. In saying that ideologies develop as their coherence improves, I place ideology at the center of how individuals interact with the political world. Contrary to the claims of those who suggest ideological language serves as little more than marketing or rationalization for power coalitions of elite interests (e.g., Aldrich, 1995; Converse, 2006; Bawn et al., 2012; Zaller, 1992), I argue that ideology is central to how we as people perceive and interact with politics. Ideological beliefs cannot be easily abandoned or revised without changes to the underlying belief systems of their adopters. These beliefs are sincerely held, and their presence helps people navigate the why’s and how’s of politics. Using data from conservative political magazines published between 1995 and 2000, I provide evidence that conservative thought on immigration developed through a process of coherence improvement. Conservatives adopted a threat narrative that

ii portrayed immigrants as dangerous to themselves and American culture and as undeserving burdens to the welfare state. These feelings, combined with preexisting positions against welfare spending and policies designed to promote racial diversity, lead conservatives, and consequently the Republican Party, to adopt increasingly restrictive positions on immigration. These restrictionist positions and the arguments that underlie them became more coherent over time, overcoming objections from libertarians and business conservatives who had more positive views about the benefits of immigration. The findings in this dissertation are a step forward for the study of ideology. First, this dissertation provides a test of the theory that ideological constraint arises out of the elite discourse. While Noel (2014) proposes this idea he never tests it directly. Instead, he limits himself to providing evidence that constraint arises in the media before it arises in Congress. While such evidence is consistent with the ideology-as-constraint, it also leaves open other possibilities, including that parties try out arguments in the media before importing them to Congress. This dissertation tests the primary mechanism: creative synthesis. I show that deliberation and discussion lead to ideological constraint by pushing public intellectuals to improve the coherence of their beliefs. Second, in examining ideology as sincerely-held belief systems, I challenge theorists like Aldrich (1995), who view ideology as a tool to market and manipulate a political coalition. Contrary to these theorists, I argue that ideologies reflect the worldviews of elites and, as such, they constrain elites’ actions. Evidence of such constraint has implications for our understanding of politics. If belief systems constrain elites, their ability to deviate from previously stated positions should be less than expected under other theories (Bawn et al., 2012). Ideological change, I argue, should reflect not just a shift in strategic considerations (a way to get more votes, for example), but a change in underlying beliefs. If a change in

iii ideology requires belief revision, this means that coherent ideologies are sticky and likely to persist even after they become a political liability.

iv Dedico esta tesis doctoral a mis padres, abuelos, hermana y amigos. Sin ustedes esto no hubiera sido posible. Cantar nos gusta unidos.

v Acknowledgements

I wish to acknowledge some of the people who have helped so much in my graduate career and dissertation. Without their support, this project would not exist. First, I want to thank my dissertation committee. I thank my advisor, William Minozzi. His feedback, advice, and guidance have been invaluable. His encouragement gave me the confidence to explore methods and theory outside the Political Science mainstream, and with his help, I was able to distinguish between useful diversions and never-ending rabbit holes. My exploration of coherence, Thagard’s work, and other concepts in this project owe a lot to his patience, understanding, and guiding hand. I also want to thank him for his personal support. Above and beyond his responsibilities as a program advisor, Minozzi took care to make sure I was well. He helped me lead a healthy life within and outside academia. He helped me, period. I thank Professor Jack Wright for his mentorship. Without his focus and helpful hand, I doubt this project would exist. When I was lost or confused he gave me advice on how to best approach problems and solve them. When it appeared that this project was heading to the waste-bin his experience and expertise helped me organize and execute the ideas I had. I consider myself blessed and lucky to have had him in my corner, and I don’t doubt that his influence will shape my future successes. I thank Professor Gregory Caldeira. His persistence that I explain things in “bone-headed English” was indispensable. It kept me honest, and it helped my writing make sense. I also want to thank him for his help in refining the words in this project.

vi I look forward to applying his lessons in my future endeavors. I thank Professor Michael Neblo. His enthusiastic support for this project motivated me to work through the numerous challenges I faced in pursuing it. His help in understanding concepts and ideas alien to me was invaluable, and his introduction to the literature on inferentialism as a concept was illuminating. Most importantly, however, his unexpected but always welcome, praise was invaluable when I felt like I was falling behind. Second, I want to thank my friends in the department. In particular, I want to thank Jakob Miller. When we first met during recruitment, you reminded me of the picture of a “Man / Hombre” in my first grade English class book: a blond, farm boy in a plaid shirt. I hope you forgive me, but I didn’t think people like that existed. After a few words, and Johnny Cash lyrics, I knew I had to be your friend. Your support, your advice, your spell-checking and revisions, your questions and suggestions, and your willingness to always be there when I needed help ... I would say I don’t have the words to thank you, but that’s not true. You are what back home I would call buena gente (good people), and I hope I was buena gente to you as well. I thank Kailash Srinivasan. I appreciated having another second-generation immigrant as a roommate, particularly one who was fluent in left-wing romanticism. I just wish that you were less of a traitor. For all your talk of solidarity and brotherhood, you always managed to turn the room against me during our board game weekends. Cardboard betrayals aside, you understood me and you were a pillar of strength I could lean on. Thanks for being there, thanks for not telling me to stop texting you. I thank Carolyn Morgan. You were my neighbor, you baked me cookies and gave me pickled hot peppers, your home was open for the holidays I spent away from

vii home. I thank you for jumping the train tracks with me to watch f´utbol when we lived next to the stadium. I thank you for being the calm voice of reason and the grown-up in the room. I also want to thank Gaby Lloyd, Rune “Tire Iron” Docking, Matt Washer, Lauren Ratliff, and Peter Tunkis (I’m sure we’ll meet for war games someday). You are all great people and I’m glad to have known you all as friends and colleagues. Third, I want to thank the people in the Department of Political Science at the Ohio State University. Charles Smith and Courtney Sanders in the office, thanks for helping me make sense of all the academic arcana. Professor McGraw, Lauren Elliot, Will Massengill, Brianna Mack, and Allison Craig, thank you for your feedback during the APDW series. Finally, I want to thank my family. Mom and Dad, Noem´ıandJes´us, thanks for trying to instill a sense of responsibility and discipline in me. I think it worked somewhat. Thanks for the value you placed on my education, for tolerating my weirdness, for supporting my decision to change majors. Thanks Mom for being so caring, even if sometimes it annoyed me. Thank you Dad, the last couple of years your support has been incredible and I wouldn’t have made it without you. Edna Cristina, my sister, you will always be the older sibling. Thanks for taking care of your little brother. By the way, since I’m also a doctor now, we still have to figure out who’s smarter. To Abuela Eva, I’ll always give you a hug. Thanks for pampering me and letting me ride in the back of Grandpa’s Willys during our trips to the farm in Jayuya. To my brothers (and you are my brothers), I thank you. Andr´es, little cousin, I’m glad we eventually stopped trying to beat each other up. David, I would thank you but you’d just say something to annoy me; so you get nothing. Wiso, thanks for leaving the door to your home open. Daniel, littlest cousin, you should never listen

viii to you older siblings (but I didn’t tell you that). I love you all.

ix Vita

August 4, 1989 ...... Born- HatoRey,SanJuan,PuertoRico

January 28, 2011 ...... B.A.,UniversidaddePuertoRico,R´ıo Piedras

Fall 2011 - Present...... GraduateStudent,TheOhioStateUniversity

Fields of Study

Major Field: Political Science

x Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii

Dedication ...... v

Acknowledgments ...... vi

Vita ...... x

List of Figures ...... xv

List of Tables ...... xvi

1 Introduction ...... 1 1.1 Ideology as Marketing ...... 3 1.2 Ideologies as Guide to Action ...... 6 1.2.1 Coherence Improvement: How Ideologies Develop ...... 7 1.3 Organization ...... 9

2 Ideology, Creative Synthesis, and Coherence ...... 12 2.1 Introduction ...... 12 2.2 What is Ideology? ...... 15 2.2.1 Constraint ...... 15 2.2.2 Belief System ...... 17

xi 2.2.3 Summary ...... 19 2.3 How Ideologies are Created ...... 20 2.3.1 Who engages in creative synthesis? ...... 21 Political Parties ...... 22 Public Intellectuals ...... 24 Persuasion ...... 25 2.3.2 Summary ...... 27 2.4 Creative Synthesis as Coherence Improvement ...... 28 2.4.1 Positive Constraints or Coherence ...... 30 2.4.2 Negative Constraints or Incoherence ...... 31 2.4.3 The Language Game: How Constraints are Socially Constructed 32 2.4.4 Individual and Social Coherence ...... 35 2.4.5 Coherence Improvement ...... 38 2.5 A Coherentist Theory of Creative Synthesis ...... 42 2.5.1 Why Engage in Coherence Improvement? ...... 44 2.6 Conclusion ...... 45

3 Fear of Immigrants: How Conservatives Became Immigration Restrictionists ...... 49 3.1 Introduction ...... 49 3.2 Immigration and the White Vote ...... 51 3.3 Immigration and the Republican Party ...... 55 3.4 A Coherentist Account of Conservative Ideology on Immigration ... 57 3.5 Conclusion ...... 60

4 Testing the Theory: An Analysis of Conservative Beliefs on Im- migration from 1995-2000 ...... 62

xii 4.1 Introduction ...... 62 4.2 Data ...... 64 4.3 Measuring Coherence ...... 70 4.3.1 System Coherence ...... 77 4.3.2 Acceptance of a Single Unit ...... 79 4.4 Hypotheses ...... 79 4.5 Results and Analysis ...... 83 4.6 Conclusion ...... 94

5 Conclusion ...... 96 5.1 Introduction ...... 96 5.1.1 “Sticky” Ideologies and Party Oversight ...... 100 5.1.2 Coherence and Ideological Change ...... 102 5.1.3 Informed Public and Democratic Legitimacy ...... 102 5.2 Limits ...... 104 5.3 Future Research ...... 106

Bibliography ...... 109

A Influence of Threat Narrative on Policy Propositions ...... 118

BListofCodes...... 120

C Extended Example of Coding ...... 176 C.1 Coder Recruitment and Training ...... 176 C.2 Article Labelling ...... 177 C.3 Argument Outlines ...... 177 C.4 Coding of Arguments ...... 180

xiii C.5 From Outlines to Networks ...... 183 C.6 From Networks to Data Sets ...... 184

xiv List of Figures

2.1 Graph representation of “Homelessness Problem” example...... 40

4.1 Example of How Networks Were Built from Outlines ...... 67 4.2 Coherence of Networks: All Magazines, 1995 to 1995-2000...... 84 4.3 Coherence of Networks: Two Year Blocks, 1995 to 1999-2000 ..... 85

C.1 Example of a Network ...... 185

xv List of Tables

4.1 Reliability measures for proposition codes by coder ...... 69 4.2 Activation value of threat narrative propositions ...... 88 4.3 Activation value of restrictionist policy positions ...... 90 4.4 Activation value of pro-business/pro-immigration propositions .... 92

A.1 Influence of threat propositions on restrictionist policy position ....119

C.1 Example of coded article outline ...... 182 C.2 Example of argument network in table form ...... 184

xvi Chapter 1

Introduction

When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. [...] They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

Donald J. Trump

Trump and his strident, anti-immigrant, introductory campaign speech are em- blematic of the current restrictionist stance that the Republican Party and conserva- tive ideologues have taken towards immigration. Though Trump’s bombast earned him notoriety, his positions are not a departure from the conservative orthodoxy that currently dominates in the Republican Party. In 2012, Mitt Romney ran for President as the Republican nominee on a platform of making the continuous ex- istence of undocumented immigrants in the United States so unpleasant that they would willingly “self-deport” out of the country (Madison, 2012). Moreover, while President Bush supported passage of the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007, that bill failed to become law in part because of the objections of socially conservative Republicans (Jeong et al., 2011). Following the 2012 election, leadership within the RNC concluded that the

1 Republican Party’s restrictionist policies and anti-immigrant views had cost them dearly in national elections (Republican National Committee, 2013). The RNC determined that restrictionist immigration policies have alienated, not only the Latino population that is seen as the target of their policies, but also other “model minorities” experiencing large immigration flows, such as Asian Americans. Despite efforts from leaders at the RNC, the traditional party base and social conservatives within the party have rejected moves away from a strong restrictionist and anti- immigrant ideology (Miller and Schofield, 2008). For now, the GOP and its base remain strongly restrictionist in their policy. For many political scientists, the restrictionist position among Republicans is puzzling. We generally view parties as coalition in pursuit of electoral power. This suggests that parties would avoid issue positions that will cost them votes (Downs, 1957). If parties are merely vote-seeking coalitions, it would be deceptively easy to understand immigration as an area of minimum conflict within the conservative coalition. However, the restrictionist position within conservatism presents a challenge for the Republican Party. The Republican Party has to manage a coalition of business- friendly interests, who generally favor immigration as a source of cheap labor, and social conservatives, who oppose immigration and the cultural changes it brings. Increasingly, it appears that these differences have been resolved in favor of social conservatives; while business conservatives within the Republican Party have had to ally with pro-business Democrats in to pass immigration policies that they favor (Jeong et al., 2011; Miller and Schofield, 2008). There is, then, a fundamental disconnect within the Republican Party between the electoral pragmatists and the ideological base. The pragmatists prefer an expansionist immigration policy, and the ideological base prefers a restrictive policy. The conservative base has come to believe that immigrants pose a threat to traditional

2 American culture, that they are increasingly an economic burden on society, and that immigrant populations increase demand for government welfare programs. Why is the ideological base of the Republican Party so at odds with the pragmatic wing of the party? How and when did the ideological views on immigration develop and crystalize within the conservative base? These are the central questions of this dissertation. I propose that conservative ideological views on immigration evolved over time through a process of deliberation and debate among conservative intellectual elites. Conservative ideological views on immigration became more coherent over time as elites accepted some arguments, rejected others, and gradually agreed upon the core elements of an ideological belief system about immigration. I define this process as one of coherence improvement, and I employ empirical methods that illuminate the process by which some propositions and beliefs are accepted and others rejected. Notably, propositions about the benefits of an immigrant workforce to the Republican business community—a fundamental position of the electoral pragmatists—achieves no traction or coherence within the conservative ideological framework.

1.1 Ideology as Marketing

How did the Republican Party’s ideological views on immigration come about? One possible explanation is that party elites—elected officials and interest groups— determined that it would be useful to collaborate on a set of issues (Aldrich, 1995; Bawn et al., 2012). Perhaps initially, the collaboration was not based on a set of shared beliefs about the world, or what is right or wrong. Instead it was based on the idea that collaboration on a set of issues would help the members of the party achieve their political goals (Aldrich, 1995; Bawn, 1999).

3 In the case of immigration, the story would be that, at some point, Republican officeholders and associated interest groups judged that a restrictionist position on immigration would help win them office. Besides agreeing to collaborate on the issues of low-taxes and social traditionalism, they would also collaborate on the issue of restricting immigration, not for any principled reason, but out of convenience. The restrictionist position, then, would have occurred as the result of strategic considerations, as the only thing limiting the collection of issues a party collaborates on is the anticipated benefits to members of the party. I will call this theory ideology as marketing. According to this theory, ideologies are merely useful stories that party elites use to sell the collection of issues on which they collaborate to the voters. Ideologies, according to this view, are intrinsically meaningless. These theories of ideology as marketing are appealing. They help explain seem- ingly incongruous coalitions in parties by focusing first on the nature of the col- laboration, and then assuming that the coalitions and the ideologies they profess are justified not through belief, but strategic logic (Aldrich, 1995). The view that strategy is the glue that holds coalitions together follows in a tradition that views politicians—and subsequently parties—as single minded seekers of reelection (May- hew, 2004). The view of ideologies as marketing also addresses the view of voters as largely uninformed and non-ideological (Campbell et al., 1980). As such, voters are ill-equipped to notice when parties or politicians change their ideological stance. This enables parties to modify their ideological positions so as to increase their potential share of the vote (Downs, 1957), or the benefits they can obtain from office (Bawn et al., 2012). In short, theories of ideology as marketing focus on how ideological language can be deployed to gain an electoral advantage. However, these theories of ideology as marketing fail to explain phenomena like the current difficulties that the GOP

4 faces in addressing immigration and immigrant issues. In 2013, the RNC conducted what the press called an “election autopsy” (Rubin, 2013). The resulting document determined that the Republican Party have failed to win the Presidency in 2008 and 2012 because it was unable to attract support from minorities and young voters who viewed the GOP as hostile towards minorities (Republican National Committee, 2013). Despite this assessment, the restrictionist policies remain a common part of Republican platforms election after election. If ideologies are just convenient stories used to sell a set of issues on which a party collaborates, and if collaboration is based on the pursuit of political power, why has the national GOP been unable to move away from its restrictionist stance? In recent years, prominent parties across the world have promulgated ideological positions that harmed their ability to seize control of government. In Great Britain, the Labour Party has sacrificed its traditional stronghold in Scotland by making the politically unsound, yet ideologically justified, decision to jointly campaign with the Conservative Party against Scottish independence (Friedman, 2016a). Moreover, the Labor Party has been systematically dragged away from popular centrist positions by its most active members and activists. Twice now, in less than two years, the Labour membership has elected an ideological purist (Jeremy Corbyn) over candidates whose main claim to the leadership was that they were willing to compromise on some issues to achieve the power to benefit their base (Stewart and Mason, 2016). Likewise, in the last five years, the CDC (Converg`encia Democr`atica de Catalunya)—which has traditionally been the largest political party in Catalonia since the return of democracy to Spain—lost seats, popularity, votes, and coalition members in pursuit of independence for the region (Pi, 2015; Gisbert, 2015). This pattern contradicts the view that ideologies are merely reflections of strategic decisions made by elected officials, interest groups, and policy demanders in pursuit of political power. If they

5 were, these parties would avoid such electorally costly positions.

1.2 Ideologies as Guide to Action

The reason why theories of ideologies as marketing provide a poor explanation of how ideologies develop is that they view the structure and content of ideologies as irrelevant. After all, according to these theories, ideologies are little more than stories. I argue that the opposite is true, that the structure and content of ideologies are central to their function and development. Ideologies serve a cognitive role and help people make sense of political phenomena and define political behavior. Their structure and content serve a purpose beyond the electoral pursuit of political parties. They develop through processes that imbue them with meaning for their adherents and contain an internal logic that is hard to discard. The view that ideologies help people make sense of political phenomena and influence their behavior is common in the political science literature. The literature presents ideologies as systems of beliefs that reinforce and justify each other (Knight, 2006). These beliefs constrain our policy preferences (Converse, 2006). Our ideologies influence whom we vote for (Downs, 1957). It is deeply perplexing that the field simultaneously assumes that ideology deeply influences our political behavior, while simultaneously being created by people who are immune to its effects. But ideology as marketing is not the only theory of ideology creation. The seeds of a better theory are already apparent in the older one. Converse defined ideologies as certain patterns of constraint between issues that repeat across individuals. Noel, borrowing from Converse, called the process through which ideologies are created and connections made between policy issues creative synthesis (Noel, 2012, 2014). According to both of them, ideologies are created by individuals

6 who engage in the task of tying issues together. These people tie issues together by giving well-argued reasons as to why people should believe issues should go together. Creative synthesis is predicated on the idea that ideologies arise as individuals attempt to make sense of politics in a structured and coherent way. As such, creative synthesis provides an explanation of how ideologies can develop not out of simple electoral calculations, but from the cognitive impulse we all have to make sense of the world. If ideologies form out of creative synthesis, it becomes easy to understand how they might be simultaneously manipulable and constraining.

1.2.1 Coherence Improvement: How Ideologies Develop

Creative synthesis occurs when public intellectuals or all sorts (from political philoso- phers to radio talk-show hosts) link issues together (e.g., [1] Abortion is a crime, [2] Killing a human being is a crime, [3] A fetus is a live human being). These linked issues are picked up and either accepted or rejected, with or without modification, by other public intellectuals who then elaborate on their acceptance and rejection. These elaborations, in turn, are then subject to future elaboration, and eventual acceptance, or rejection by others. This deliberation and debate are what creates ideological constraint. Ideological constraint arises because deliberation allows individuals to improve the coherence of their beliefs. This dissertation clarifies and defends the idea that creative synthesis occurs through coherence improvement. This statement rests on two key assumptions. The first assumption is that ideologies are belief systems. Belief systems provide adherents with a representation of the world that helps them make sense of what goes on around them (Schwitzgebel, 2015). Ideologies so conceived serve a cognitive function; they help us explain and understand the world. The second assumption is that the propositions of ideologies are accepted or rejected to the degree that they cohere (fit

7 or make sense together) with other elements in the network (Zaller, 1992; Thagard, 2000). The second assumption entails that ideologies are sticky, above and beyond mere preferences over political or electoral outcomes. In the case of the Labour Party membership, they elected Jeremy Corbyn as Leader, twice, even though doing so will likely cost the party in future elections. They did this because, after years of centrist governance under Blair and Brown, the membership demanded that the party return to what they considered the “true Labour values” of the left. Ideologies serve a cognitive function, helping to explain the political world. Therefore, shifts in collective ideologies must be, at least to some degree, associated with this explanatory function. In particular, saying that ideologies change through a process of coherence improvement means that changes in ideology should occur when they provide adherents with a belief system that allows them to “make better sense” of the world. Here, “making better sense” means increasing the degree to which the elements of the ideology cohere with each other. Likewise, changes in ideology are less likely to occur when they would make the belief system less capable of explaining the political world by decreasing that coherence. So what does the coherentist view of ideologies have to say about Trump and the GOP’s immigration dilemma? It means that Trump and other restrictionists currently represent the GOP; not by accident, and not because it gets the party electoral benefits. Rather, Trump’s rise occurred because relevant portions of the party truly and sincerely believed that restrictionist policies on immigration would address their concerns about the economic and cultural impact of immigration. It would also say that the reason why conservatism has ignored the preferences of business conservatives and libertarians (who favor relatively open immigration) is that their beliefs contradict other strongly held conservative beliefs. While business conservatives view immigration as a great source of cheap labor, mainstream conser-

8 vatives view immigration as an economic and budgetary burden. While libertarians may consider immigration quotas to be social engineering, social conservatives view immigration as a threat to traditional American culture. Even more troublesome for pro-immigration conservatives, the view of immigrants as an economic burden and a threat to American culture also aligns with traditional conservative values that oppose poverty reduction programs and cultural change. Later chapters further elaborate the development of the restrictionist stance; but for now, the argument as to why the restrictionist stance is dominant within conservative circles is that the elaborations provided by libertarian conservatives, election-minded conservatives, and business conservatives fail to improve the coherence that the current restrictionist stance offers American conservatives.

1.3 Organization

In what remains of the dissertation, I develop and defend my argument that ideologies develop through a process of coherence improvement. What remains of the dissertation develops and defends the argument that ideolo- gies develop through a process of coherence improvement. Chapter 2 presents a theory of creative synthesis through coherence improvement. Section 2.2 of that chapter begins by providing a definition of ideology based on Converse (2006). In particular, it focuses on the concepts of ideological constraint and structured belief systems. This section helps lay the groundwork for not just the theory; but also the methods used later to test hypotheses based on the theory. Section 2.3 reviews the literature on creative synthesis and the development of ideologies. This section serves dual purposes: first, it reviews the literature on ideology as marketing and a critique of it; second, it introduces the concept of

9 creative synthesis as a cognitive process of coherence improvement. Section 2.4 reviews the literature on coherentism, how coherence creates constraint between beliefs, where coherence comes from, how it is improved, and how coherence is simultaneously a social and individual phenomenon. Section 2.5 summarizes the ideas presented previously in the second chapter to present a simplified version of the theory. It then presents answers to the question of what motivates individuals to develop coherent ideologies. Chapter 3 is a review the literature on how conservative ideology developed from widespread indifference towards immigration to its current restrictionist position. Sections 3.2 and 3.3 focus on the development of the ideology among voters, par- ticularly white voters, and congressional Republicans respectively. In both cases, the development of the ideology was shaped by immigrant threat narratives. White voters feared the impact that high levels of immigration from Latin America would have on their lives, economic prospects, and culture. These concerns, along with general predispositions towards conservatism, pushed white voters towards the Re- publican Party, whom they saw as responsive to their concerns (Abrajano and Hajnal, 2015; Chavez, 2013). Among congressional Republicans, the shift occurred as they began to associate immigration policy with both welfare policy and concerns about Democratic Party gains among immigrant communities (Gimpel and Edwards, 1999). Section 3.4 applies the theory of creative synthesis to the literature reviewed in the previous sections. Chapter 4 tests the theory as applied to conservative ideology on immigration. Section 4.2 presents the data used to examine the theory, arguments in articles about immigration published in conservative political magazines. Section 4.3 presents the methods used to analyze the data. The analysis makes use of a connectionist algorithm that locally optimizes the coherence of belief networks and provides

10 measures of the acceptance of individual beliefs and the coherence of networks as a whole. The algorithm is built based on theories of coherence by Thagard (1989, 2000). Section 4.4 presents hypotheses to test for based on the general theory as presented in Chapter 2 and the review on the development of conservative thought on immigration in Chapter 3. Section 4.5 presents the results and analysis of the data. The results in this chapter provide evidence that conservative ideology on immigration did become more coherent over time and that it did so in a way that conforms to the threat narrative hypothesis. Chapter 5 concludes the dissertation. Chapter 5 reviews the theory and the results of the analysis. The implications of the findings and the theory for political science and democratic theory are discussed there. In Section 5.2, presents the limits of the research done here and suggest methods by which to replicate and expand on the work done here. Finally, section 5.3 suggests future areas of research relevant to the theory.

11 Chapter 2

Ideology, Creative Synthesis, and Coherence

The idea-elements go together not simply because both are in the interest of the person holding a particular status but for more abstract and quasi-logical reasons developed from a coherent world view as well. It is this type of constraint that is closest to the classic meaning of the term “ideology.”

Philip E. Converse, The Nature of belief Systems in Mass Publics

2.1 Introduction

The main claim of this dissertation is that ideologies develop through a process of coherence improvement. This view is predicated on the idea that ideologies are belief systems. As belief systems, ideologies serve a cognitive role of helping us make sense of the political world. Because belief systems help us makes sense of the world, we are motivated to prefer coherent belief systems over incoherent ones (Thagard, 2000).

12 The previous chapter presented these claims in contrast to theories of ideology as marketing. According to these theories, ideologies are nothing more than convenient stories to mobilize voters, pure rationalization, or mere marketing (Aldrich, 1995; Bawn et al., 2012; Lodge and Taber, 2013). Despite the prevalence of theories of ideology as marketing, there is an extensive literature to draw from in defense of the theory presented in this dissertation. Political science, whatever its disagreements on what ideology is, has for a long time agreed that ideologies are “a coherent and relatively stable set of beliefs or values”(Knight, 2006, p. 625). This common ground is the foundation of the theory presented here. This chapter begins by discussing the two elements of ideology which are most common in conceptions of it: that ideologies provide constraint, and that they are belief systems (Converse, 2006). Ideological constraint is the idea that ideologies limit and define which beliefs individuals can hold simultaneously. Intuitively, when someone argues that a liberal should defend the welfare state and progressive taxes while opposing military spending and prayer in school, they are saying that liberals are constrained into believing in the welfare state and progressive taxation while rejecting military spending and prayer in school. The idea that somehow the latter prevents the former is to believe in ideological constraint. The concept of belief systems is trickier to unpack. They are defined as a system of propositions that constrain each other. Propositions are statements to which we can attach a degree of believability, a measure of how true we think the statement is. Because propositions in a belief system constrain each other, when the believability of one proposition changes then the acceptance of others should change. Political science has tended to assume that ideologies are belief systems because the literature views them as a set of propositions about politics that influence and constrain one another. Section 2.2 reviews the concepts of constraint and belief systems in the

13 context of ideology and provide the building blocks for the rest of the chapter. Section 2.3 focuses on reviewing the literature on the creation and development of ideologies. It reviews Noel’s work on this question, criticize its limitations, and expands on it. Noel theorizes that public intellectuals create ideologies. Public intellectuals debate and deliberate on political issues, and by persuading each other on what they should believe, they create ideological constraint. This Section builds and improves on Noel’s theory. Noel points to persuasion as central to the creation of ideological constraint, but never provides a definition or what makes for a persuasive argument, nor does he identify a mechanism through which dialogue can lead to ideological constraint. This dissertation does. The central argument of this project is that discourse helps individuals clarify, refine and build on each other’s ideas through a process of coherence improvement. Arguments are persuasive when they help us better make sense of the world and our beliefs. Section 2.3 serves to place the theory presented here within the political science mainstream, even as the other sections expand beyond political science into cognitive science, philosophy, and psychology. Section 2.4 applies research into coherence and cognition to the concepts in sections 2.2 and 2.3. It begins by defining coherentism as a cognitive theory and continues by providing coherentist accounts of the concepts of constraint and belief systems. Section 2.4 also presents how coherence is socially constructed. Section 2.4 uses the concepts discussed in the previous sections to introduce and develop the central argument of this dissertation. Section 2.5 synthesizes what came before, and it provides a simplified version of the theory that mirrors the structure of the one provided in Noel (2014). This section also provides answers to the question of what would motivate people to engage in coherence improvement.

14 2.2 What is Ideology?

Any study of ideology has to deal with the difficulty in providing a satisfactory definition of the concept. Converse (2006) described ideologies as belief systems that provided constraint between issues. To Converse’s definition, one can also add that these belief systems and patterns of constraints need to repeat across a group of people (Denzau and North, 2000). The concepts of constraint and belief system are essential to the theory presented here, so some space will be spent defining them.

2.2.1 Constraint

To say that an ideology provides constraint between issues is to say that ideologies limit the number of possible issue stances an individual can simultaneously hold. Consider a simple example. Imagine a society where only the following policies were capable of existing: A, B, C, D, and E. Imagine also that each member of this society either supported or rejected each of these policies. If knowing a person’s stance on one issue helps predict their stance on another, then those two issues constrain one another for that individual. If the same pattern of constraint, where different people have the same policy stances across issues, repeats, and one can predict which issue positions a person would have by knowing another; then an ideology would exist in this fictional society (Converse, 2006). So what does it mean to say ideology provides constraint? It implies that there are sets of correlations across beliefs that repeat in society. In other words, a person has an ideology if people can predict their stance on one issue based on their stance on other matters. One may object that it is unseemly to reduce ideology to a set of correlations across beliefs that repeat across people, but the field has, if not explicitly, at least implicitly accepted this definition. For example, consider the most

15 popular measure of ideology in the field, NOMINATE (Poole and Rosenthal, 1985). NOMINATE measures ideology by looking for latent variables that help predict patterns of votes across issues. Anyone familiar with NOMINATE can predict whether a person who scores highly on the NOMINATE scale (the conservative side of the scale) would be for a tax cut —they would say yes. They would make this prediction because as a political scientist, or simply a person interested in politics, they have internalized that conservatives are more likely to support tax cuts than liberals; knowing one piece of information constraints plausible predictions about the other. Creating constraint across issues is not the only defining characteristic of ideologies. Imagine a person had the following four beliefs: 1)“taxation is the same as slave labor”, 2) “the state should fund welfare programs for the disadvantaged”, 3) “I oppose equal pay for equal work”, and 4) “the U.S. should support the creation of a supranational body like the EU for North America”. The field may be inclined to classify someone like this as having non-preferences; but what if a survey showed that 10% of the country consistently held these beliefs? Would its members be called ideological given that this pattern of constraint exists for a portion of the population? Probably not, mainly because this particular combination of beliefs would seem nonsensical to most. The reason such a collection seems nonsensical is not just because there is no label (e.g, liberal, conservative, libertarian) to this particular set of constraints. Rather, this set of constraint seems nonsensical because we are unaware of any set of reasons as to why anybody would believe these four things simultaneously. It would appear then that a set of issue constraints that is stable over time and repeated among portions of a society is not enough to define an ideology. Ideology needs something else. It needs the constraints to make sense. It needs reasons as to

16 why certain issues go together. Incidentally, this belief is common in the literature. Converse (2006, pp. 9) states that ideologies are presented as a “logical whole, [...] presented in such terms (“If you believe this, then you will also believe that, for it follows in such-and-such ways”).” Knight (2006, p. 619), defined ideologies as “the way a system —a single individual or even a whole society— rationalizes itself.” And Jost, Federico and Napier (2009, p. 309) states that “Ideologies also endeavor to describe or interpret the world as it is —by making assertions or assumptions about human nature, historical events, present realities, and future possibilities— and to envision the world as it should be, specifying acceptable means of attaining social, economic, and political ideas.” Ideologies are not just a set of constraint between issues. They must have an accompanying belief system that makes sense of and justifies those constraints.

2.2.2 Belief System

The previous section defined the concept of constraint. This section unpacks the idea of belief systems. This chapter is based on a coherentist theory of belief systems, and the methods used in later chapters are based on a connectionist model of cognition. These terms will be clarified later on as they become more relevant. However, at this moment the best way to get started is by reviewing the literature on belief systems. This subsection presents and explains concepts such as propositions, representation, and systematicity that will serve as the building blocks of the coherentists or connectionist models that follow. Schwitzgebel (2015), summarizing philosophical research, defined belief as “the attitude we have, roughly, whenever we take something to be the case or regard it as true.” Put another way, to have a belief in something is to accept, to some degree, that something is true or not. Generally, in philosophical terms, it is assumed that

17 beliefs are formed about propositions. Propositions are “whatever it is that sentences express” (Schwitzgebel, 2015). Merriam-Webster provides a definition of propositions as, “an expression in language or signs of something that can be believed, doubted, or denied or is either true or false.” Based on these two definitions, this dissertation assumes that beliefs are attitudes about the degree of acceptability that a proposition is true. To provide a political example, to say that “Liberals believe that healthcare is a right” is to say that Liberals have an attitude that the statement ‘healthcare is a right’ is, to some degree, true. Just as the literature defines beliefs as propositional attitudes, it is common for theorists to view beliefs as something that people store in their minds. Schwitzgebel (2015) states that theorists have the feeling that when someone believes something they have a mental representation of that belief stored somewhere in their mind. Additionally, theorists believe that these mental representations of beliefs have a causal effect on behavior. For example, people often say things like: “Congressman Smith, Democrat from New York, voted for the Affordable Care Act because he believes that healthcare is a right.” Prominent research on political beliefs reflects these common assumptions. For example, Zaller (1992) compared the voter’s mind to a bucket that received considerations (a near synonym of propositions) from politicians and that when voters expressed political opinions, they sampled considerations from the bucket. Similarly, Lodge and Taber (2013) use a representational framework to build their theory of hot cognition. These assumptions about us having mental representations of beliefs are key to what are called representational approaches to belief. They are ubiquitous in both philosophy and political science (Schwitzgebel, 2015)1.

1There are other accounts of beliefs outside of representationalism. Dispositionalism is defined as the view that to believe in P is to have a behavioral disposition to act as if P is true. Interpretationism is the view that beliefs can be attributed to a person when they engage in patterns of behavior that

18 Just as representational approaches to belief are common in the field, it is also commonplace to assume that beliefs relate to and influence each other. That is to say, if someone has representations of various beliefs in his or her mind, these beliefs are structured in such a way that what he or she believes about one proposition influences his or her belief about other propositions. In the context of ideology, beliefs are thought to constrain one another in such a way. For example, assume that John Doe changes his belief that “A: the election will be close” to “B: the election will not be close.” The expectation would be for him to also change, to some degree, his belief that “A+C: the election will be close, therefore my vote matters more” to “B+C: the election will not be close, therefore my vote matters less”. In other words, a move from A to B should limit Joe Doe’s ability to believe A & C over B & C.

2.2.3 Summary

So what does it mean that ideologies are belief systems that provide constraint? Based on the literature on constraint and beliefs, this claim can be decomposed into three parts. First, ideologies offer their adopters sets of beliefs about various political propositions (tells them which political propositions are true or not). Second, ideologies limit the types of political beliefs that people can simultaneously hold in a way that knowing an ideologue’s belief on one issue helps predict their belief on another. Third, the political beliefs that ideologies form are structured and related to each other in a way that changing one should, to some degree, compel change on related beliefs.

can only be explained by attributing that person that belief. Finally, some view the concept of belief or the attribution of belief as little more than instrumentally useful simplifications; to these theorists, beliefs are not real, and talk of them is the result of a lack of scientific understanding of the mind.

19 2.3 How Ideologies are Created

Defining ideologies as belief systems that provide constraint allow me to focus on two questions about the creation of ideologies. Where do beliefs originate? And how do constraints between them arise? Converse (2006) provides a theory of the origin of beliefs. Writing about the creation and dissemination of ideologies, Converse wrote:

“the shaping of belief systems of any range into apparently logical wholes that are credible to large numbers of people is an act of creative synthesis characteristic of only a minuscule proportion of any population. Second, to the extent that beliefs are socially diffused from such creative sources, they tend to be diffused as “packages”, which consumers come to see as “natural” wholes, for they are presented in such terms (“If you believe this, then you will also believe that, for it follows in such-and-such ways”)” (Converse, 2006, pp. 8-9).

There are two ideas worth unpacking in the previous quote. First, the creation of ideologies is a task taken on by a small proportion of the population. Second, ideologies tend to be diffused as packages, whose particular structure is that of claim (“If you believe this, then you also believe this”) and reason (“because it follows in such-and-such ways”). This structure of claims and reasons (alternatively conclusions and premises) is the core structure of argumentation, and how ideological packages are not only disseminated but created. What remains of this section will discuss who creates ideologies. Section 2.4 discusses how argumentation leads to ideological constraint.

20 2.3.1 Who engages in creative synthesis?

In Converse’s seminal work, he claimed that a small proportion of the population created ideologies. This claim may seem controversial. However, there are reasons to accept it, if not as a complete model, at least as a useful simplification. First, of all Converse’s research and research that followed (particularly the American Voter and related works) provided significant reasons to doubt the degree to which average voters held stable, long-lasting, and consistent ideological constraints (Campbell et al., 1980). Additionally, Converse’s work suggested that people would not be able to satisfactorily explain why they believed what they believed (Converse, 2006). More recent research suggests that, when average people explain their beliefs, they are more often than not rationalizing, providing after-the-fact explanations, rather than reasoning, developing their expressed beliefs from prior beliefs (Lodge and Taber, 2013). Second, even assuming that average people can have well-developed and robust belief systems, there are reasons to believe that their ability to transmit their belief systems as packaged wholes is significantly smaller than the capacity of elites to do so. Elites, particularly media elites, have channels of communication that can target significantly more people than the average individual. Assuming that ideas spread based on the number of individuals one can reasonably reach, having access to channels of communication where one can target a larger audience will facilitate a person’s ability to transmit an idea. As such, even though creative synthesis could occur through day-to-day deliberation among ordinary people, the broad strokes of ideology are mainly defined by elites. Assuming that a small portion of the population is mostly responsible for the creation of ideologies, which small part of the population creates and diffuses ideolo- gies? Noel’s (2012) work and the second chapter of his 2014 book offers an answer

21 to this question. Noel identifies two potential groups that could engage in creative synthesis: politicians (through parties) or public intellectuals (through discourse and deliberation). Ultimately, he suggests that ideologies are predominantly created by public intellectuals and not parties.2 Noel bases his theory on a useful but often overlooked, distinction between parties and ideologies. While parties are coalitions of convenience among the electorally-minded, ideologies are informal coalitions of people with shared belief systems with sincerely held beliefs about how the political world should work. These differences lead Noel to believe that ideologies must be created outside of parties unless we truly believe that ideologies are nothing more than marketing and rationalization.

Political Parties

According to Noel, both parties and ideologies define coalitions. Parties create coalitions in pursuit of institutional power. Most of the time, they are coalitions between politicians who work together to maximize the benefits of legislation (Aldrich, 1995). Others include interest groups and policy demanders as integral elements of the party and focus on the pursuit of nominations (not office per se)asthe main goal of these coalitions (Bawn et al., 2012). Parties create coalitions through log-rolling, a process where actors with diverse interests find it better to ally with others to minimize policy losses while maximizing policy benefits. These coalitions exist because they “solve problems that current institutional arrangements do not solve and that politician have come to believe they cannot solve” (Aldrich, 1995,p. 22). They do not exist because individuals have shared views about the state of the

2 Here, much like Noel, the term public intellectuals groups together anyone whose work is to think and talk about politics, or who (successfully) devotes time and effort to thinking and talking about politics in public mediums. It is important to note that while there is a theoretical distinction between politicians and public intellectuals, in actuality, it is not impossible to have people who perform both roles simultaneously.

22 political world. How do parties create ideologies, then, if ideologies play no role in their origin? In explaining how parties could create ideologies, Noel points to a view in the field that ideologies serve a rationalizing role for parties (Noel, 2012, p. 157). One answer would be that parties find it useful to create ideologies as a way to reach uninformed voters (Downs, 1957). Ideologies, thus conceived, are little more than stories that parties find useful for marketing purposes. Ideologies provide reasonable explanations as to why party coalitions exist. They help disguise the fact that it is log-rolling, not an ideological commitment, that holds the party together. According to these theories, party members collaborate because doing so will net them greater expected returns in the legislative and democratic process, not because they are committed to each other’s projects or conception of the common interest. It is useful here to distinguish between two versions of this story. The first would be a theory of ideology as marketing. Put simply, ideology as marketing views ideologies as devoid of any meaning beyond their use as a marketing tool. Because ideologies are simply marketing tools, they do not constrain parties; instead, it is the logic of long coalitions3 that constrains party behavior and votes. Theories of ideology as marketing suggest that should the time ever come when a party would benefit from changing an issue stance, it should do so easily and with little cognitive cost. Hypocrisy, flip-flopping, or changes in policy stances would be cognitively easy because ideologies, under these theories, are not belief systems. To the degree that parties constrain the behavior of their members, it is because members of a party share an understanding that “if I scratch your back, you scratch mine.” In a very real sense, theories where ideology is pure rationalization by parties, assume that parties

3A concept introduced in Aldrich (1995), long coalitions are coalitions that persist because the long term benefits of repeated collaboration surpass the short term benefits of defection.

23 are non-ideological. Party members do not need to hold a set of shared beliefs, nor do they need to be constrained by one. The second version of these theories would be that ideologies start as nothing more than rationalizations of electoral or legislative coalitions. However, over time, continued participation within the constraints of this collaboration (repeated voting or advocacy of other member’s issue) would cause members of the coalition to internalize their rationalizations as an ideology. In this case, what starts as mere rationalization becomes an ideology that defines how members view and interpret the political world. As such, because members would begin to share a belief system, constraint in party behavior would arise not just from the logic of long coalitions but because deviations from ideology are likely to be psychologically and cognitively costly.

Public Intellectuals

While theories that point to parties as the creators of ideology are prominent, Noel rejects the idea that parties and politicians are responsible for the creation of ideologies. He argues portions of political science adopt the view that parties create ideologies because they confuse parties and ideologies (Noel, 2014, p. 14). To Noel, the confusion arises because of the similarities between parties and ideologies. They both create coalitions, but the nature of the coalitions they each create is different. While parties create coalitions of people united in pursuit of electoral or legislative successes, ideologies create coalitions of people united through a common belief system. Likewise, different types of actors create parties and ideologies. Politicians create parties, while public intellectuals create ideologies (Noel, 2012). Public intellectuals play a major role in the development of ideologies by publicly tying different issues and considerations into larger belief systems and disseminating them

24 to the public where they may find adherents (Converse, 2006; Noel, 2012, 2014). According to the literature, public intellectuals create constraint through public arguments and discourse. TV appearances, op-ed pieces, and articles in political magazines or websites are the tools of creative synthesis. In these spaces, pundits and intellectuals make a case for their policy positions and their reasoning behind them. Ideological constraint can arise out of direct linkage between positions (e.g., “The free movement of peoples across borders is analogous to the free flow of goods in a market; therefore we should not restrict immigration”). Additionally, constraint can arise out of discrete connections (e.g., A person watching MSNBC may hear Chris Hayes talk about one issue, Rachel Maddow speak of another, and because the viewer knows they are both liberals they assume the issue positions are somehow connected) (Noel, 2012, p.158). These actions, where public intellectuals present arguments as to why certain beliefs should entail (constrain) other beliefs, are a real world example of what Converse theorized when he said that “multiple idea-elements of a belief system are socially diffused from [...] creative sources, [...] as “packages,” which consumers come to see as “natural” wholes, for they are presented in such terms (“If you believe this, then you will also believe that, for it follows in such-and-such ways”)” (Converse 2006, p. 8).

Persuasion

In pointing to deliberation and debate as the tools through which public intellectuals create ideological constraint, Noel makes persuasion central to his theory of creative synthesis. When public intellectuals deliberate, they listen, borrow, and comment on each other’s work to determine which linkages and arguments are most persuasive. They then either modify or drop elements of their belief systems based on their accepting or rejecting other arguments they come across. This process of deliberation

25 and persuasion creates ideological patterns that repeat across individuals (Noel, 2012, 2014). Given how significant persuasion is in Noel’s theory, it is surprising that he fails to provide either a definition, mechanism, or measure of persuasiveness. The closest he comes to it is when he suggests that public intellectuals persuade each other by engaging in reflective equilibrium (Noel, 2014, p. 47). Reflective equilibrium is a tool that can be used to determine which beliefs are justifiable in light of how they relate to other strongly held beliefs. Under reflective equilibrium, beliefs are examined based on how they relate to each other. If a belief coheres (makes sense) with other accepted beliefs, there is little reason to revise it. However, once beliefs begin to contradict each other, that justifies a process of belief revision in an attempt to create harmony between incompatible beliefs (Rawls, 1971). The method of reflective equilibrium provides a method of justification for moral beliefs; and it does so without resorting to claims about irreversible or self-evident foundational beliefs from which to derive moral positions (Daniels, 2013; Rawls, 1971; Tatcher, N.d.).4 Instead, moral propositions are justified because of their coherence with intuitions about what is right or wrong. The rejection of foundational beliefs not subject to revision places reflective equilibrium as a coherentist theory of moral justification. Coherentist theories hold that individual beliefs are not justifiable in and of themselves, but as a function of their coherence with other beliefs in a system. In other words, when Noel states that creative synthesis occurs when public intellectuals engage in reflective equilibrium, that statement implies that ideology formation is coherentist process. Recognizing that creative synthesis is a form of coherence improvement is im- portant because it opens the door to examine coherence as separate from reflective

4I will return to the rejection of foundational beliefs in the discussion about coherentism.

26 equilibrium. Reflective equilibrium as a method, especially as presented by Rawls’ in A Theory of Justice, is a method meant to pursue philosophical justification. In layman’s terms, there’s an expectation that reflective equilibrium should lead to unmotivated and unbiased reasoning and beliefs. It is hard to see why, or how, all public intellectuals could engage in the platonic ideal of the method. Noel is uncomfortable about this conceptual slippage and states that it is unlikely pundits like Rush Limbaugh or Chris Hayes are being unbiased in their belief revision (Noel, 2015, pp. 13-14). Noel addresses his concerns by loosening his definition of reflective equilibrium and merely claiming that public intellectuals engage in a type of reflec- tion where they are subject to psychological biases and rational self-interest when determining which beliefs to keep or change. Adopting a broader coherentist view of creative synthesis could address these concerns.

2.3.2 Summary

Noel provides a theory of creative synthesis where public intellectuals are responsible for the creation and dissemination of ideologies. Public intellectuals create ideologies by arguing and deliberating among themselves about which political beliefs should go together and why. These ideological constraints spread to the degree that they are persuasive. So far, so good, but Noel’s theory is incomplete. Noel never provides a clear definition of what makes an argument persuasive. In not providing a definition he essentially black boxes the central mechanism of his theory. More surprising still, he never directly tests to see if public intellectuals ever actually persuade each other, or build on each other’s arguments. While he presents a theory where discourse and persuasion are central, he never examines his key assumptions. In drawing a direct line between Noel’s intuitions about reflective equilibrium

27 and coherence theories of justification, this dissertation provides a definition of persuasiveness. By drawing on the work of philosophers and cognitive scientists that have studied coherence, this dissertation operationalizes persuasiveness. More importantly still, the theories and methods I present in the following sections also allow me to test whether constraint, through persuasion, can arise as a side-effect of deliberation. In this, and other ways, this dissertation builds upon and improve our understanding of creative synthesis and ideologies.

2.4 Creative Synthesis as Coherence Improvement

Section 1 of this chapter defined ideology as belief systems that provide constraint. Beliefs are the degree to which someone accepts (or rejects) a proposition as true.5 Meanwhile, constraints are relationships between beliefs, where acceptance or rejec- tion of one leads to rejection or acceptance of others. Under a coherentist theory, ideological constraints arise when an argument linking two political beliefs together is accepted as true in a belief system. The persuasiveness of an argument is determined by how the beliefs entailed by the argument fit with the preexisting beliefs one holds. In short, beliefs entailed by an argument are accepted as true when they cohere with a preexisting belief system. The view that beliefs are justified based on their coherence with other accepted beliefs is known as coherentism. Coherentism is a theory of belief justification. It is a school of thought which states that beliefs are justifiable (or acceptable) if they cohere (make sense, fit together) with other beliefs that are themselves justified. Coherentism stands in

5 Note that, within the context of this paper, truth is treated as subjective. While there are coherentist theories of truth that treat “truth” as an objective characteristic that can be assigned to a proposition, doing so is not necessary to the theory. As such, “truth” is treated as roughly equivalent to “highly acceptable or likely, given a set of beliefs.” This particular definition is useful due to the assumption that public intellectuals are influenced by known or unknown biases in the development of their ideologies.

28 contrast with foundationalist theories of belief justification. Foundationalists argue that beliefs are justified if they are either self-evident or part of a chain of logical elaboration back to a self-evident truth. For the coherentist, self-evidence is not necessary to justify beliefs; rather all beliefs are open to reexamination and revision as part of a web of beliefs (Quine and Ullian, 1970; Rawls, 1971). As mentioned above, the method of reflective equilibrium can be understood as a coherentist theory of how to arrive at morally justifiable positions (Olsson, 2014; Thagard, 2000, p. 21). Under reflective equilibrium, beliefs are justified when they are compatible with both considered judgments of what is right or wrong and with intuitions of what would be just in specific examples. Olsson (2014) provides a useful example of belief justification through coherence. Imagine that there was a robbery, and someone receives the following propositions: (A) “John was at the crime scene at the time of the robbery”, (B) “John owns a gun of the type used by the robber,” and (C) “John deposited a large sum of money in his bank account the next day.” Olsson (2014) says that this set of propositions is intuitively coherent. The latter two propositions, taken together, makes one more likely to believe the first. If asked to defend a claim of A, one may rely on B and C. Despite these inclinations; A is not deductively derived from B and C in the way geometric propositions are presented as derived from geometric principles. So what is it that makes the above set of A, B, and C coherent? What establishes a relationship of coherence between propositions? I will begin by stating that between any two propositions in a belief system there can be one of three types of coherence relationships. First, two propositions could be said to cohere (or have a positive constraint) with each other. Second, two propositions can incohere (or have a negative constraint) with each other. Finally, two propositions can be said to have no coherence relationship (no constraint) with each other (Thagard, 2000). Positive

29 and negative constraints are the main focus of coherence theories (mostly because a lack of constraint between propositions means that there is no influence from one to the other). Each of these relationships represents different ways propositions can constrain each other. In the context of a creative synthesis, where constraints arise through argumentation, each type of constraint accounts for a particular kind of argument that links beliefs together.

2.4.1 Positive Constraints or Coherence

In a belief system, two propositions constrain one another when belief in one influences belief of the other. Ideological constraint exists when acceptance or rejection of political beliefs influence the acceptance or rejection of other beliefs. Positive constraint exists when acceptance of a belief influences us to accept another belief; or when the rejection of one entails rejection of the other. For example, saying that “X believes in lower taxes because X believes taxation is akin to forced labor” is to say that X’s belief on lower taxes positively constraints their belief that taxation is a form of forced labor. Positive constraints between propositions are satisfied when the propositions are either jointly accepted or rejected. So what is it that causes some propositions to positively constrain one another? Thagard suggests that positive constraints between propositions exist when one can either deduce some propositions from others (a relationship of deduction)or when one can explain some propositions with others (a relationship of explanation). Brandom, on his work on inferentialism6, said that propositions could have two types of compatibility relations between them: deductive inference and inductive inference. According to Brandom, a commitment to a proposition P entails a commitment to all other propositions Q you could deduce from P. Commitment to P also entails

6A concept similar enough to coherentism that I shall talk of it as a version of it.

30 commitment to all propositions R that P is deduced from. Meanwhile, a commitment and entitlement to a proposition P,7 entails an entitlement to a proposition Q that you could induce from P (Wanderer, 2008). In other words, if one can deduce a proposition from other propositions, one should be more likely to accept or reject both propositions as true. Likewise, if one can use some proposition to explain another proposition, one should be more inclined to accept or reject both propositions as true. In Olsson’s example, people are unable to appropriately deduce the proposition that (A) “John was at the crime scene at the time of the robbery” from (B) “John owns a gun of the type used by the robber” and (C) “John deposited a large sum of money in his bank account the next day.” However, people can present (A) as a reasonable conclusion based on inductive inference from (B) and (C). People intuit that the probability of (A) being true is somewhat higher if (B) and (C) are also true. When deliberating, positive constraint can be expressed as a variation of “If one believes X, they should believe Y.”

2.4.2 Negative Constraints or Incoherence

Negative constraints are harder to explain. A negative constraint exists when acceptance of one proposition should make rejection of another more likely. There’s a temptation to say that two propositions incohere only if they blatantly contradict each other. Such a definition would mean that any proposition P only incoheres with any proposition not-P. For example, “It is 5:00 PM in Vera Cruz” would only incohere with “It is not 5:00 PM in Vera Cruz.” Thagard (2000) notes the difficulty in such a strict definition, mainly that it does not allow for contradictions that arise from the meaning of a sentence. For example, if incoherence can only exist between

7Entitlement being that you are normatively allowed to commit to a proposition.

31 P’s and not-P’s, then people should be able to justifiably and simultaneously hold the beliefs that “It is 5:00 PM is Vera Cruz, Mexico” and that “It is 7:00 PM is Vera Cruz, Mexico”. A better definition of negative constraint appears in Brandom’s work. Brandom states that incompatibility between propositions occurs when commitment to one proposition entails a prohibition of entitlement to another (Wanderer, 2008). What this means is that when someone claims that “it is 5:00 PM in Vera Cruz”, they also forfeit the right to simultaneously say “it is 7:00 PM in Vera Cruz”.

2.4.3 The Language Game: How Constraints are Socially

Constructed

Having defined constraints, how can one determine what can be inferred from what? Brandom’s work on inferentialism provides an answer to this question. Brandom begins his theory by stating that propositions derive their meaning from the inferences one can draw from them or towards them (Wanderer, 2008). So far, this is similar to the common coherentist viewpoint. Brandom, however, notes that social practices determine the inferences one can draw from one proposition to another (Wanderer, 2008). Wanderer (2008), summarizing Brandom’s work, notes that the very act of language can be conceived as the practice of giving and asking reasons while others make judgments on the appropriateness of the claims and reasons. Brandom presents this practice as a game to illustrate how negative and positive constraints are created. In the game of giving and asking for reasons there are two types of players. The player and the scorekeeper. The game has the following components: an infinite set of tokens and boxes that each player uses to keep track of each other player’s score. Additionally, the game has rules about the relationship between each type of token

32 in such a way that some tokens entail entitlement or commitment to others. A turn goes as follows (Wanderer, 2008).

1. The player whose turn it is will place a token P in front of them, in so doing the player commits themselves to it.

2. The scorekeepers (a role all people in the game occupy) will then treat the player as committed to P by placing the token corresponding to P in the player’s commitment box.

3. The scorekeepers will then add other tokens that P entails to the player’s commitment box. The player is now considered to have also played these tokens and being committed to them.

4. The scorekeepers also add other tokens that entail P to the player’s entitlement box. The player is now considered to be entitled (and therefore allowed to commit) to the tokens in this box.

5. Finally, the scorekeepers also subtract from the gamer’s entitlement box all those tokens that are incompatible with tokens in the player’s commitment box.

The wonder of the game of language presented above, is that it describes our everyday use of language. For example, consider a young child who states that they “like candidate X ” because “X is a good person,” and that “X is a good person” because “my parents like X.” According to Brandom’s theory, the kid who mimics their parents’ political preferences is an example of the language game. When the child says that they “like candidate X ”, their audience of family members will treat the child as committed and entitled to this belief. Additionally, they may treat him as entitled or committed to the beliefs “Xisagoodperson”, and that “my parents

33 like X.” Each different person in the conversation may treat the child as committed or entitled to differing sets of propositions, but given prevailing cultural norms, it is safe to assume some significant overlap. By accepting the inferences, commitments, and entitlements of other people, we reinforce the constraints they create between their beliefs. In fact, Brandom notes that by being explicit about the entailments we think exist between different propositions, and by reacting differently to each of these possible entailments we reinforce or debilitate them. In this example, an adult, could treat the kid’s inferences as illegitimate by stating that just because their parents support X,thatisnota valid reason for liking X or thinking X is a good person. In fact, we would expect such criticism to become more common as the child grows older. To say that what determines when a proposition constrains another is the judgment of social peers (scorekeepers in the game of asking and giving reasons) may seem disappointing. However, just as there is no need for self-evident truths in a coherentist framework, and what is justified depends on its fit with other beliefs; what makes a good inference is determined by what people internalize through their social practices as a proper inference. To quote from Wanderer’s review of Brandom,

“To treat a material inference as good is to update the score in the manner just indicated [in the game above]. According to normative phenomenalism, we should say that to be a good material inference is for the inference to be appropriately treated as a good one. In our case, therefore, a good material inference is an inference that is appropriately treated as one.” (Wanderer, 2008, p. 116).

34 2.4.4 Individual and Social Coherence

So far, this discussion has taken liberties in addressing coherence as both an individual and societal phenomenon. This Section will explain how the social act of recognizing or rejecting someone’s inferences as valid can lead to the creation of ideologies. Section 1 mentioned that ideologies are belief systems that constrain political beliefs and repeat across a portion of the population. The previous subsection defined different types of constraint. This Section will explain how these constraints can repeat across individuals. As mentioned when summarizing Brandom’s inferentialism, what makes for a good inferential connection (a constraint between propositions) is that it be treated as such by other people. The act of an inference being dealt with as appropriate is a normative judgment. It is a judgment made by individuals in their role as scorekeepers in the game of language. Often, these judgments carry consequences in social practice. In the case of political ideology, making a wrong inference carries the risk of social rejection, the shame of correction, or of institutional punishment. Rep. Joe Heck (R-NV) provides a good example of how making a wrong inference carries the risk of punishment. Rep. Joe Heck (R-NV), after a videotape surfaced where Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women, said:

“My hope is that this will not divide us and that we can unite behind principles. Republican principles. We deserve a candidate that can ask themselves at the end of the day did I live my life with honor and do I deserve to be elected President Of The United States. I believe our only option is to formally ask Mr. Trump to step down and to allow Republicans the opportunity to elect someone who will provide us with the strong leadership so desperately needed and one that Americans

35 deserve.”

The audience, a crowd of Republican voters, booed. What happened in that audience can be presented as a version of the language game as specified above.

1. Heck, as the player, played the token P1: “We deserve a President with Republican values.”

2. The audience, as scorekeeper, treated Heck as committed to this proposition. By not booing, the audience treated the commitment as acceptable in this instance.

3. Heck then committed himself to the token P2 : “We should unite behind Republican principles.” Though Heck didn’t link this to P1 explicitly, P1 could be inferred from P2. In the game, the audience treated Heck as committed and entitled to P1 and P2.

4. Heck then committed himself to P3 : “Trump should step down.” The audience responded by booing. Again, Heck never explicitly said “P3 because of P1 and P2”, but one can infer that Heck was making this claim. The audience, as scorekeeper, rejected that Heck made a proper inference to P3. Nevertheless, they treated him as believing P3, P2, and P1.

Heck made an argument against Trump based on what he considered to be proper inferences from Republican beliefs. His audience rejected his inferences as proper. Reporters have assumed that part of the reason why Trump faced little opposition from the Republican establishment is that Trump’s popularity with the base of the GOP made opposing him dangerous (e.g.,: Friedman, 2016b; Haberman, 2016). If this is the case, the sanction of public opposition to Trump helped create a shared

36 set of appropriate inferences (of constraints) by defining among Republicans which inferences were acceptable and which were not. Noel never references Brandom’s theory of inferentialism. Likewise, he never uses the idea of social sanction to state how public intellectuals generate shared belief systems. Instead (much like he does not mention coherentism, but does mention reflective equilibrium) he analogizes the process of creative synthesis with the process of peer review.

“I model the interplay via the process of peer review, in which a small set of actors try to work out the best positions on a set of issues. They offer up “ideologies” that prescribe issue positions, and these ideologies are judged by another in the set. That process leads those actors to change their own beliefs about the issue under consideration. This sets up a tournament of ideologies in which some ideologies survive and end up persuading some members, but other ideologies persuade others” (Noel, 2015, pp. 1-2)

The analogy to peer review fits —coheres— with Brandom’s concept of score- keeping. Scholars submit research, with all the claims, inferences, and reasons both explicit and implicit that the research entails for reviews from peers. The reviewers evaluate the claims, reasons, and inferences in the research and evaluate them. This evaluation makes its way back to the researcher, who then faces the pressure of addressing any inferences the reviewer objects to —either by clarifying, presenting more reasons, or modifying them— with the goal of improving their chances of being accepted and published. The institution of peer review, in this way, helps to create a set of inferences that are socially accepted and repeated across the research community.

37 Likewise, when individuals make their inferences public, they open themselves to criticism by their peers. Their audience will give signals, either explicitly or implicitly, that the inferences made were right or wrong. When inferences are judged positively, they are more likely to spread. When not, they are less likely to. In this way, social practices —the language game— can help create shared belief systems out of the inferences of individuals.

2.4.5 Coherence Improvement

The central claim of this paper is that ideologies develop through a process of coher- ence improvement. Having presented the concept of coherence and how constraints are socially constructed, I will now talk about how coherence is improved. Under- standing coherence improvement is significant because it is the way people choose between competing interpretations of the world. Thagard (2000) calls situations where people have to choose between competing sets of interpretations coherence problems. Coherence problem arise when people have to decide what set of beliefs and inferences to accept and reject so as to have the most coherent belief system possible. I am going to use an example of how a coherence problem may arise. Imagine some conservatives arguing about how to solve homelessness. Imagine Conservative A presents the following set of arguments and inferences:

1 “Homelessness is a problem for the city” and

2 “The homeless exhibit a set of criminal behavior.”

Conservative A then concludes that because of 1 and 2,

3 “We should implement a policy of incarceration to reduce the homelessness problem.”

38 Conservative B accepts propositions 1 and 2, but rejects proposition 3 by committing to the proposition

4 “The problem of homelessness cannot be solved through incarceration.”

Conservative B accepts 4 and rejects 3 because

5 “Maladaptive behaviors are not reflective of innate character but hard circum- stances.”8

Conservative B, by publicly rejecting 3 and accepting 4 because of 5, claims that there are two relationships of incoherence—negative constraint. One is between 3 and 4. and the other is between 3 and 5. Conservative B then concludes that because of 4 and 5

6 “We should give the homeless permanent shelter to solve the problem of homelessness.”

A third conservative, Conservative C, replies to Conservatives B and A that they accept propositions 1, 2, 4, and 5 — consequently rejecting 3. However, unlike Conservative B, Conservative C does not accept proposition 6 because:

7 “Giving away homes to the homeless smacks of nanny-state liberalism” and

8 “Conservatives should encourage people to rely on their own labor instead of on welfare to do better.”

Conservative C argues that, because of propositions 7 and 8, Conservative A and B should believe that

8 As a scorekeeper one could attribute to B a commitment or entitlement to propositions such as “You should not incarcerate people whose criminal behavior is due to circumstance and not nature.” However, for the sake of not having an infinitely long example, I will stick to what was explicitly said by these imaginary conservatives.

39 1 2 10 9

3 5 7 8

4 6

Red bolded lines represent negative constraints, green lines positive constraints.

Figure 2.1: Graph representation of “Homelessness Problem” example.

9 “We can help resolve homelessness by coordinating between city governments and private industry to create temporary jobs for the homeless” because

Additionally, C argues that because of 2 and 5

10 “The income from work will solve the circumstances that lead to bad behavior.”

The negative and positive constraints between all these ten propositions can be graphed (see Figure 2.1), according to the inferences made by these fictional conservatives, to get an idea of the coherence problem. How does a conservative who accepts the inferences made by Conservatives A, B, and C as appropriate, decide which of these propositions to accept and which to reject? How can they choose given that, because of the negative constraints between some of them, they are cognitively and normatively discouraged from accepting all of them? To generalize beyond this example, how does someone choose the most coherent set of beliefs when there are competing arguments? Answering this question is central to my claim that ideologies are created through a process of coherence improvement. Thagard centers his research on coherence around how to solve coherence problems like the one above. Thagard suggests that coherence problems can be solved (and

40 coherence can be improved) by satisfying the constraints that make up the problem. Thagard (2000) defines coherence problems as follows:

1. There are elements which are representations of things like concepts, proposi- tions, parts of images or sound.

2. The elements can cohere or incohere with each other.

3. Two elements that cohere have a positive constraint between them; while two elements that incohere have a negative constraint between them.

4. Elements have to be divided into two sets. Those that are accepted and those that are rejected.

5. Positive constraints are satisfied by either accepting or rejecting both of the constrained elements.

6. Negative constraints are satisfied by accepting one of the constrained elements while rejecting the other.

7. Solving a coherence problem consists of dividing the set of elements into accepted and rejected sets in a way that satisfies the most constraints.

Returning to the example in Figure 2.1, a person could solve the coherence problem by partitioning the set of 10 propositions in the homelessness example into accepted and rejected categories. They want the partition to satisfy as many constraints in the set as possible. Doing this would maximize the coherence of the set.9One can intuit how Thagard’s solution is appealing and believable. In the example above, I assume most would consider a person who expressed mutual belief

9Finding a solution is computationally difficult. The example above, containing, only 10 propositions, has 210 = 1024 possible partitions. Chapter 4 uses a conenctionist algorithm that approximates an optimal solution to coherence problems in a computationally efficient manner.

41 in both the efficacy and inadequacy of incarceration as a solution to the issue of homelessness to be incoherent. In fact, the risk of social sanction and cognitive dissonance would discourage such a person from either expressing or holding both beliefs simultaneously.

2.5 A Coherentist Theory of Creative Synthesis

So far this chapter has presented the concepts and theory necessary to understand the development of ideologies through coherence improvement. In this section, I want to tie all of the previous sections together to provide an overview of how to think about creative synthesis as a process of coherence improvement. I do this by presenting a theoretical story of how creative synthesis would occur in a simplified world. Assume a new issue becomes salient. Seeing the issue as one worthy of public deliberation, public intellectuals may decide to write editorials or talk about the issue on the air (Noel, 2014). In deciding to deliberate about the issue, public intellectuals will try to make persuasive arguments. They want to be persuasive because it will allow them to convince others to view the world as they do. To be persuasive, public intellectuals will try to determine which positions and arguments make the most sense together—cohere—given their underlying beliefs and the beliefs of their audience. The public intellectual attempts to develop an argument that coheres with their audience, because then the audience is more likely to accept the intellectual’s arguments as true. Once the public intellectual presents their argument, the audience has to make two decisions. The first decision is whether to accept or reject the arguments they received as true. The second decision is whether to make their acceptance

42 or rejection of the intellectual’s argument public. The first decision—whether to accept or reject the arguments—depends on how the propositions in the argument cohere with preexisting beliefs. Members of the audience will accept or reject the propositions in a way that maximizes the overall coherence of their belief system (Thagard, 2000). Whether they accept or reject the arguments, the propositions in those arguments propagate to these individuals and become part of their belief systems. This propagation of arguments and propositions eventually leads to the creation or modification of their ideology. The second decision audience members have to make is whether or not to make their acceptance or rejection of the arguments they received public. If they make their acceptance or rejection public, they will occasionally be making explicit the reasoning or inferences that led them to accept or reject the intellectual’s argument (Wanderer, 2008). In making their reasoning public, actors are not only adding to the pool of propositions on which to make judgments but passing judgment on the types of inferences (links, constraints) that can be made from some propositions to others. In so doing they contribute to the creation of shared belief systems, by making some constraints acceptable within their ideological community and others not. In this story, ideological constraint comes from two sources, both operating to maximize coherence. The first, internal, is coherence improvement at the individual level, where people try to hold and express coherent beliefs. The second is collective, as groups decide which inferences are acceptable to hold and express, by making normative judgments on the inferences made publicly by individuals. The first, Noel analogizes to reflective equilibrium, the second to peer review (Noel, 2015). They both are examples of coherence improvement, and central to my claim that ideologies develop through a process of coherence improvement. I build and improve on Noel’s theory by providing the mechanism through which, and a theory of how, coherence

43 improvement can create and lead to the development of ideologies.

2.5.1 Why Engage in Coherence Improvement?

So far this chapter has mentioned that developing coherent beliefs and arguments helps people be persuasive; persuasive in the sense that their claims and premises are said to cohere and derive from each other. The question remains, however, what motivates individuals to develop convincing arguments. Here I present two possible reasons. First, persuasive ideologies help create political coalitions that can influence public policy. Second, we are motivated to develop coherent ideologies to avoid cognitive dissonance. Noel argues that public intellectuals create ideologies in the hope of gaining adherents, people who sincerely hold to the ideology as an appropriate interpretation of political reality Noel (2012). By gaining followers, opinion leaders can have influence over which policies a party supports. This influence can be gained by promising (and successfully) delivering votes to a party in exchange for policy concessions. As an example, Noel points to the development of civil rights as a political movement. A pro-civil rights ideology developed among progressive intellectuals decades before it was reflected in the roll-call votes of the American parties. Noel argues that the partisan division we see today on civil rights is the result of the ability of ideologues to influence the behavior of the parties by demonstrating that there were people who would be motivated to vote on their side of the issue. Another reason why we engage in coherence improvement is that people are psy- chologically predisposed to be cognitively consistent. Cognitive consistency theories argue that people are motivated to have consistent beliefs, and that inconsistency between beliefs leads to a state of mental discomfort. This state of mental discomfort motivates individuals to resolve the discomfort by making their beliefs consistent. A

44 subset of cognitive consistency theories called cognitive dissonance theories adds that inconsistencies between behavior and beliefs can lead to a state of mental distress which tends to be solved through belief revision or, more rarely, behavior change (Festinger, 1957; Jamieson, 2001; Kahan, 2010). Ultimately there are many reasons why people may engage in the process of coherence improvement. The benefits of being coherent are numerous. One makes more sense when arguing with others if they are coherent. Being coherent helps one’s arguments be more persuasive. Having a coherent belief system, and being coherent in thought and action, reduces cognitive dissonance. All of these benefits should encourage people, particularly public intellectuals, to engage in coherence improvement.

2.6 Conclusion

The main claim of this chapter is that creative synthesis is best understood as a process of coherence improvement. Ideologies are more than convenient stories to mobilize voters; they are belief systems central to people’s cognition of politics. How people interpret, understand, and interact with the political world is informed by their ideologies and beliefs. Ideologies constrain behavior and influence it in non- strategic ways. Strategic actors, hoping to mold ideologies in a politically beneficial way must contend with the fact that such shifts are unlikely to be accepted and successful unless they provide a more coherent alternative than what already exists. This theory stands in contrast to others that present ideologies as a construct of parties. These theories suggest that ideologies should be easily malleable; that they can change whenever strategic considerations call for it. Instead of looking to parties as the creators of ideologies I look to public intellectuals. Building on

45 Noel (2014), I point to public intellectuals as the main driver of ideological change in politics. Public intellectuals create ideologies by engaging in open discussions about politics. Their public deliberations make clear to the public which beliefs the intellectual thinks should constraint other beliefs. Eventually, the introduction of new arguments and considerations into these discussions will create a coherence problem. A coherence problem arises when there are competing interpretations about which beliefs are true and how they constrain one another. When a coherence problem arises, like-minded public intellectuals have to decide how to make sense of these competing sets of explanations and beliefs. I argue that public intellectuals solve these problems by trying to maximize the coherence of their beliefs. Coherence is maximized by accepting or rejecting propositions that fit together while rejecting propositions that contradict other accepted beliefs. So what does my theory tell have to say about how the GOP became a restrictionist party on immigration? In the case of immigration, the following chapter will provide evidence that the restrictionist position arose out of linkages made between judgments made about immigrants coming from Latin America and Asia and long-standing conservative positions on welfare and culture. These beliefs included a view of immigrants as threatening, opposition to welfare on racial and economic grounds, and a view of American culture as predominantly White. Given these beliefs; the coherent position became that immigration ought to be reduced because increased immigration brought with it increased demand for welfare and cultural accommodations. These conclusions clashed with business-friendly conservatives —who favor immigration as a source of low-wage labor. Conservatives attempted to solve these contradictions by differentiating between legal and illegal immigrants. Legal immigrants were presented as good and part of the American fabric. Meanwhile, illegal immigrants were presented as being the source of all that was wrong with immigration (Gimpel

46 and Edwards, 1999). However, this differentiation has not made its way to the public and, increasingly, conservative voters began to see both legal and illegal immigration as part of the same processes and problems (Abrajano and Hajnal, 2015). Ultimately, conservative ideology on immigration is almost entirely defined by threat narratives. In the conservative belief system, immigrants are poor and prone to socially undesirable behavior. They refuse to integrate and threaten America’s cultural cohesion. They likely support Democrats and are clients of the welfare state. Given these beliefs, the only plausible solution to the immigrant problem is to reduce immigration, to limit immigrants’ access to public services, and to oppose programs of cultural accommodation (Abrajano and Hajnal, 2015). A coherentist framework helps explain why the GOP has been unable to become a party that is more appealing to minorities and young voters(Republican National Committee, 2013). They failed because for decades the conservative movement and the Republican party has used racial appeals (at first explicit, then implicit) to attract a white base motivated by racial resentment (see HoodIII,KiddandMorris, 2012; Kruse, 2007). In so doing, whether they wanted to or not, they made the dim buzz of white supremacy a cornerstone of their base’s support of conservative policies (Williamson, Skocpol and Coggin, 2011; Gilens, 1999). What this means is that changes to conservative ideology that seek to rid the movement of anti-minority beliefs are liable to fail. That is unless this alternative conservatism can better explain and cohere than current conservative ideology. Shifts such as this will likely require efforts to undermine racial conservative beliefs by appealing to other strongly held beliefs (Feinberg and Willer, 2015). In this task, relying on the preferences of business elites and libertarians may help, given that they are more cosmopolitan and less restrictionist in nature (Jeong et al., 2011). However, the question then becomes whether the majority of the conservative base would care for conservative economic

47 policies devoid of racial appeals. The following chapter is a literature review of conservatives and the immigrant threat narrative. I will present it in such a way that it gives an overview on how to understand this literature in coherentist terms. It will also serve to identify which beliefs and inferences are central to conservative ideology on immigration. Identifying these beliefs and inferences is necessary to test whether my theory helps explain conservative belief on immigration.

48 Chapter 3

Fear of Immigrants: How Conservatives Became Immigration Restrictionists

Immigrants of the ’90s are twice as likely as the native born to lack high-school education. Forget their indifference to learning our language, history and customs, many are qualified only for the most menial positions.

Don Feder, Open Immigration is Ruining U.S. Society, published in Human Events

3.1 Introduction

Immigration was not always a partisan issue. In the last few decades, the Republican party and its supporters in the mass public have taken an increasingly oppositional stance to immigration. Meanwhile, the Democratic party and its supporters have become more supportive of immigration and immigrants. What caused this divergence of views on immigration? In this chapter, I review the literature on partisan divisions on immigration and

49 what caused them. As I review this literature, I will frame it around my theory of creative synthesis as a process of coherence improvement. According to my theory, as issues become salient, public intellectuals will develop narratives around these matters. In developing these narratives, they will attempt to define the issue, what problems it causes, and how these problems can be solved (Noel, 2012, 2014). As competing and parallel narratives develop, public intellectuals—be they pundits, politicians, or the interested public—will come to accept portions of the narrative into their ideologies and reject others (Zaller, 1992). Which ones they accept or reject will depend on how these arguments cohere with each other and their pre- existing beliefs. Positions that cohere–—make sense together and within a larger belief system—–become accepted as part of the ideology while those that do not are rejected (Thagard, 1989, 2000). Previous research shows that conservative’s move towards immigration restric- tionism was driven, in large part, by changes in the public and within the Republican Party. One of these changes was a substantial shift to the right among white voters concerned about immigration. Another change was polarization among Republicans and Democrats in Congress around the issue of immigration. The first cause, the substantial shift among white voters towards the right, occurred as immigration became an increasingly salient issue. These shifts were the results of increasing immi- gration, demographic changes caused by the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, and a pervasive threat narrative that negatively stereotyped new immigrants. These changes, coupled with increasing differences between Democratic and Republican Party policy on immigration, made the GOP a more appealing option for white voters who saw immigration as a threat (Abrajano and Hajnal, 2015). The second cause was that by the 70’s congressional debate over immigration policy began to polarize. This polarization was driven, in part, by the politics of immigrant populations in

50 cities. Immigrant communities tended to be Democratic and provided a consistent base of support for the party. These populations also tend to be more liberal in their view of welfare politics. Their welfare liberalism became influenced conservative views on immigration causing debates on the issue to focus on redistributive policies following the 1965 Immigration Act. The 1965 bill shifted legal immigration channels away from wealthier Western Europe to poorer regions of the world, like South America and Asia. These populations were more liable to need government assis- tance when moving to America and Republicans worried that changing demographics of immigrants would give Democrats an electoral advantage. Additionally, during this time Democrats approved costly refugee resettlement programs that the GOP publicly opposed on economic grounds. For these reasons, Republicans in Congress began to see immigration and welfare policy as intrinsically tied together (Gimpel and Edwards, 1999). In short, an immigrant threat narrative—that immigrants were poor, that they lowered the wages of American workers, that they were overly reliant on welfare, that they were prone to commit crime, and that they were scornful of American culture—cohered with conservatives’ and white voters’ pre-existing beliefs that the welfare state was overly generous towards “undeserving” minorities, that American culture was European in nature, and that criminals should be punished. These linkages led conservatives to adopt restrictionist policies against immigration and to oppose multiculturalism as the most coherent ideology available to them.

3.2 Immigration and the White Vote

One of the reasons why conservatives became restrictionists is as a result of the white vote. As immigration increased, particularly during the 90’s, white voters became

51 more and more restrictionists on their views on immigration. Abrajano and Hajnal (2015) provide a comprehensive look at the effects that immigration has had on the white vote in America. They argue that as immigration became an increasingly salient issue, white voters began to perceive immigrants as a threat and turned to the GOP as the party most likely to address their concerns. This move to the Republican Party took place within the context of massive de- mographic changes directly tied to immigration. For the last fifty years, immigration and the descendants of immigrants have driven the majority of population growth in the US (Pew Research Center, 2015). This increase will continue for the next fifty years as well. In 2014, the Census Bureau provided figures that the United States will become a majority-minority country by 2044. By 2044 non-Hispanic whites will no longer make up the majority of the population. By 2044, Census figures predict that non-Hispanic Whites will make up 49.7% of the population. Meanwhile, Hispanics are expected to be 25.1%, African Americans 12.7%, and Asians 7.9%of the population. At this time the largest group of immigrants comes from Asian countries. However, the immigration wave of the 90’s and 2000’s came mainly from Latin America —particularly Mexico. It is this wave that drove much of the demographic changes and currently drives policy discussion around immigration. Demographic change on this scale can be shocking; consider what these numbers meant for a person living in a region with high levels of immigration. First of all, there is day to day changes as non-Hispanic white Americans experience increased contact with people of different races. As immigration increased, new businesses and restaurants opened that catered to the cultural needs of the immigrant population. Schools suddenly had to accommodate an increasing number of non-native speakers. Cities, businesses, and public agencies began to provide bilingual services. Groups representing these new immigrants began to flex their political muscle. These groups

52 began to run and endorse candidates for office. As all of this happened, people could react in one of two ways. People could have thought that this was the realization of America as a land of immigrants. Alternatively, they could have thought that these newcomers were a danger to them, their pockets, and their culture. There is ample evidence to show that the second reaction was commonplace among white voters. As happened during past waves of immigration, a threat narrative about new immigrants emerged (Abrajano and Hajnal, 2015). Research shows that immigration is usually portrayed negatively by the media. At the peak of the current immigration wave, media portrayal of immigrants —particularly those from Latin America— was overwhelmingly negative. The media would portray immigrants as an invading force, with no regard for American culture, and unwilling to assimilate (Chavez, 2013). Cultural threat narratives presented multiculturalism and bilingual accommodation as the first signs of a systematic attack against American culture (Brimelow, 1996; Huntington, 2005). These supposed cultural deficiencies reinforced and cohered with negative stereotypes of Hispanics as poor, uneducated, on welfare, and likely to exhibit criminal, or socially undesirable behavior (Borjas, 1999; Brimelow, 1996; Valentino, Brader and Jardina, 2013). As white voters experienced increasing demographic change and threat narratives about immigrants, they began to see the GOP as the party best suited to address their concerns. This change in views occurred, in part, because anxiety about immigration influences —Abrajano and Hajnal (2015) use the term “permeates”— other political issues in a conservative direction. Immigration influences political preferences in a conservative direction because large parts of American politics, particularly welfare politics, are racialized. Theories on the racialization of issues in American politics have mostly arisen in the context of civil rights and views about African Americans. This line of research provides evidence that negative views about

53 African Americans can lead to lower levels of support for welfare policies (Gilens, 1999; Wright, 1976). Likewise, evidence suggests that negative views about the work ethic of Hispanics result in lower support for welfare programs in states (Fox, 2004). Moreover, research shows that concerns about overcrowding of welfare resources by low-skilled immigrants lead to negative attitudes towards low-skilled immigrants (Hainmueller and Hiscox, 2010). For voters, negative representations of immigrants and immigration in the media and politics reinforce these linkages (Brader, Valentino and Suhay, 2008). These linkages helped drive voters to the GOP, in part because voters saw the GOP a party that would reduce immigrant’s access to welfare. In short, threat narratives about immigrants cohered with preexisting beliefs. Beliefs that the welfare state is too generous to minorities, that multiculturalism threatens American culture, and that criminals should be punished. These beliefs have been a staple of Conservative dialogue since the civil rights realignment (Gilens, 1999). These beliefs made the GOP the logical home for voter experiencing white backlash because the anxieties and policy preferences of these voters and the stated positions of the GOP cohered. Just as policy racialization made the GOP the natural home for voters experienc- ing racial backlash, there is cause to believe that preexisting attitudes associated with conservatism drove both white anxiety over immigration and a shift of white voters to the Republican Party. Research shows that attitudes like ethnocentrism, authoritarianism, and racial prejudice influence public opinion on immigration and related issues in a conservative direction(Abrajano and Hajnal, 2015; Kinder and Kam, 2010; Citrin, Reingold and Green, 1990; Per´ez, 2010). These attitudes are also closely associated with general conservative orientations at the individual level (Graham, Haidt and Nosek, 2009). In the current party system, the Republican Party is seen as the more conservative of the two main parties; making the GOP the

54 natural home for voters whose ethnocentrism, authoritarianism or racial resentment had been activated by the current immigration wave.

3.3 Immigration and the Republican Party

While white voters experiencing racial anxiety helped move conservatism toward immigration restrictionism, they were not the only reason why conservatism rejected open immigration policies. Partisan polarization in Congress also played a significant role in this shift. Before the 70’s, changes to immigration policy enjoyed bipartisan support in Congress. By the late 70’s however, votes became more partisan. The polarization was driven in part because debates about immigration were linked to debates about welfare policy and social policy. This linkage was the result of changes in the demographic characteristics of immigrants after the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act. The 1965 Act changed how immigration quotas were assigned and shifted the main sources of immigration to the U.S. from Europe to Asia and Latin America. Asian and Latin American immigrants tend to be poorer than European immigrants. Being poorer, they came to be viewed by Republicans as reliant on welfare policies and costly to the country. Likewise, the racial identity of Asian and Hispanic immigrants made them a target of discrimination and beneficiaries of civil rights advances. By the 70’s, the Republican Party had defined itself as opposed to further advances in civil rights. As the linkages between immigration, welfare, and social policy strengthened, the Republican became more restrictionist in nature. Congressional polarization on immigration was the result of the linking together of immigration and welfare policy Gimpel and Edwards (1999). Divisions between Democrats and Republicans on the issue of welfare predated divisions on the issue of immigration. Ever since the New Deal, Democrats have been identified as the

55 party in favor of the welfare state while Republicans are seen as more skeptical of its benefits. The linkages between immigration and welfare were driven, in part, by demographic changes caused by the 1965 Immigration Act. The 1965 Act changed how immigration quotas were assigned and led to a shift in the sources of immigration. The main sources of immigration to the US moved from Europe to Asia and Latin America. Immigrants from Asia and Latin America were poorer than immigrants from Europe; and even though these immigrants would achieve similar levels of economic success as Americans two or three generations after settling, they were seen as taking advantage of a generous welfare state (Borjas, 1999). By the 70’s Republicans began to see immigrants as a consumer base for the welfare state and, as such, natural supporters of the Democratic Party (Gimpel and Edwards, 1999). Republicans —being traditionally opposed to welfare— began to link opposition to immigration and opposition to welfare policy as coherent elements of their belief system. The Republican Party’s opposition to immigration was not solely defined by the party’s opposition to redistributive policies. One of the interesting aspects of post-1965 immigration was that it took place amidst the Civil Rights era and the Great Society program. Within this context, accommodations for immigrant populations —such as bilingual education, ease of access to welfare, and affirmative action— became common; particularly in those states that more readily accepted the gains of the Civil Rights movement (Hero and Preuhs, 2006). The Civil Rights movement also led to a realignment in politics as southern whites left the Democratic Party and joined the GOP. As southern voters joined the GOP, they brought with them a predisposition to oppose new immigration policy and new immigrants on social grounds. The civil rights realignment created an uneasy alliance between the pro-business

56 and social conservative wings of the Republican Party. Pro-business conservatives favored the low wages of immigrant labor while cultural conservatives opposed immigration on social grounds (Jeong et al., 2011; Miller and Schofield, 2008). The GOP has attempted to manage differences within their coalition by distinguishing between legal and illegal immigrants. Legal immigrants are usually portrayed as good for the country while illegal immigrants carry the brunt of the threat narrative. This distinction, however, seems to disappear at the mass level (Abrajano and Hajnal, 2015; Gimpel, 2000). Currently, it appears social conservatives are winning the internal argument. More often than not, Republican legislators vote on immigration bills in line with the concerns of social conservatives and against the interests and desires of pro-business Republicans (Jeong et al., 2011; Miller and Schofield, 2008).

3.4 A Coherentist Account of Conservative Ideol-

ogy on Immigration

Several patterns repeat when reviewing the literature on how conservatism adopted a restrictionist position. Both conservative voters and Republicans in voters immigra- tion as a threat. They both had their views of immigrant influenced by the racialized narrative around welfare policy. Both congressional Republicans and white voters opposed the cultural changes immigrants brought with them. It was the linkages between immigration and several conservative predispositions on welfare, culture, and economics that began to cohere and crystalize. By the late 70’s and 80’s, these linkages drove both conservative voters and Republican congresspeople to adopt increasingly restrictionist positions. Following the civil rights realignment, the Republican Party and American conservatism were characterized by an ideology that favored business, opposed a

57 generous welfare state, was suspicious of civil rights and took a traditionalist stance on cultural and social issues. In the context of the immigration wave from Asia and Latin America, a narrative took hold that immigrants were flooding the United States. These immigrants were portrayed as poor and uneducated, as dependent on welfare, as criminals, and as failing to assimilate. Likewise, conservative lawmakers saw in these immigrants, and their supposed dependence on welfare, a population likely to become a future base of Democratic support. For conservatives, restrictionist policies were the type of policies that best cohered with both the immigrant threat narrative and their preexisting stances on welfare, culture, and economics. Reducing immigration was necessary because immigrants were a threat to the cultural, physical, and economic well-being of the nation. Reducing immigrant’s access to welfare programs made sense because immigrants were poor, lazy, and a fiscal burden on the state. Illegal access to jobs had to be limited because immigrants were taking jobs from natives and undercutting their wages. Likewise, reversing policies that accommodated immigrant culture and language was important because the American nation-state would be undermined if its culture moved away from its European roots. A key example of how these linkages shaped conservative politics was the passage of Proposition 187 in California. The proposition sought to, among other things, restrict illegal immigrants access to welfare, public health, and public education. Campaigners for the propositions argued that their concerns were economic, not cultural. Despite these claims, the introductory section of the Proposition text itself reveal how the immigrant threat narrative influenced the language of the proposal:

Section 1. Findings and Declaration. The People of California find and declare as follows: That they have suffered and are suffering economic hardship caused bt the presence of illegal aliens in this state. That they

58 have suffered and are suffering personal injury and damage caused by the criminal conduct of illegal aliens in this state. That they have a right to the protection of their government from any person or persons entering this country unlawfully.

Strong restrictionist positions may have brought successes like Prop. 187 in the 90’s and early 2000’s, but the restrictionist stance creates difficulties within the conservative coalition. Pro-business conservatives have a more positive view of immigration than social conservatives. In particular, they see immigration as good for the economy. Increasingly, differences between pro-business and social conservatives have been resolved in favor of social conservatives’ views (Jeong et al., 2011; Miller and Schofield, 2008). The fact is that most of the discourse in conservative circles about immigration has not focused on its economic benefits; and to the degree that conservatives debate the economic effects of immigration, they tend to concentrate on its deleterious effects on wages and spending.1 As pro-business conservatives are increasingly left behind, the GOP may find itself susceptible to losing their votes as immigration and multiculturalism are used as a wedge issue in elections (Jeong et al., 2011; Miller and Schofield, 2008). The restrictionist ideology also presents a challenge for conservative elites going forward. Already, election-minded Republicans have warned of the increasingly negative electoral consequences of a strong restrictionist stance. In light of this, leaders within the RNC and have suggested that candidates take a softer stance on immigration. In doing so they hope to attract minority voters who may be socially or fiscally conservative, but oppose the GOP’s current stance on the issue (Republican National Committee, 2013). These attempts to soften conservative ideology on immigration face serious difficulties. First, restrictionism coheres both with the view

1George Borjas, cited in this chapter, is an example of such an economist

59 that immigrants are a social and fiscal burden and with conservative opposition to multiculturalism and welfare. Second, attempts to soften conservative ideology by distinguishing between a restrictionist ideology towards undocumented immigrants and a non-confrontational ideology for legal immigrants will likely fail at the mass public level. While these distinctions are common at the elite level, there is not evidence that the average voter distinguishes between illegal and legal immigrant (Abrajano and Hajnal, 2015). Third, to the degree that feelings of white resentment and immigrant threat drive restrictionist policy, conservatives face a challenge in presenting an alternative ideology on immigration that depends on a less threatening conception of immigrants and their culture. These challenges exist because rejecting a coherent belief system would require accepting an alternative system of beliefs. Belief systems help us make sense of the world, moving from a coherent system to a less coherent one is cognitively costly. As such, any alternative conservative ideology on immigration has to simultaneously make more sense than the current one while simultaneously contradicting previously accepted elements of the belief system (Thagard, 1989). In the case of immigration, election-minded Republicans face the challenge of creating a conservative argument that is not alienating to immigrants while addressing the racial anxieties of their base.

3.5 Conclusion

This chapter has reviewed the literature on the development of the restrictionist stance in conservative ideology about immigration. The restrictionist ideology arose amidst a narrative that regularly presented immigrants as a threat to body, pocket, and culture. White voters were particularly susceptible to this narrative; and in reaction to it, they became more responsive to conservative proposals on welfare, the

60 social safety net, and cultural accommodations. This shift mirrors changes at the Congressional level where, as early as the late 70’s, new immigrants from Asia and Latin America were seen as poor, unskilled, and likely clients of the welfare state. These linkages between immigration and welfare spending marked the beginning of polarization between Democratic and Republican legislators. The development of the restrictionist stance can be understood through the framework of coherence improvement. Conservatives were presented with new information: a new wave of immigration from Asia and Latin America; a threat narrative that painted the new immigrants as poor, violent, and disdainful of American culture; and the belief that new arrivals would compete for resources and jobs. Conservatives had a set of beliefs they held to be true: opposition to welfare spending and a belief that American culture should be protected. These two sets of beliefs meant that it made sense —it cohered better— to reject policies that were welcoming to immigrants and accommodating of their culture; and accept policies that sought to restrict immigration, immigrant’s access to services, and accommodations to their culture and language. The following chapter presents the methods through which I evaluate the claim that the restrictionist stance —and ideologies more broadly— are developed through a process of coherence improvement. The analysis will be performed by applying a connectionist model of coherence to a corpus of articles on immigration from conservative magazines published between 1995 and 2000. With these methods, I

can test a series of hypotheses derived from the previous chapter and this one.

61 Chapter 4

Testing the Theory: An Analysis of Conservative Beliefs on Immigration from 1995-2000

4.1 Introduction

The previous chapters laid out my theory of creative synthesis as coherence improve- ment and discussed the literature on how conservative ideology on immigration has developed in recent years. According to this theory, ideologies develop as intellectual elites deliberate and debate about political issues. As the discussions develop, ideolo- gies become more coherent as some arguments are accepted while others are rejected. Arguments are accepted or rejected to the degree that doing so helps improve the coherence of the ideology as a whole. In order to test the theory, I have selected the development of conservative ideology on immigration as a case study. Currently, conservatives tend to favor restrictive immigration policies. This restrictive stance is substantively interesting. Firstly, electorally minded Republican leaders are of the opinion that it is costing the GOP votes (Republican National Committee, 2013). Second, not all members of

62 the conservative coalition favor the restrictionist stance. Business conservatives, in particular, tend to favor immigration. They view immigration as an excellent way to import two kinds of labor: high-skilled labor and low-wage labor that are not common in the native population. I argue that the restrictionist stance that currently dominates conservatism is the result of coherence improvement through deliberation. The previous chapter presented previous work that suggests the restrictionist stance of immigration is the result of strengthening linkages between an immigrant threat narrative and pre-existing conservative beliefs. The immigrant threat narrative portrayed immigrants as a threat to American culture, a drain on public budgets, and a burden to the economy. These views cohered with conservative beliefs about culture, welfare, and economics. The linkages between these two sets of beliefs pushed conservatives to want to restrict immigration and immigrants’ access to public services. This chapter uses methodological tools first presented in Thagard (1989) to test my theory. Mainly, it makes use of the ECHO (Explanatory Coherence through Harmany Optimization) algorithm developed by Thagard.1 This algorithm models the mechanism of coherence improvement and allows me to illuminate the process by which some beliefs are accepted while others are rejected. Testing my theory was a two step process. First, network models of conservative ideology on immigration were constructed using data from articles published in conservative magazines from 1995 to 2000. These models are composed of nodes, which represent propositions, and edges between nodes, which represent how propo- sitions constrain each other. Second, the ECHO algorithm itself was applied to the networks. The ECHO algorithm is built to optimize the coherence of a network.

1Thagard uses “Harmany” instead of Harmony as an homage to the work of philosopher Gilbert Harman.

63 This is done by iteratively calculating the acceptability of each proposition based on its relationship with other nodes. Ultimately, the ECHO algorithm provides a measure of acceptability for each proposition in a way that satisfies the constraints of the network,2 thus increasing its coherence. The measures provided by the ECHO algorithm are the result of the relationship of the nodes in the system. In this sense, the ECHO algorithm models coherentist theories of belief justification. With these measures, I am able test several hypotheses about how coherentist theory can explain the development of conservative ideology on immigration. Thus chapter present evidence of four findings. First, conservative belief networks on immigration become more coherent over time. Second, threat narrative propositions influence the acceptability of restrictionist positions within these networks. Third, both threat narrative propositions and restrictionist positions are coherent within the belief systems. Also, fourth, threat narrative propositions have a higher average measure of acceptability than pro-business propositions — which view the effects immigration more favorably.

4.2 Data

As mentioned in Chapter 2, under a coherentist framework the acceptability of a proposition is derived from its relationships of coherence with other beliefs. Therefore, any model that seeks to mimic the cognitive process of coherence must begin with a data set of propositions and relationships of coherence between them. To collect data on the coherence relationships between relevant propositions I turn to political magazines. Political magazines are a prime source of data on both political propositions and

2See Sections 2.4.1, 2.4.2, 2.4.5 for a discussion on constraint satisfaction and its role in coherence improvement.

64 the coherence relationships between them. Political magazines, particularly those of an ideological nature, can be seen both as tools of persuasion and as signaling devices. The writers and the editorial staff of these magazines are trying to direct opinion, influencing the beliefs of political elites, other public intellectuals, and, eventually, the mass public. As such, they provide information on which positions public intellectuals think are persuasive and what arguments they think are most persuasive. In line with the decision to focus on conservatives and immigration, data collection was limited to explicitly conservative magazines. Furthermore, data collection was limited to articles about immigration policy published between 1995 and 2000. Articles were initially collected if they mentioned “immigration” or a related term. The 1995-2000 year range was selected because it encompasses the period delimited by passage of Proposition 187 in California and the election of President Bush. The success of Proposition 187 in California, which restricted illegal immigrants’ access to public services, was initially seen by Republicans as a sign that restrictionist policies could be electorally successful (Unz, 2000). By the 2000’s, however, the view among election-minded Republicans shifted to viewing Proposition 187 as the beginning of the end for Republicans’ electoral hopes in California. By this point, a split arose between the relatively immigration-friendly positions of future President Bush and those of conservative thinkers who still held a strong restrictionist position. Data collection began by creating a corpus of 305 different articles from nine dif- ferent magazines (Human Events, National Review, The Weekly Standard, American Spectator, Policy Review, Public Interest, American Enterprise, and Reason). These magazines were selected because they are easily identified as consistently conservative magazines. It is important for the sample to only have relevant articles. Several of the

65 articles in the intial corpus failed to provide any useful information about conserative thought on immigration. As such, articles that only mentioned immigration in passing, whitout making any arguments in favor or against a policy stance or attitude, were excluded. Additionally, articles about immigration were removed when they focused on immigration from Cuba or on Cuban-American foreign relations. The reason why articles related to Cuba were excluded is that Cuban immigration is treated as substantively different from other types of immigration both in a legal and in an ideological sense. While most stories about immigration in the corpus focused on its economic or cultural impact, stories about Cuban immigration mostly focused on anti-Communist sentiments and opposition to the Castro regime. In the end, 179 articles remained in the corpus to be coded. Coding was done by a team of undergraduate coders that I supervised.3 Two coders, working separately, would generate an argument outline for each article in a subset of the corpus. Each argument outline would deconstruct the article, providing an easy to understand structure of the arguments within it. Outlines would be organized with the main conclusions of the article as the first level of the outline, and premises for each of those arguments as the second level. If these premises served as sub-conclusions with their own premises within the article, the sub-premises were included as another sub-level indented under the corresponding premises. For each pair of outlines, I would revise work to make sure the coders were capturing the main arguments. Once satisfied with the quality of the outlines I would merge them to create a master outline that incorporated and synthesized the work of the two coders. In some cases, I would include elements of outlines I had made, mainly to supplement outlines for particularly long or difficult to parse articles. Once a master outline was created for each article, each element (premise,

3For a detailed example of coding see Appendix C.

66 67

Figure 4.1: Example of How Networks Were Built from Outlines conclusion, or sub-premise) was coded. Each code represented a particular type of argument, a proposition that served as either evidence or a conclusion to be believed or disbelieved. Coding was done iteratively, with new codes created as needed. The goal was to be comprehensive while simultaneously accommodating nuances between arguments and grouping together differently worded propositions that carried the same meaning. In the end, over 500 codes were used in the project. Coding was done in batches of documents, usually 50 a week. First, I would code the documents myself, creating codes as needed. Then, I split the week’s documents into smaller batches and sent a different set of coded documents to each coder. Each coder would then code the documents they got for the week independently. Inter-coder reliability measures were satisfactory, particularly given the large number of codes used. Table 4.1 presents the κ measures for each coder and batch of coding; it also has percent agreement measures. Generally, κ values greater than .60 are considered fair while greater than .75 are considered good. These guidelines however are arbitrary, and as the number of potential categories increases, the values for κ tend to fall. Given the large number of codes used in this project, I consider the fact that the κ values generated by the coding tend to surpass .60 and .75 indicate that the coding was satisfactory. In cases where coding discrepancies existed, they were addressed by myself and other coders working in collaboration. Most of the time, discrepancies in the coding of a proposition were resolved by selecting one of the two competing codes. In cases where the coder and I could not agree on a preferred code, both codes were included in the final dataset. Once all of the master outlines were coded, I used a software program called Atlas.ti to generate data on the coherence relationship between all the codes. As discussed in Chapter 2, there are two types of coherence relationship: 1) positive constraints between propositions that entail an explanatory relationship and 2)

68 Coder Batch Matches # of Codes % Agreement κ

Coder 1 1 58 52 0.896 0.84 275860.872 0.77 375940.798 0.73 4 141 153 0.922 0.83 Coder 2 1 107 123 0.870 0.74 269850.812 0.65 4 99 105 0.943 0.84 Coder 3 2 69 79 0.873 0.71 3 107 127 0.842 0.74 4 103 131 0.786 0.68 Coder 4 1 45 59 0.763 0.52 272970.742 0.65 3 91 102 0.892 0.77 4 137 163 0.840 0.71 561720.847 0.74 Coder 5 1 126 146 0.863 0.67 256700.800 0.56 4 99 137 0.723 0.57 5 252 282 0.894 0.80

Each week a coder would get a batch of documents to code. Their codes were compared to those of the author to get reliability measures.

Table 4.1: Reliability measures for proposition codes by coder

69 negative constraints between propositions that entail a contradictory relationship.4 The creation of argument outlines facilitated the coding of coherence relationships between codes; the codes of items in the outline were assumed to have a relationship with their sub-items. The type of relationship, explanatory or contradictory, was tracked in the outline. The coders, when creating the outlines, would note if the relationship was one of explanation or contradiction. Because of the nature of the outlines, the relationship between codes could be easily transformed into a network. Figure 4.1 and Appendix C illustrates this process. The software also allowed the networks to be converted into a dataset of code-to-code relationships which form the basis of the data analysis. Using the data collected, I generated a data set of 4,490 coherence relationships. Each relationship is a dyad of two propositions connected by a link type. Having collected this data, the next step is to determine which propositions are coherent.

4.3 Measuring Coherence

Section 4.5 of Chapter 2 defines a coherence problem and how to solve it. As men- tioned there, coherence is improved by satisfying constraints between propositions in a belief systems. Positive constraints (explanatory relationships) between two propositions are satisfied when both propositions are jointly accepted or rejected. Negative constraints between two propositions are satisfied when one of the proposi- tions is accepted while the other is rejected. Additionally, one can assume that each relationship between two nodes has a weight attached to it, corresponding to the strength of the relationship (some measure of how much it explains or contradicts).

4There is also a third kind of relationship called observation. Observations are a special kind of explanatory relationship that represents when an argument is defended by referring to a poll, publication, an authority figure, or common sense. The relevance of this type of link is noted in the discussion of the ECHO algorithm.

70 Given these assumptions, coherence is maximized when propositions are partitioned into accepted and rejected categories in a way that maximizes the sum of the weights of satisfied constraints. This definition of coherence as constraint satisfaction provides the basis for the measures of coherence used throughout this chapter. The following paragraphs makes use of concepts that I will define here. Proposi- tions indicate statements that one can either accept or reject as true.5 Constraints are relationships between propositions, and can be positive or negative.6 Weights are a value assigned to constraints that indicate their strength and type, negative values indicate a negative constraint, positive constraint indicate positive constraints. Because of the close relationship between constraints and weights, in the following

paragraphs, both are simultaneously represented by the variable wij. Harmony is a value that increases as constraints in the network are satisfied, when constraints with greater weights are satisfied the harmony is greater, when constraints with lower values are satisfied harmony is lower. The ECHO algorithm optimizes the harmony of the networks to which it is applied. Coherence is an interesting emergent product of the algorithm, it is calculated as a sum of the weights of the satisfied constraints in the network. Acceptability is another interesting value generated by the network; it represents the degree to which a proposition is accepted as true or not.7 Of particular interest for my tests are the activation values of propositions, and the coherence of the networks. In formal terms a coherence problem can be expressed and solved as:

5Chapter 2 pointed out that beliefs are formed around propositions.. Because of the close relatioship between beliefs and propositions, often times both terms are used interchangeably. In the echo algorithm, propositions are represented by nodes. 6Constraints can also be called links or edges, particularly when representing belief systems as a network. 7The acceptability of a proposition can also be referred to as the coherence of the proposition. In the context of the ECHO algorithm, acceptability is refered to as activation

71 1. Let E be a finite set of propositions ei

2. Let C be a set of constraints on pairs of propositions (ei,ej)wherei = j.

(a) C can be divided into C+, the positive constraints, and C−, the negative constraints.

3. Each constraint between propositions is associated with a weight wij, which measures the strength of the constraint (how much the acceptance or rejection of one element influences the acceptance or rejection of the other connected proposition).8

4. The problem is to sort the propositions of E into two sets, A and R,inaway that maximizes compliance with the following coherence conditions:

+ (a) If (ei,ej)isinC ,thenei is in A if ej is in A.

+ (b) If (ei,ej)isinC ,thenei is in R if ej is in R.

− (c) If (ei,ej)isinC ,thenei is in R if ej is in A.

− (d) If (ei,ej)isinC ,thenei is in A if ej is in R.

5. Constraint satisfaction is maximized when we find a partition whose sum of the weights of all satisfied constraints is greater than that of any other possible

partition (Thagard, 2000). Assuming that ei in A have positive value and ei in R have negative value,9 the sum of satisfied constraints, W , can be calculated  as W = i 0 ∧ eiej > 0](|wij|)+1[wij < 0 ∧ eiej < 0](|wij|).

8 The weight ijw is an assigned value. The value is assigned prior to running the algorithm based on the nature of the data. Positive constraints have positive values of w while negative constraints have negative values of w. The rules for calculating w which are explained below. Once a value of w is assigned it remains fixed and the algorithm does not change it. 9This assumption merely exist to express W mathematically. It however parallels the concept of acceptability as applied to analysis the ECHO algorithm.

72 There are several algorithms that, given a data set of proposition to proposition constraints with positive and negative weights, could approximate optimal solutions to a coherence problem (Thagard and Verbeurgt, 1998; Thagard, 2000). Among these algorithms, I use the ECHO algorithm first presented in Thagard (1989). ECHO is efficient even as the number of propositions in the system and links between them increases. It is also able to provide non-binary measures of acceptance and rejection (measures of how much sense it makes to believe or not believe a proposition given a belief system). Finally, as a connectionist algorithm, it is meant to mimic the cognitive process of coherence, with the acceptance and rejection of each proposition a function of the acceptance and rejection of propositions to which it has explanatory or contradictory relationships. The ECHO algorithm can be summarized as follows:

1. For each proposition ei of belief system E, construct a unit (node) in a network

+ 2. For every positive constraint in C between elements ei and ej increase the

weight wij of the symmetric link (edge) between ei and ej as follows:

If ej is the only other node that explains ei, then increase wij by .05

If ei is explained by a set of propositions Q, then the w of the links between e Q .05 i and each element of increases by number of elements in Q . Additionally, each pair of elements within Q has their w increased by the same value.10

− 3. For every negative constraint in C between elements ei and ej decrease the

value of the weight wij of the symmetric link (edge) between ei and ej by −0.2.11

10.05 is the standard value given by Thagard (1989) and is a tuning parameter. 11-0.2 is standard and a tuning parameter (Thagard, 1989).

73 4. For each proposition that has a relationship of observation construct a link with w = .1toaspecial observation node.12

5. Each ei is assigned an equal initial activation level ai of .01. Values of ai indicate the degree of acceptability of a proposition. Positive values indicate acceptance of a proposition as while negative values indicate rejection. Values

of ai are bounded between −1and1.

6. Update the activation level of all the units in parallel. The activation level of each node being dependent on the activation level of each other node connected to it and the weight of links between them. The ECHO algorithm uses the following updating function:

For each time t, the activation level of unit i (ai)is:

ai(t +1)=ai(t)(1 − d)+neti(max − ai(t)) if neti > 0or

ai(t +1)=ai(t)(1 − d)+neti(ai(t) − min) otherwise,

where d is a decay parameter that lowers the activation of each unit each cycle. min and max are the minimum and maximum

activation levels—set at -1 and 1, respectively. Meanwhile, neti is the net input to unit i from all nodes connected to it calculated as  neti = j wijaj(t)

7. Continue updating as noted in step 5 until no change in the activation of any node is over a threshold value. Then classify nodes into A or R based on their activation values. Elements e represented whose activation value a is > 0are

12The special observation node is represented by a node in the network whose activation value is fixed at 1. It is meant to represent that the acceptability of some observations is derived from direct observation, evidence, or appeals to authority which are given special credence in and of their own. The nature of this type of relationship and its role in the network is discussed further below.

74 accepted while those whose activation is < 0 are rejected.13

The ECHO algorithm reflects several assumptions about the nature of constraints between propositions. Propositions that explain one another have positive constraints while those that contradict each other have negative constraints, this reflects general coherence theories. The weight of positive constraints between propositions varies based on co-occurrence and parsimony. When two propositions are simultaneously used to explain several other propositions, they have a greater weight than if, all things being equal, they simultaneously explained a smaller set of propositions. For example, if propositions A and B simultaneously explained propositions C, D, and

E, the weight of the positive constraint between A and B wab would be greater than in a network equal in all other ways except that A and B explained C and D but not E. Another reason that positive weights in the ECHO algorithm can vary between propositions is that the model prefers parsimonious arguments. In the ECHO algorithm the potential value of w between a proposition P explained by a set of propositions Q decreases as the number of propositions in Q increases. The ECHO algorithm also reflects a preference for propositions that describe the results of observation. Propositions in the data that are justified as the result of observation, as common sense, or by referencing polls, or a trustworthy source are connected in the network to a special observation node. The special observation node has a fixed activation value of one. As a result, propositions connected to it are, all thing equal, more likely to be accepted than those that are not. The existence of a special observation node should not be interpreted as accepting foundationalist beliefs about self-evident truths. Rather it reflects the assumption that “A subject’s experience is relevant to the justification of his empirical beliefs” (Haack, 1993,p.

13The values used here (.05 for positive weights, -0.2 for negative weights, and 0.1 for data excitation links) reflect the values suggested by (Thagard, 1989).

75 19). Because of how the ECHO algorithm is constructed, propositions connected to the special observation node can be rejected if they are not supported by the other propositions in the network. The ECHO algorithm is appealing because it reflects theoretical assumptions made in Chapter 1. Positive links between two units will make it so that the units tend to be accepted or rejected together, just as positive constraints are satisfied when both elements are accepted or rejected simultaneously.14 Meanwhile increasing the acceptance of a unit with a negative link to another tends to lead to the rejection of the second unit; similar to how negative constraints between elements are satisfied by accepting one while rejecting the other. Additionally, the ECHO algorithm has been shown to maximize the harmony (or harmany as Thagard calls it in reference   to Gilbert Harman’s work) of the network calculated as H = i j wijai(t)aj(t) (Thagard, 1989). This measure of harmony (H) is similar to that of constraint satisfaction (W ). The measure increases as the number of mutually accepted (or rejected) units with a positive link between them increase and as the number of units with negative links that are split between accepted and rejected sets increases. Harmony (H) biggest difference from W is that it not only increases for each satisfied constraint but also decreases for each unsatisfied one. While H and W are different, all things being equal, an increase in one should lead to an increase in another.15 The use of the ECHO algorithm makes it possible to get different measures of coherence. The first measure is one of “how much sense” a set of propositions that constrain each other makes. The second is a property of a single proposition given its

14A more detailed version of the algorithm is present in the Appendix. That version includes the rules used to calculate values for the weight of links, the decay parameter and other variables in the algorithm. 15(Thagard and Verbeurgt, 1998) discusses in detail how the ECHO algorithm performs excep- tionally well in maximizing coherence, defined as constraint satisfaction, despite being designed to increae H and not W directly.

76 relationship to a system of beliefs, measuring how much “sense” it makes to believe a proposition, given the system of beliefs to which it belongs. The first measure is one of system coherence, the second of the acceptability of a single proposition.

4.3.1 System Coherence

The ECHO algorithm optimizes the harmony (H) of the network to which it is applied. Harmony increases as propositions with positive constraints are simultaneously accepted or rejected while splitting contradictory propositions between acceptance and rejection and decreases otherwise. Given these features, the measure appears to provide a good measure of system coherence. This measure, however, is of limited value because it is sensitive to the size of the network. This sensitivity renders comparisons of the harmony across different systems impractical. While dividing the harmony of a network by the number of links or propositions in the network may address some of the size sensitivity, this does not result in a network-independent measure of system coherence because the measure would remain sensitive to the specific updating functions used in the algorithm (Thagard and Verbeurgt, 1998). The same problems that plague H as a measure of coherence apply to W .Bothare unscaled and network dependent. As such, an unscaled measure of W is of little value if the intent is to compare the coherence of different networks. We can obtain a network independent measure of system coherence by measuring how close a particular solution to a coherence problem is to an optimal solution. Chapter 1 noted that coherence problems are solved by partitioning elements into accepted or rejected subsets. The goal is to find the partition that provides the greatest sum of satisfied constraints (W ) possible. As such, for any given belief system, any solution where elements are partitioned into a set of accepted or rejected beliefs, has a corresponding measure of W . There should also be, for any such system,

77 a set of solutions that generates a single value of W greater than that possible for any other set of partitions of that system. The highest single value of W that could be obtained from a system is that system’s optimal coherence (W opt), meaning there is no other partition of beliefs into accepted and rejected that can better satisfy the constraints of the system. By dividing the set of satisfied constraints of a particular solution by the set of constraints satisfied in the optimal solutions (W/W opt)one gets a measure of how close a partition’s coherence is to the best coherence that can be obtained from a system of beliefs (Thagard and Verbeurgt, 1998). The problem with using W/W opt as a measure of coherence is that it is hard to obtain a measure of W opt, particularly for larger belief systems. In fact, algorithms that can be guaranteed to provide a solution where W/W opt = 1 have, so far, proven to be computationally intractable. Given this difficulty, Thagard and Verbeurgt (1998) suggest we instead use a scaled measure of constraint satisfaction Wˆ = W/W ∗,where  ∗ W is the sum of the weights of all constraints i

78 4.3.2 Acceptance of a Single Unit

Having a network independent measure of system coherence allows a test of the theory that ideologies increase in coherence over time. Measures of network coherence, however, do not allow me to make claims about what is believed and why. Fortunately, the ECHO algorithm provides measurements of the acceptability of each of the propositions in the network. These measures provide evidence that the network assigns high values of acceptability to propositions in accordance with the discussion in Chapter 3. Below, I will use his evidence to argue that threat and restrictionist propositions are a vital component of conservative ideoloy on immigration. The primary measure of the acceptance of an individual unit is the unit’s acti- vation, (ai). The activation corresponds to the level of acceptance or rejection of the proposition it represents. Higher values indicate that a proposition makes more “sense” while lower values suggest that it makes “less sense” to believe the proposition. Using activation values as a proxy measure of how much sense a proposition makes is supported by previous research. Empirical studies have shown that there are strong correlations between experimental measures of confidence and activation levels in connectionist models (Read and Markus-Newhall, 1993; Kunda and Thagard, 1996; Schank and Ranney, 1992).

4.4 Hypotheses

The data collection strategy allows me to build network models of conservative ideology. The ECHO algorithm provides measures of the coherence of the networks and the acceptability of the proposition within them. With these tools, I can test elements of the theory. First of all, I test the hypothesis that the process of creative

79 synthesis leads to more coherent ideologies over time. Chapter 2 mentioned that coherent ideologies develop as public intellectuals discuss political issues. As they discuss issues, we would expect people concerned with spreading a particular point of view to hone their arguments. Public intellectuals hone arguments by rejecting claims and conclusions that are not particularly convincing in favor or those that are or by building on the arguments of others. Under a coherentist framework, as arguments and ideologies develop, belief systems should increase in coherence. H1: The coherence of conservative ideology on immigration should increase over time. I employ two different strategies to test H1. In the first test, I create networks for the years 1995, 95-96, 95-97, 95-98, 95-99, and 1995-2000. The first test is performed under the assumption that past arguments do not “age out” of belief systems. This test reflects an assumption that arguments are honed not by dropping old arguments in favor of better ones, but through elaboration of older arguments. The second test makes a different assumption, that old argument, unless repeated, do disappear from belief systems. This second assumption is modeled by measuring the coherence of belief networks that only include data from two-year windows. In this case, the networks include data from 1995, 95-96, 96-97, 97-98, 98-99, and 1999-2000. The second test reflects an assumption that arguments are honed through replacement of weaker arguments with stronger onew. For both tests of H1, networks were built that include all arguments made in all magazines in the data set for their specific time periods. I then applied the ECHO algorithm to each network. After the algorithm was applied, network independent measures of system coherence (W/W ∗) for each of the networks will be obtained. If the measures of network coherence increase over time, then that serves as evidence that creative synthesis leads to an increase of coherence over time.

80 Testing whether or not the coherence of conservative ideology on immigration increases over time serves as a general test of the theory that ideologies are created through a process of coherence improvement. However, the review of the literature on conservatives, the Republican Party, and immigration in Chapter 3 suggests some more specific tests to analyze whether or not the development of conservative ideology on immigration can be explained through a coherentist framework. Key in the discussion was the idea that an immigrant threat narrative drove conservative ideology on immigration. Assuming that threat narratives drive the restrictionist stance in conservative ideology on immigration, one should find that threat narrative propositions are coherent. This test can be performed by running the ECHO algorithm on the network of arguments and verifying if propositions associated with the threat narrative have positive activation values. Not only should threat narrative propositions be activated but so should restrictionist positions. Additionally, there should be evidence that the activation of threat narrative propositions drives the activation of restrictionist positions. H2: Threat narrative propositions should have high positive activation values. H3: Restrictionist proposition should have high positive activation values. H4: The coherence of threat narrative propositions should influence the coherence of restrictionist policy positions. The discussion on how conservatives and the Republican Party became restric- tionists reveals that there is a perceived split between business conservatives and social conservatives about how to address immigration as a policy issue. In Chapter 3, I posited that the reason that social conservatives won out in the coalition is that

81 their belief system was more coherent than that of business conservatives. Testing this hypothesis is not as straightforward as the others. Thagard notes that it is hard to measure the coherence of “sub-networks” using his algorithm, but he also suggests that this can best be done by taking the average activation of the nodes of each sub-network. Assuming that sub-networks contain contradictory proposition, such that acceptance of one sub-network should lead to a rejection of the other, calculating the average activation value of each sub-network could serve as a proxy of their coherence. Testing the hypothesis in this way would require that the activation level of a set of propositions corresponding with business conservative views on im- migration (e.g.: “immigration helps the economy”, “we need high-skilled immigrants to fill jobs”, “immigrant labor is cheaper than local labor”, etc.) be compared to the activation level of threat narrative propositions. H5: The average activation of immigrant threat propositions should be higher than average activation of business propositions. Alternatively, one might compare measures of the system coherence of maga- zines more closely associated with the mainstream of conservative thought (Weekly Standard and the National Review) against those related to business conservatism (American Enterprise and Reason under the expectation that the former will be more coherent. H6: The network coherence of mainstream conservative magazines (Weekly Standard and National Review) is greater than that of business conservative magazines (Reason, American Enterprise).

82 4.5 Results and Analysis

To test H1, networks were built using all arguments in articles published within the following time periods 1995, 95-96, 95-97, 95-98, 95-99, 1995-2000. Each subsequent network added arguments from following years without eliminating older ones under the assumption that past explanations do not fade out of belief system if not repeated. The ECHO algorithm was applied to each of these networks, and activation values of the propositions within the networks were saved. Using these measures, I calculated W , the weight of satisfied constraints. With this measure of W , I then calculated the system coherence (W/W opt) of each of the networks. Additionally, bootstrap samples of the data were collected to determine if the increase in coherence was statistically significant. The bootstrap samples were generated from the data of proposition to proposition dyads in the original dataset (see C.2 for an example of this sort of data). One thousand bootstap samples were genetated for each time period. Networks were built and their system coherence calculated for each of the bootstrapped samples. Figure 4.2 shows, the 95% bootstrap confidence interval for the measure of coherence for each set of years. As can be seen the coherence of the networks in later years is statistically higher than that of earlier years. Under H1, I expected the system coherence to increase for networks built from more recent articles. Figure 4.2 shows that this is the case. The system coherence of the networks increases from 0.77 for the 1995 network to 0.93 for the 1995-2000 network. Additionally, the system coherence for the networks increased as new arguments were added for every year of the data. H1 was also tested using two-year windows to build the networks. In this way, older arguments drop out of newer networks unless they are repeated in subsequent

83 1.0

0.9

0.8 System Coherence

0.7

1995 1995−1996 1995−1997 1995−1998 1995−1999 1995−2000 Ye a r s

Figure 4.2: Coherence of Networks: All Magazines, 1995 to 1995-2000.

84 1.0

0.9

0.8 System Coherence

0.7

1995 1995−1996 1996−1997 1997−1998 1998−1999 1999−2000 Ye a r s

Figure 4.3: Coherence of Networks: Two Year Blocks, 1995 to 1999-2000

years. The networks in this test used data from 1995, 95-96, 96-97, 97-98, 98-99, and 1999-2000. Figure 4.3 shows that the data largely behaves as expected. Except for a drop between the coherence of the 96-97 network and the 97-98 network, the coherence of the networks increased over time from 0.77 in 1995 to 0.82 in 1999-2000. As with the previous analysis, bootstrap confidence intervals were calculated. Unlike the fist test, the coherence of later networks does not appear to be statistically higher than the coherence of earlier years. Two differences stand out when comparing the results presented in Figure 4.2 to those in Figure 4.3. The first is that the increase in coherence for the first test

85 is greater than the one in the second test. Figure 4.2 shows an increase in network coherence of .16 from .77 in the 1995 network to .93 in the 1995-2000 network. Meanwhile Figure 4.3 shows an increase of .05 from .077 in the 1995 network to 0.82 in the 1999-2000 network. The second interesting difference is that the rise in Figure 4.2 is statistically different from zero at the 95% confidence level while that is not the case for the results presented in Figure 4.3. This difference in significance suggests that the coherence of ideologies does not increase only by substituting old arguments for newer ones; rather it is the building and addition of new arguments into existing belief systems that leads to the growth of the coherence of ideologies. As mentioned above, the measure of system coherence used here is network- independent, meaning that it does not increase because of the size of the network. As such the increase in coherence demonstrates that, as expected, conservative ideology on immigration became more coherent over time as the issue became more salient. In so doing, this evidence shows that coherence improvement plays a role in the development of ideologies. Moreover it shows how that happened—not by dropping arguments, but by developing more elaborate ones. The discussion in Chapter 3 suggests that an immigrant threat narrative drove the conservatives’ move to a restrictionist position. Common elements of the immigrant threat narrative include claims that immigrants are a fiscal burden, that they use welfare at higher rates than natives do, that they are prone to crime, and that they steal jobs and lower the wages of native workers. Under a coherentist framework, this would mean that both restrictionist policy positions and threat narrative propositions ought to be coherent and that the coherence of restrictionist positions should depend on the coherence of threat narrative propositions and vice versa. H2 states that threat narrative propositions should be coherent. To test this hypothesis, I selected the set of propositions from the 1995-0000 network that

86 constitute the immigrant threat narrative. I then ran the ECHO algorithm on the data and collected the activation levels of the selected propositions. Table 4.2 shows that the 19 selected propositions all had positive activation values. Keeping in mind that higher activation values correspond with the strength of a belief; this means that propositions such as “immigrants don’t pay taxes” (with an activation value of 0.905), “immigration is a fiscal burden” (0.966), that “immigrants take jobs from natives” (0.921), and that they “lower wages” (0.943) are highly coherent given a conservative belief system like the one generated from the data. Just as H2 states that threat narrative propositions should be coherent, H3 states that restrictionist positions should be coherent as well. Here the evidence is mixed. Table 4.3 shows a set of propositions, selected from the 1995-2000 network. As with H2, the algorithm was applied to the 1995-2000 network. Only 12 of the 15 selected propositions are coherent. These include propositions such as: “In favor of reducing immigration” (0.953), “In favor of reducing family reunification” (0.854), “In favor of restricting illegal immigrants’ access to public services” (0.887), and “Opposition to bilingual education” (0.453). Although the majority of the restrictionist positions are coherent, a subset of them is not. The propositions “In favor of reducing legal immigration” (-0.909), “In favor of a moratorium on legal immigration” (-0.859), and “Against amnesty for illegal immigrants” (-0.347) have negative activation values. Chapter 3 noted that elites trying to manage divisions between social and business conservatives within the Republican coalition attempted to differentiate between “good” legal immigrants who were not part of the threat narrative and “bad” illegal immigrants that were part of it. The evidence seems to support that this distinction did exist at the elite level as the propositions listed at the beginning of the paragraph are rejected and highly incoherent given the network. More surprising still, the proposition “Against

87 Proposition Activation Value

Immigration leads to tension between classes and eth- 0.923 nicities Immigration is a burden to public service budgets 0.966 Immigration could change (is a threat) to American 0.933 culture Immigrants do not pay fair share of taxes 0.905 Immigration is bad for the economy 0.969 Welfare magnet effect (Welfare attracts immigrants) 0.845 We need ethnic and cultural homogeneity to preserve 0.851 nation Multiculturalism threatens American culture 0.894 Immigrants are prone to crime 0.881 Immigrants are more likely to be on welfare than 0.942 natives Illegal immigrants take jobs that should go to natives 0.858 Immigrants take jobs that should go to natives 0.921 Immigration lowers wages 0.943 Immigration redistributes wealth from natives to im- 0.643 migrants Immigration is changing the ethnic/racial composition 0.919 of the US Immigrants’ culture fundamentally different from 0.816 American culture Against multiculturalism 0.742 Immigration harms the nation state 0.847 Multiculturalism leads to tensions between cultural 0.684 groups

Activation values can range from -1 to 1. Negative values indicate rejection by the network while positive values indicate acceptance. Lower and higher values indicate a higher degree of rejection or acceptance.

Table 4.2: Activation value of threat narrative propositions

88 amnesty for illegal immigrants” (-0.347) is not coherent. This rejection, however, is the result of the proposition being connected to only one other another rejected proposition, “That policies with bipartisan support ought to be supported” (0.531). So far the data shows that restrictionist and threat narrative propositions tend to be highly coherent, with some exceptions around reducing legal immigration. These findings suggest that a coherentist theory of creative synthesis explains the restrictionist turn in conservative ideology. Looking to see if restrictionist and threat narrative positions influence the activation level of each other provides further evidence that threat propositions indeed influence the acceptance of restrictionist positions. To test H4, the hypothesis that threat narrative propositions should influence restrictionist positions, the ECHO algorithm was applied to the 1995-2000 network with a small modification. This time the activation value of the threat narrative propositions that were fixed to a value of 1 (and later -1). Running the algorithm while fixing the value of a proposition allows one to see what the activation value of the propositions in the network would be if the network were forced to always fully accept or reject the fixed proposition. By comparing the difference between the activation values in the network when a proposition was held at 1 and -1, one can measure the influence of the fixed node over the other ones in the network. The table in Appendix A includes all the restrictionist positions which experience a change of 1 or greater when the activation value of threat narrative propositions from Table 4.2 are fixed at -1 and 1. The cutoff of a change of 1 or greater is relevant because it is the value at which a proposition would change from being fully accepted (or rejected) to rejected (or accepted). Several of the threat narrative nodes selected for H2 influence the acceptance of restrictionist positions. For example, switching the activation level of the proposition “Immigration is a burden to public service budgets” from -1 to 1 leads to a change of 1.854 in the activation value of the proposition

89 Proposition Activation Value

Border patrols efficient way to prevent illegal immi- 0.920 gration Border patrol serves as deterrent to illegal immigration 0.909 In order to reduce illegal immigration we have to also 0.923 reduce legal immigration In favor of reducing family reunification 0.854 In favor of reducing illegal immigration 0.895 In favor of reducing immigration 0.944 In favor of reducing legal immigration −0.909 In favor of restricting illegal immigrants’ access to 0.887 public services In favor of increasing border security 0.903 In favor of deporting illegal immigrants 0.811 In favor of barring entry (denying citizenship) to for- 0.279 mer illegal immigrants In favor of moratorium on legal immigration −0.859 Against open borders 0.757 Against amnesty for illegal immigrants −0.347 Opposition to bilingual education 0.453

Activation values can range from -1 to 1. Negative values indicate rejection by the network while positive values indicate acceptance. Lower and higher values indicate a higher degree of rejection or acceptance.

Table 4.3: Activation value of restrictionist policy positions

90 “In favor of reducing legal immigration” (from -0.947 to 0.975). Likewise changing the activation level of the proposition “Immigration is a threat to American culture” from -1 to 1 leads to a change in the activation level of “In favor of a moratorium on legal immigration” of 1.748 (from -0.862 to 0.886). Overall it appears the coherence of restrictionist positions, particularly those about legal immigration, is influenced by the acceptance or rejection of threat narrative propositions. So far this chapter has presented evidence in support of the hypotheses that the coherence of argument networks would increase over time and that the immigrant threat narrative influenced restrictionist positions on immigration. All that remains is to test the expectation that the ideology of social conservatives—who are partial to the threat narrative and restrictionist positions—was more coherent than the ideology of business conservatives—who favor immigration. H5 states that if this expectation is correct, then the average activation of “immigrant threat” propositions should be higher than the average activation of business propositions. Meanwhile, H6 states that the networks built from mainstream conservative magazines (The Weekly Standard and The National Review) should be more coherent than networks built from business conservative magazines (Reason and American Enterprise). These hypotheses reflect the theoretical expectation that the reason why the restrictionist position against immigration dominates conservative ideology is that it is more coherent that the business conservative position. To test for H5, I selected nineteen propositions associated with pro-business arguments about immigration policy. I then applied the ECHO algorithm to the 1995-2000 data and collected the activation value of these business propositions. Table 4.4 shows these propositions and their activation levels. There is a broad range of activation values ranging from -0.928 for the proposition “Immigration is good for the economy” to 0.88 for the proposition “In favor of moving to skill-based

91 Proposition Activation Value

Skilled immigrants are good for business/economy 0.426 Immigrants have strong work ethic (hard workers, 0.797 work hard) Immigration is good for the economy −0.928 Immigration has no effect on wages −0.888 Immigration does not harm the economy −0.834 Not enough Americans with skills high-skilled immi- −0.904 grants have High-skilled immigrants create jobs 0.646 Immigrant labor cheaper than native labor 0.692 Immigration attracts people with talents and skills −0.799 Reducing immigration would hurt the economy −0.643 Economies expand to accommodate immigration 0.616 Against national ID card 0.837 Immigrants do not take jobs from natives −0.730 In favor of moving to skill based migration 0.882 Against employment verification −0.744 Against reducing legal immigration 0.872 Against reducing skill-based immigration −0.807 In favor of increasing H1-B (work) visas −0.710 Immigrants are good for the country 0.838

Activation values can range from -1 to 1. Negative values indicate rejection by the network while positive values indicate acceptance. Lower and higher values indicate a higher degree of rejection or acceptance.

Table 4.4: Activation value of pro-business/pro-immigration propositions

92 migration.” Overall, acceptance of these propositions is mixed. It is not surprising then that their average activation (-0.073) is lower than the average activation of the threat narrative propositions in Table 4.2 (0.867). These findings indicate that threat narrative propositions enjoyed broad acceptance in the network while pro-business propositions received conditional support, with some being accepted while others were not. Because the acceptance of each proposition is a function of the relationship of all propositions in the network, these findings suggest that restrictionist propositions were better supported by the network than pro-business ones. I tested H6 by creating two separate networks, one from the arguments presented in Reason and The American Enterprise, the second from those presented in The Weekly Standard and The National Review. Reason and The American Enterprise are magazines that associate themselves with libertarian and free-market conservatism while The Weekly Standard and The National Review are conservative magazines targeted at the mass public. By creating separate networks, one can compare measures of system coherence for the business conservative magazines to those of the mainstream conservative magazines. Contrary to expectations, the measure of system coherence for the business conservative magazines from years 1995-2000 was higher (0.866) than the one for the mainstream magazines from years 1995-2000 (0.821). The finding for H6 is contrary to expectation. There, however, may be reasons, outside of theory, why this may be the case. First of all, Reason and American Enterprise are more policy-oriented than The Weekly Standard and The National Review. Articles in the previous two magazines tend to be longer and more meticulous than those in the later two; this is because they are targeted at different audiences. While The Weekly Standard and The National Review are mass circulation magazines, the same is not true for Reason or American Enterprise. Reason and American Enterprise

93 were targeted at policy makers and written as such. Assuming that the different audiences meant authors and editors were more careful and meticulous in presenting strong arguments, it is possible the business network has a higher degree of coherence simply because of style and audience. Second, The National Review and The Weekly Standard include a variety of conservative viewpoints, some of them contradictory, in an attempt to be a meeting place where all types of conservative, in good standing, can meet and debate. This commitment to allowing different conservative voices to flourish meant that, to a degree not seen in other magazines in the network, writers published in The Weekly Standard and The National Review, would address each other’s disagreement in their articles. Evidence of this is reflected in the fact that the network built from the mainstream conservative magazines has more contradictory links (930) than the one built from the business magazines (825). If this is the case, the “all voices welcome” nature of the mainstream magazines may have lead to a lower coherence than that in the business magazines.

4.6 Conclusion

According to my theory of creative synthesis through coherence improvement, ide- ologies develop as public intellectuals deliberate about the issues. This deliberation increase the coherence of shared belief systems as some arguments are accepted and other rejected to the degree that doing so increases the coherence of the ideology. In the case of conservative ideology on immigration, the data shows that conser- vative belief systems about immigration grew more coherent over time. Additionally, the data demonstrates that, both restrictionist and threat narrative propositions are coherent within these belief systems, and that the acceptance of restrictionist positions depend, in part, on the acceptance of restrictionist positions. In this way,

94 the data and tests conducted in this chapter align with previous findings that the conservatives’ restrictionists positions were driven by concerns about the perceived budgetary and social costs of immigration (Abrajano and Hajnal, 2015; Gimpel and Edwards, 1999). The evidence supports the hypothesis that conservatives’ support for restrictive immigration policies can be explained as the result of a coherentist process. More precisely, the evidence shows that restrictionist positions are accepted because they cohere with the immigrant threat narrative. Despite this, evidence in support of the hypothesis that pro-business conservatives—who support less restrictive policies than social conservatives—lost out in the ideological debate because their belief system was less coherent than the restrictionist belief system was mixed. When examining the data, pro-business propositions have a lower average activation value than threat narrative propositions. However, when examining separate networks built from pro-business magazines and mainstream conservative magazines, the data shows that the pro-business network is more coherent than the mainstream conservative network. Another finding of interest is that conservative belief systems make a distinction remains between legal and illegal immigration. While the proposition that illegal immigration ought to be reduced is accepted (0.895), this is not the case for the proposition that legal immigration be reduced (-.909). While this may seem surprising, the discussion in Chapter 3 suggested that such a distinction existed at the elite level, mainly as a way to accommodate the preferences of business conservatives (Abrajano and Hajnal, 2015; Gimpel and Edwards, 1999).

95 Chapter 5

Conclusion

5.1 Introduction

On January 27, 2017, President Trump signed an executive order that was widely condemned as a “ban on Muslims”. Within the text of the order, the President defended it as necessary to “ensure that those approved for admission do not intend to harm Americans and that they have no ties to terrorism” (Trump, 2017b). Two days before that, the President had signed another executive order that made it the policy of the executive branch to begin “immediate construction of a physical wall on the Southern border” (Trump, 2017a). These policies, along with others mentioned in the executive order, were defended on the grounds that “aliens who illegally enter the United States without inspection or admission present a significant threat to national security and public safety” and that “the recent surge of illegal immigration at the southern border with Mexico has placed a significant strain on Federal resources and overwhelmed agencies charged with border security and immigration enforcement, as well as the local communities into which many of the aliens are placed.” Both these executive orders are the result of a belief, common within the Re-

96 publican Party and the conservative movement that immigrants threaten America’s safety and resources. They are part of a pervasive threat narrative about immigrants which serves to motivate and justify restrictionist and nativist policies (Abrajano and Hajnal, 2015). Moreover, even if one were to claim that a fear of immigrants does not motivate these policies, it is evident that the supposed threat that immigrants from South America or Muslim-majority countries present to the nation was used to defend these policies. Conservatives’ use of immigrant threat narratives is not new. Conservative ideology on immigration has been characterized by a belief in threat narratives, advocacy of restrictionist policies, and the defense of the later by the former for years (Abrajano and Hajnal, 2015; Gimpel and Edwards, 1999). In the previous chapters, I have shown that the sentiments and beliefs expressed by our current President and his supporters made sense to conservatives as early as 1995. However, the question remains why? Converse (2006) noted that ideologies are created by tying beliefs together. My discussion in Chapter 1 pointed out that elites play a dominant role in this act of creative synthesis. For this thesis, I focused on the role of public intellectuals. Creative synthesis occurs as public intellectuals engage in the process of delineating who co-ideologues should be for and against, what they should support or not, and why they should believe or not believe certain things (Noel, 2014). According to this theory, conservative elites were able to tie feelings of unease towards immigration and support of restrictionist policy positions to general conservative principles. The literature on conservative ideology and immigration finds that, in particular, threat narratives about immigrants and restrictionist policy towards immigration were linked to opposition to the welfare state and negative opinions about racial minorities, both beliefs common within American conservatism (Abrajano and Hajnal, 2015; Gimpel

97 and Edwards, 1999). Although previous research assumes that elites are the central actors in the development of ideologies, it has so far failed to provide the mechanisms by which public intellectuals can tie beliefs together.1 The main contribution of my dissertation is to uncover one such mechanism: coherence improvement. The central argument of this dissertation is that when public intellectuals delineate who co-ideologues should be for and against, what they should support or not, and why they should believe or disbelieve things, they are improving the coherence of beliefs they and like-minded people hold. By arguing, deliberating, and debating each other, public intellectuals are uncovering and honing the reasoning behind their beliefs (Neblo, 2015). They do this by seeking to reduce contradictions between beliefs and by providing guidance as to why x set of beliefs should entail y set of beliefs. Likewise, while the literature on the development of conservative ideology has singled out feelings of immigrant threat, opposition to welfare, and racial resentment as drivers of conservative opposition to immigration, it has provided no guidance as to why these beliefs won out over the desires and beliefs of business conservatives or electorally-minded Republicans. Business conservatives, who are generally more cosmopolitan than social conservatives, tend to have a more positive view of immi- gration (Gimpel, 2000; Jeong et al., 2011). Coherentism again provides an answer. While business conservatives do have a coherent ideology that supports immigration policies that favor the hiring of immigrants, when their arguments are combined with those of social conservatives, the restrictionist positions are more coherent than the policies favored by business conservatives. The data support this dissertation’s theory. By building argument networks from

1For example, Noel (2012, p. 169) noted that “It’s not clear why the problack ideology won out. It might not have. It is very difficult to measure the persuasiveness of individual arguments.”

98 articles published in conservative magazines, and applying a coherence algorithm to them, I was able to provide evidence that conservative ideology on immigration did become more coherent over time. I was also able to prove that threat narrative propositions, and restrictionist positions are coherent given the structure of con- servative belief systems. I was also able to provide evidence that the acceptance of restrictionist positions depends on the acceptance of threat narrative proposi- tions. Likewise, evidence showed that while business conservatives do support less restrictive immigration policy, their arguments fail to be accepted as coherent when incorporated into a network that includes the beliefs of social conservatives. Saying that creative synthesis is driven by a process of coherence improvement has several implications for the literature. Mainly, it goes against theories of ideology which present ideologies as little more than rationalization or marketing of political coalitions (Aldrich, 1995). According to these theories, ideologies exist to market to the masses political coalitions whose main purpose is to capture power for the benefit of their members. As such, ideological claims could be insincere, at least initially. Rather, with minimal oversight from voters, elites can pursue their interests while providing empty talk in defense of their actions (Bawn et al., 2012). In the context of immigration policy, such theories would have predicted that the Republican Party would have been able to adopt a more moderate position on the issue of immigration. After Mitt Romney’s failed presidential campaign, the Republican National Committee commissioned an “election autopsy.” The resulting report argued that the GOP would be well-served in moderating their stance on immigration so as to garner the votes of the immigrant population (Republican National Committee, 2013). Rather than adopting the recommendations of electorally-minded conservatives, the Republican Party base nominated Donald Trump as their presidential candidate. The party remained in support of restrictive policies.

99 Support of restrictive policies is the result of creative synthesis improving the coherence of political beliefs. Restrictive policies are coherent with propositions that view immigration as an economic burden and a cultural threat. Immigrant threat narratives cohered with conservative beliefs against the welfare state and preexisting racial attitudes. All in all, these beliefs supported and reinforced each other and public discussions and deliberation on the issue of immigration helped crystalize the restrictionist position as coherent. In making the argument that ideologies are developed through a process of coherence improvement, I am making the argument that sincerely held beliefs precede the formation of political coalitions; and that ideological coalitions cannot freely change their stated positions if doing so will contradict a coherent system of beliefs. Such changes are difficult because coherence is a cognitive and social phenomenon and there are penalties for going against a coherent belief system. These penalties can include social sanction, cognitive dissonance, and ostracism (Festinger, 1957; Jamieson, 2001; Wanderer, 2008). In simple English, given the nature of conservative ideology on immigration, the RNC’s recommendation to moderate on the issue of immigration, made no sense.

5.1.1 “Sticky” Ideologies and Party Oversight

The claim that ideologies serve a cognitive role and as such are hard to abandon carries another implication for the literature. Ideologies that play a cognitive role should be sticky in a way unforeseen by those who see ideology as little more than marketing or rationalization. Such theories of ideology as marketing, like those presented by Aldrich (1995)andBawn (1999), assume that political coalitions persist becauseofthelogicoflong coalitions. It is the benefits of repeated cooperation that hold the coalition together, not a shared commitment to a set of beliefs. As such, unless shared beliefs help establish cooperation, there is no reason why coalitions

100 should express similar ideological views over time. Theories of this sort assume that because ideologies do not play a role in preserving the coalition, parties should be able to change their stated preference with relative ease as a way to gain more votes while hiding their true preferences (Downs, 1957; Bawn et al., 2012). However, Chapter 1 presented examples from the Republican Party, the UK Labour Party, and Catalonian politics to point to cases where parties made ideological decisions at the expense of their electoral considerations. It appears then that, at least occasionally, ideological language forces parties into metaphorical suicide pacts where they must acquiesce to the strongly held preferences of the membership at the expense of the preferences of the leadership. These examples call into question the assertion made by scholars like Bawn et al. (2012) that parties can pursue their preferences with almost no oversight from the membership. It appears that in cases where ideologies are coherent and accepted among the membership, they should be able to control the behavior of the leadership better. Control should be easier because an electorate possessing a coherent ideology would know what the logical implications of ideological language are. If Republican voters were repeatedly told that immigrants were dangerous, why they were dangerous, and how to get rid of them. The GOP should not have been surprised when its electorate rejected any attempt to moderate Republican policy on immigration and elected the most radical voice on immigration during the primaries. Whether voters can control a party’s ability to shift its ideology depends on whether or not coherent ideologies exist among party members or the public at large. If a party’s base does have coherent views on some issues, their ability to monitor their party’s behavior on the issue should be greater than assumed by scholars in the field. Whether the control coherent ideologies may provide is beneficial to democracy or not is another question entirely.

101 5.1.2 Coherence and Ideological Change

The theory presented in this project is deliberative in nature. It is debate and dialogue between people that allows for the sort of reflection that creates coherent belief systems. If this is the case, if propositions are accepted or rejected based on their coherence with each other, it means that arguments are moments of potential change. Previous research already shows that prior beliefs can be revised as new propositions are accepted (Ranney and Thagard, 1988). Additionally, work on the nature of belief systems suggests that even if new arguments are rejected, their introduction into belief systems allow for the possibility of gestalt shifts in the future (Homer-Dixon et al., 2013). Argumentation, even if immediately unsuccessful could lay the groundwork for dramatic change in the future. The methods used in this project hints at how one may be able to either induce or lay the groundwork for ideological change. Because beliefs are justified and accepted based on their relationship to each other, knowledge of which beliefs entail support for other beliefs can be useful in crafting convincing arguments. If person A wants to convince person B of something, person A is more likely to succeed if A’s arguments were based on the beliefs that B has already accepted as coherent. This intuition is supported by experimental research which has shown that conservatives are better able to convince liberals to support conservative positions when using liberal morals as the basis of their arguments and vice versa (Feinberg and Willer, 2015).

5.1.3 Informed Public and Democratic Legitimacy

Elite theories of democracy rely on the notion that the mass-public lacks the sophis- tication to adequately monitor their elected officials; as such democracies are more likely to cater to the interests of organized elites over those of the public. Section

102 1.1 of this chapter already discusses how my theory may weaken the claims of elite theories of democracy. Here I want to discuss how my theory addresses claims made by deliberative democratic theorists. A common claim of deliberative democracy is that people should be able to give reasons for their use of democratic power. In short, under a deliberative conception of democracy, while procedural legitimacy is significant, it is not the only sort of legitimacy and in fact may not even be the most important. Winners in a democracy should be able to justify their use of power in an understandable way to those who lose out. It is not enough to say “X will happen because” since it fails to legitimize “X” to those who do not support it. Deliberative democrats believe that deliberation legitimates power by requiring that decisions be reasoned and reasonable. If ideologies do indeed develop through a process of coherence improvement and if coherent arguments are, all thing equal, better and more acceptable arguments, then the process of creative synthesis may serve a legitimizing role in democracies. If not, consider the alternative. If ideologies are not coherent, if instead beliefs and preferences are unconnected to each other, their acceptance and rejections subject to unknowable whims, there is no possibility to validate the legitimacy of democratically endorsed actions outside of claiming some procedural legitimacy. Moreover, while procedural legitimacy is necessary, it is a weak defense of democracy on its own. After all, several atrocities and morally repugnant decisions were and will likely be defended on formal grounds of the rules being followed. In demanding coherent arguments, in demanding that we as members of a democracy not only be able to explain why we want “X” but how “X” coheres with our other expressed beliefs, we challenge each other to be honest and intelligible in our demands. It is through demands like these that incongruities between stated beliefs and actions can be called out and resolved; something that formal defenses of democracy, in and of themselves,

103 have been unable to do. For example, there was no procedural requirement that slavery come to an end in the United States. Rather, it was the work of countless individuals and organizations that repeatedly brought to bear that there was an inherent contradiction in the democratic ideal of equality and the institution of slavery.

5.2 Limits

Despite the fact that a theory of creative synthesis through coherence improvement impacts other areas of the study of ideology and politics, the fact remains that the work done in this project is limited in scope. Chapter 2 presented the theory that ideologies are created through a process of coherence improvement. Chapter 3 discusses the development of conservative ideology on immigration. Chapter 4, leverages data and methods to provide evidence that the theory is supported by the data in a way that paralleled the findings of the literature discussed in Chapter 3. The focus of this project was narrow. Further research needs to be done to see if the findings here can be replicated in other policy areas beyond immigration, and across ideologies beyond conservatism. For example, this project provides no answers to the question of whether or not liberals experienced a similar process of coherence improvement in the area of immigration policy. In discussing how immigration politics polarized, Gimpel (2000) focuses on polarization among Republicans. Perhaps it is the case that liberals have no coherent ideology on immigration other than to oppose conservatives. This could be the case because, in American politics, it appears that conservatives have polarized more than liberals (Grossmann and Hopkins, 2015). If it is the case that liberal ideology coheres less and experiences less improvement of coherence than

104 conservative ideology, it would be interesting to note why this is the case. This project has focused on the role of ideological elites; future research should be done to see what role exactly public intellectuals play in creating coherent ideologies. Are these intellectuals the authors of the ideas and propositions that make up belief systems? Are they taking their cues from elected and party officials and providing structure and coherence after the fact? Alternatively, are public intellectuals taking their cues from the public? Noel (2014) provides convincing evidence that ideological divisions between liberals and conservatives arose in the media before they did between the parties, but if creative synthesis is the work of making better arguments it could be the case that the building blocks of ideology are coming from a source that is separate from ideological elites. Future work should attempt to uncover whether public intellectuals are truly the main source of creative synthesis or whether their deliberation is merely a reflection of party debates, public demands, or some combination of both. Another limit of the work done here is that it focuses on a short period (1995- 2000). While the time period is of theoretical interest, it begins shortly after the passage of Proposition 187 in California and ends with President George W. Bush’s first presidential campaign; a wider window of analysis would help reveal more about the development of conservative ideology on immigration. For example, the coherence of the network of all magazines at 1995 was 0.77. It would be good to know how that measurement compares with what would be obtained from previous years. Was it the case that conservative ideology was moderately coherent for years before 1995? Alternatively, would the pattern discovered for the 1995-2000 period, one of yearly improvement in coherence, persist if the window of analysis was expanded? Another way the work here focuses on a narrow portion of ideology is that the analysis only focused on conservatives ideology on immigration. Just as it would be good to see if

105 the results hold over a wider time window, it would be ideal to get measurements of coherence in other areas of policy. At the very least, this would help define a base level of coherence from which to make comparisons about how coherent a network is. Finally, the limited definition of coherence used in this project deserves mentioning. Theanalysisdonehereisoneofexplanatory coherence. As such, the data collected here was only about how much propositions helped explain one another. There are other kinds of coherence beyond explanatory coherence. Of particular interest for political scientists is that of emotional coherence. Emotional coherence is the degree to which different propositions elicit similar emotional responses. Plenty of research exists that demonstrates how emotions play a significant role in our cognition, and future projects based on this one should better incorporate their findings (see Lodge and Taber, 2013).

5.3 Future Research

Despite the narrow scope of this dissertation, the work presented here lays the groundwork for future research on the development of ideologies. At the most basic level, future research should focus on expanding both the areas of policy analyzed and the time frame of analysis. Analysis of more policy areas would help confirm whether or not the findings here are replicable across different areas of policy, and as such would contribute to confirm (or disconfirm) aspects of the theory. Meanwhile, greater time windows of analysis would help establish baselines for comparison and, hopefully, uncover interesting periods of time where the coherence of an ideology changes unexpectedly. For example, imagine analyzing conservative ideology on immigration from 1940 to 2016. Imagine finding that the coherence of the ideology experiences sharp

106 increases and decreases over time (instead of experiencing near-constant increases in coherence). If such sharp variation exists, researchers would be able to study what, if anything, helps predict and explain periods where ideology on a policy area crystallizes and periods when it is in flux. Another benefit of more studies is that they will contribute to defining baselines for comparison. This project can only make claims of increases in network coherence (see Figures 4.2 and 4.3). It cannot make claims about how materially relevant the increase in network coherence from a measure of .77 to one of .93 is. This inability arises out of not knowing the distribution of network coherence across ideological networks. Additionally, beyond not knowing how the coherence of the networks analyzed here compares with the coherence of other ideologies, this project is unable to provide insight into how an unbiased observer would perceive the arguments from the networks analyzed here. For example, picture two documents equal in all ways except that one incorporated all the arguments on the 95 to 2000 network (which had a coherence measure of .93) and another did the same for the 1995 network (coherence = 0.77). Would an unbiased reader find the first document significantly more convincing, understandable, or coherent than the second? This project cannot answer this question, all in all, it could be that there is no perceivable difference between the two. As such, research that uncovers what the distribution of network coherence is across time and policy areas and research into how people react to the arguments of networks with different coherence, would be useful. Such types of research would help uncover how practically relevant the findings in this thesis are. Finally, it is important to understand the role that coherence plays on the spread of ideologies both within different levels of sophistication (elites to elites, ordinary citizen to ordinary citizen) and across levels (from elites to mass-public and vice versa). Such research would help answer questions important for democratic theorists.

107 For example, to what extent is the average person more (or less) likely to accept more coherent arguments as opposed to less-coherent ones? Deliberative democrats would suggest that deliberation between citizens leads to better more informed decisions. Are informed decisions made because deliberation helps citizens form more coherent beliefs, or is something else happening? Perhaps citizens in deliberation experience a case of cue-taking and they simply adopt the arguments of those they see as reliable sources without building a more coherent belief system. Further research could also illuminate the role ideologies play in party behavior. One of the basic tenets of naive theories of democracy is that people can monitor the behavior of elected officials and judge them based on whether or not their preferences were satisfied. Does the development of coherent ideologies among elites help citizens develop coherent belief systems? Are citizens with coherent ideologies better able to control their parties? In other words, are highly ideological citizens— the type that participates in party primaries—better able to constrain the behavior of their candidates in areas where their ideology is coherent than in areas where their ideology is not? Perhaps the metaphorical suicide pacts I mentioned earlier —the CDC pursuing independence in Catalonia, the Labour party membership electing Jeremy Corbyn as their party Leader, the GOP doubling down on their restrictionist policy as the country speeds toward minority-majority status— is the result of high levels of ideological coherence among party electorates. If that is the case, it is worth studying how ideologies spread and how parties could guide their membership away from increasingly costly positions.

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117 Appendix A

Influence of Threat Narrative on Policy Propositions

The following tables show the influence of threat narrative proposition on a selection of policy propositions. Each table shows the influence that a particular threat proposition had on a number of policy positions. The influence of proposition X on Y was calculated as the difference in the activation value of Y when X has a fixed activation value of 1 and Y when X has a fixed activation value of −1. The tables only showcase where the influence of threat propositions on policy propositions is greater than 1. This choice was made because any proposition that experiences a change in activation values greater than 1 will go from being accepted to rejected or vice versa.

118 T. Propositions Policy Propositions

IP02 IP06 IP26 IP35 IP36 IP39 IP45 IP49 IP59 IP65 OB01

Immigrants 04 1.75 1.84 1.75 –––––1.71–1.60 Immigrants 14 1.75 1.85 1.77 – – 1.50 1.53 1.51 1.70 1.54 1.61 Immigrants 19 1.75 1.84 1.76 –––––1.72–1.64 Immigrants 21A 1.75 1.85 1.76 –––––1.72–1.60 Immigrants Economy 01 1.75 1.85 1.76 ––––1.501.711.51– Immigrants Economy 04 1.75 1.84 1.76 1.50 1.54 – – – 1.72 – 1.60 119 Immigration Culture 01 1.75 1.85 1.76 –––––1.71–1.61 NationState011.751.841.76–––––1.72–1.60 NationState031.751.841.76–––––1.71–1.60 Notes. Influence is measured as the total change in activation values of the policy position when the threat proposition is changed from a fixed activation value of -1 to a fixed activation value of 1. IP02 = In favor of a moratorium on legal immigration. IP06 = In favor of reducing legal immigration. IP26 = Against reducing legal immigration. IP35 = Against reducing skill-based immigration. IP36 = In favor of reducing skill-based immigration. IP39 = In favor of increasing H1-B work visas. IP45 = Against increasing H1-B work visas. IP49 = Against open borders. IP59 = Against a moratorium on immigration. IP65 = In favor of open border policy. OB02 = Immigration cannot be free and unrestricted.

Table A.1: Influence of threat propositions on restrictionist policy position Appendix B

List of Codes

Code Label Code

Affirmative Action 01 Affirmative action is discriminatory against some minorities

Affirmative Action 02 Affirmative action is discriminatory against whites

Affirmative Action 03 Affirmative action lowers the quality of education

Affirmative Action 04 Affirmative action contributes to grade inflation

Affirmative Action 05 Affirmative action contributes to culturally offensive curriculum

Affirmative Action 06 Affirmative action places students in institutions they should not go to

120 Code Label Code

Affirmative Action 07 Affirmative action prevents goods students from going to good universities

Affirmative Action 08 Affirmative action places poor students into universities they lack the skills to succeed at

Affirmative Action 09 Affirmative action harms assimilation/integration

Affirmative Action 10 Affirmative action creates resentment between the races

Affirmative Action 11 Affirmative action pushes minorities into stereotypical degrees

Affirmative Action 12 Affirmative action hurts Asians by programs that would expose them to American culture

Affirmative Action 13 Immigrants do not think they need affirmative action to succeed

Affirmative Action 14 Affirmative action increases demands for reducing immigration

Affirmative Action 15 Affirmative action doesn’t work

121 Code Label Code

Affirmative Action 16 Claims of Affirmative action’s successes often come from people who have succeeded

Affirmative Action 17 Affirmative Action success stories not that different from success stories of native born Americans

Affirmative Action 18 Affirmative action is Un-American

American Culture 01 American culture is virtuous (not corrupt)

American Culture 02 American culture is white/European

American Culture 03 American culture is about commitment to American values

American Culture 04 It takes time to assimilate into American culture

American Culture 10 It is impossible to achieve cultural homogeneity

American Culture 11 US is a nation of opportunity

American Culture 12 American culture is not white/European

American Culture 13 Immigrants want to become a part of America and its culture

122 Code Label Code

American Culture 14 Minorities proud to be Americans and of American culture

American Culture 15 Family values in the US are in decline

American Culture 16 Social values in America moving to the left (becoming more liberal)

American Imperialism 01 The US tries to keep Latin America in the 3rd world

American Imperialism 02 US benefits from Latin America’s poverty

Anti-immigrant 01 Anti-immigrant sentiments caused by governmental inaction on immigration

Asian Immigrants 01 Asian immigrants create networks that facilitate assimilation

Asian Immigrants 02 Asian immigrants are entrepreneurial

Big Government 01 Against the creation of new agencies, bureaucracies, or areas of government involvement

Big Government 02 Argument that a policy would create a burden on businesses and as such should be opposed

123 Code Label Code

Big Government 03 Against idea of government invading citizen’s privacy or liberties

Big Government 04 Argument that policy would not burden business

Big Government 05 Argument that program is limited in scope

Big Government 07 Argument that we cannot put too much faith in government or that government is incapable of working correctly

Big Government 08 Beneficiaries of government intervention (labor unions, environmentalist, other liberal groups) growing in political power

Big Government 09 A national registry would be prone to government abuse

Big Government 10 Americans fear big government more than immigrants

Big Government 11 Immigrants finding employment in government

Big Government 12 Argument that you should oppose costly and inefficient programs

124 Code Label Code

Bipartisan 01 Argument that a policy with bipartisan support should be endorsed

Border Security 01 Significant number of illegal immigrants entering US from Southern border

Border Security 02 Illegal border crossings lowers the quality of life of border communities

Border Security 03 Crossing the border is dangerous for immigrants

Border Security 04 Illegal border-crossers tend to be preyed upon by criminals and coyotes

Border Security 05 Border crossings take place in environments that are unfit for humans

Border Security 06 Mexican Government is helping people cross the border

Border Security 07 Lack of border security is forcing citizens to take matters into own hands

Border Security 08 Border patrols are an efficient way to prevent illegal immigration

Border Security 09 Border patrols deter illegal immigration

Border Security 10 We have increased border security/patrols

125 Code Label Code

Border Security 11 Increasing border patrols would not significantly reduce illegal immigration levels

Border Security 12 Increasing border security would be inefficient way to reduce illegal immigration levels

Border Security 13 Not all illegal immigration comes from border crossings

Buchanan 01 Buchanan lost because his issues were not salient

Buchanan 02 No foreign wars during 2000 election

Buchanan 03 Buchanan lost because he made bad campaign decisions

Buchanan 04 Buchanan ran ridiculous ads about immigration

Buchanan 05 Buchanan was seen as desperate by conservatives

Buchanan 06 Buchanan showed he lacked experience

Bush 01 Bush would not have won if we had supported restricting immigration

126 Code Label Code

Bush 02 Bush thinks affirmative action should be handled by the courts

Bush 03 Bush favors his own kind of affirmative action

Bush 04 Bush values a diverse Republican party

Bush 05 Bush is more pro-immigration than rest of party

Bush 06 Bush opposed denying immigrants public services

Bush 07 Bush is courting pro-choice votes

Citizenship 01 Only those who believe in American values should become citizens

Citizenship 04 There are high levels of naturalization among immigrants

Citizenship 05 Private naturalization tests are better for immigrants

Citizenship 06 Private citizenship programs subcontract to other private companies with no oversight

127 Code Label Code

Citizenship 07 Allegations of corruption in private citizenship programs easily combated with checks and audits

Citizenship test 01 Tests allows us to pick the best immigrants

Citizenship USA 01 Citizenship USA was not used to make more Democratic voters

Conservative Beliefs 01 Conservatives believe in free markets (free trade) / interventions in markets bound to fail

Conservative Beliefs 02 Conservatives reject belief that society is zero-sum

Conservative Beliefs 03 Conservatives don’t believe America is in decline

Conservative Beliefs 04 Republicans support tax cuts

Conservative Beliefs 05 GOP wants to build up military

Conservative beliefs 06 Republicans support privatizing social security

Conservative Beliefs 07 Republicans support school vouchers

128 Code Label Code

Conservative Beliefs 08 GOP supports faith-based anti-poverty programs

Conservative Immigrants 01 Immigrants oppose the welfare state

Conservatives 01 Conservatives should try to attract immigrants

Constitutional Argument X should be supported because it is 01 constitutional

Crime 01 No relationship between immigration and crime

Crime 02 Hispanics commit less crimes than Blacks

Crime 03 Immigration reduces crime

Crime 04 Immigrants tend to live in crime ridden neighborhoods

Cubans 01 Cuban population growth decreasing

Database 01 Against creation of national database of people

Democratic Party 01 Democrats favor less restrictive immigration policy because it creates democratic voters

129 Code Label Code

Democratic Party 02 Democrats do not get majority of white vote

Democratic Party 03 The poor tend to vote for Democrats

Democratic Party 04 Immigration increases the share of the Democratic vote

Democratic Party 05 Democrats in favor of multiculturalism, against assimilation

Democratic Party 06 Prominent Democrats oppose bilingual education

Democratic Party 07 Democrats are hypocrites

Democratic Party 08 Democrats say they support free-trade and globalization

Democratic Party 09 Democrats say the oppose free-trade and globalization

Democratic Party 10 Democrats favor allowing immigrants access to welfare in order to make them into Democratic voters

Democratic Party 11 Democrats have not reduced immigration

Deportation 01 Deportation is an inefficient way to reduce illegal immigration

130 Code Label Code

Discrimination 01 Immigrants do not face discrimination

Discrimination 02 Light-skinned immigrants do not think they have an advantage over dark-skinned immigrants

Discrimination 03 Hispanics do not want to be treated as minorities

Discrimination 04 Classifying Hispanics as minorities is a new phenomenon

Drugs 01 Immigrants are bringing in drugs

E-verify 01 Employment verification would burden states

E-verify 02 Employment verification would limits states ability to recognize each others’ documents

E-verify 03 Employment verification would not reduce illegal immigration

E-verify 04 If wrongly implemented, E-verify would leave people without jobs

E-verify 05 Easy to falsify current employment documents

131 Code Label Code

E-verify 06 E-verify doesn’t infringe on civil liberties

E-verify 07 We already use documents to verify employment eligibility

E-verify 08 E-verify same as old verification process but better

E-verify 09 Employment verification creates an unnecessary burden on Americans

E-verify 10 E-verify will require the use of biometric data

E-verify 11 Against making people carry personal information at all times

E-verify 12 People would have to change their IDs to make use of services that require IDs

E-verify 13 E-verify system would be prone to unacceptable errors

E-verify 14 Employment verification would make it harder for people to find work

E-verify 15 Employers oppose employment verification

132 Code Label Code

E-verify 16 E-verify is an example of governmental overreach

E-verify 17 E-verify would require creation of a national ID card to work

E-verify 18 Will require creation of a national registry to work

E-verify 19 E-verify will not lead to creation of National ID card

E-verify 20 E-verify will require all hiring decisions be verified by government

English 01 Immigrants should learn English

Environment 01 Immigration harms the environment

Environment 02 High population levels contributes to environmental degradation

Ethnic Enclaves 01 Ethnic enclaves harm immigrant children

Ethnic Factions 01 Immigration, as a political issues, hijacked by ethnic factions

Ethnic Groups 01 Asian immigrants more likely to succeed than Latino immigrants

133 Code Label Code

Ethnic Groups 02 Asian immigrants more educated than Latino immigrants

Evidence Use to code appeals to other sources, common sense, authority, observation, etc.

Family Reunification 01 Reducing family reunification is an attack on family values

Family Reunification 02 Family reunification allows too many distant relatives

Family Reunification 03 Restricting family reunification is not anti-family

Family Reunification 04 We should prioritize close relatives over other immigrants

Family Reunification 08 Reducing ability of immigrants to bring in family members will anger them

Geographic Segregation 01 Geographic segregation creates image of competing nations

Geographic Segregation 02 Geographic segregation (ethnic enclaves) inhibit assimilation

Globalization/Trade 01 Globalized trade has reduced importance of nations and borders

134 Code Label Code

Globalization/Trade 02 Free trade has good consequences

Globalization/Trade 03 Free trade has negative consequences

Green Card 01 Costs of renewing green cards are high

Illegal Immigration 01 Illegal immigration is a small percentage of total immigration

Immigrant Employment 02 Employment protection for immigrants encourages hiring of illegal immigrants

Immigrant Health 01 Providing immigrants access to emergency health services is not costly

Immigrant Health 02 Immigrants should have equal access to health services

Immigrant Health 03 It would be wrong to take health benefits away from legal immigrants

Immigrant Labor 01 Immigrant labor cheaper than native labor

Immigrants 01 Immigrants are prone to commit crime

Immigrants 03 Immigration levels are growing or high

Immigrants 04 Immigrants are more likely to be on welfare than natives

Immigrants 05 Immigrants are not assimilating

135 Code Label Code

Immigrants 08 Immigrants coming into the country are generally minorities

Immigrants 09 Immigrants contribute to overpopulation

Immigrants 11 Immigration contributes to overcrowding of public services

Immigrants 12 Immigration contributes to tension between classes and ethnicities

Immigrants 13 Immigration increases demands for affirmative action

Immigrants 14 Immigration is a burden on public service budgets

Immigrants 15 More likely to vote Democratic than Republican

Immigrants 18 Immigrants a magnet for other immigrants (legal or illegal)

Immigrants 19 Immigration could change or is a threat to American culture

Immigrants 20 Skilled immigrants are good for business (economy)

136 Code Label Code

Immigrants 21 Immigrants do not pay taxes or pay less than they take out

Immigrants 21A Immigrants take jobs that should otherwise go to natives

Immigrants 22 Immigrants unskilled or uneducated

Immigrants 23 Immigrants create ethnic enclaves

Immigrants 24 Immigrants not a burden on public budgets

Immigrants 25 Fertility Rates of immigrants higher than that of natives

Immigrants 26 Immigrants coming from third world (Asia/Latin America)

Immigrants 27 Immigrants tend to come into country young

Immigrants 28 Current immigrants less skilled than past immigrants

Immigrants 29 Current immigrants not fleeing communism

Immigrants 30 Educational attainment of children similar to that of parents

137 Code Label Code

Immigrants 31 Immigrants have strong work ethic (hard workers, work hard)

Immigrants 32 Current immigrants more likely to succeed than past (previous) immigrants

Immigrants 33 Current immigrants similar to past (previous) immigrants

Immigrants Economy 01 Immigration is bad for the economy

Immigrants Economy 02 Immigration good for economy

Immigrants Economy 03 Immigrants more likely to be (and remain) poorer than natives

Immigrants Economy 04 Immigration lowers wages

Immigrants Economy 05 Immigration redistributes wealth from natives to immigrants

Immigrants Economy 06 Immigration has no effect on wages

Immigrants Economy 07 Immigration does not harm economy

Immigrants Economy 08 Businesses don’t need skilled immigrants to fill high-skill jobs

Immigrants Economy 09 Not enough Americans with the skills that high-skilled immigrants have

138 Code Label Code

Immigrants Economy 10 Skills businesses say immigrants have but Americans don’t have are arbitrarily determined

Immigrants Economy 11 Skilled immigrants are needed in home countries more than in the US

Immigrants Economy 12 Current economy not good or robust

Immigrants Economy 13 Quality of life in the US greater than in immigrants’ home country

Immigrants Economy 14 Immigrants are not integrating in the economy

Immigrants Economy 15 Immigration increases competition for jobs

Immigrants Economy 16 High-skilled immigrants create jobs

Immigrants Economy 17 Competition for (low-skill) jobs leads to lower wages

Immigrants Economy 18 High-skilled immigrants not a fiscal burden

Immigrants Economy 28 Immigrants can fill jobs that would otherwise go unfilled because of labor shortage

139 Code Label Code

Immigrants Education 01 Asian students want accurate measures of academic success

Immigrants Education 02 Non-Asian minorities dislike objective measures of academic success

Immigrants Education 03 Asian students want classical academic curricula

Immigrants Education 04 Non-Asian minorities dislike classical academic curricula

Immigrants Education 05 Overcrowding of classrooms caused by immigration harms education

Immigrants Employment 01 Illegal immigrants are hired willingly by employers

Immigrants Employment 02 Jobs are a magnet for (illegal) immigration

Immigrants Employment 03 Natives should have first right to work

Immigrants Employment 04 Immigrants take jobs Americans don’t want

Immigrants Employment 05 Don’t need immigrants to fill undesirable jobs

140 Code Label Code

Immigrants Employment 07 Some employers prefer immigrant labor over native labor

Immigrants Employment 08 Current law prohibits hiring of illegal aliens

Immigrants Family 01 Immigrants have family values

Immigrants Family 02 Immigration harms family values of immigrants

Immigrants Family 03 Mass immigration increases teenage/unwed pregnancies/motherhood

Immigrants Family 04 Immigrant households more likely to have a family than native ones

Immigrants Family 05 First generation immigrants preserve families better than subsequent generations

Immigrants Family 06 Immigrants more likely to marry and not divorce than natives

Immigrants Family 07 Immigrant households less likely to have single-mothers than native ones

Immigrants Welfare 01 Welfare magnet effect (Welfare attracts immigrants)

141 Code Label Code

Immigrants Welfare 02 Immigrants don’t use welfare more than natives

Immigrants Welfare 03 Most public expenditures go to the elderly

Immigrants Welfare 04 Immigrants inform other immigrants on how to get welfare

Immigrants Welfare 05 Welfare is significant source of income for poor people

Immigrants Welfare 06 Restricting immigrants’ access to welfare is not good policy

Immigrants Welfare 07 People on welfare do not try to find work

Immigrants Welfare 08 Opposition to immigration driven by the view that immigrants use welfare

Immigration 02 Reducing legal immigration is harder politically than reducing illegal immigration

Immigration 03 Immigration part of American history and identity

Immigration 04 Current immigration different from previous immigration

142 Code Label Code

Immigration 05 Illegal immigration has not been reduced

Immigration 06 Mass immigration hurts immigrants

Immigration 07 In order to reduce illegal immigration we have to reduce legal immigration

Immigration 08 Legal and illegal immigration should be treated as different issues

Immigration 09 Immigrants come to the US because it is a land of opportunity and freedom (Freedom of Opportunity/Quality of Life Magnet)

Immigration 10 Immigration does not lead to overpopulation

Immigration 11 Immigration harms/hurts minorities

Immigration 12 Current immigration coming from less diverse set of nations than in past

Immigration 13 Immigration is a difficult process/choice

Immigration Control 01 Wanting to control immigration goes against free market liberalism

Immigration Control 02 Borders restrict movement of people seeking a better life

143 Code Label Code

Immigration Culture 01 Immigration is changing ethnic/racial composition of US

Immigration Culture 02 Mass migration inhibits assimilation

Immigration Culture 03 Immigrants should assimilate

Immigration Culture 04 Assimilation lessens ethnic tensions

Immigration Culture 05 Assimilation depends on economic success of immigrants

Immigration Culture 06 Lack of assimilation of immigrants a threat to American unity

Immigration Culture 07 Immigrants’ culture fundamentally different from American Culture

Immigration Culture 08 Immigration not a threat to American culture

Immigration Culture 09 Immigrants are (or will) assimilate

Immigration Culture 10 Immigration policy should not be about preserving culture

Immigration Culture 11 Immigration does not contribute to tension between classes or ethnicities

144 Code Label Code

Immigration Culture 12 Ethnic tensions usually a problem because of native minorities not immigrants

Immigration Culture 13 Immigrants hate/disdain/dislike America (and its culture and values)

Immigration Culture 14 Assimilation wrongly attacked as imposing white culture on minorities

Immigration Culture 15 Past (previous) immigrants assimilated unlike current immigrants

Immigration Culture 16 The problem with Hispanics (Latinos) is that they are Catholics

Immigration Culture 17 Latin American culture committed to socialism

Immigration Culture 19 Lack of assimilation not due to ethnicity or culture of immigrants

Immigration Culture 20 America (USA) cannot assimilate immigrants as well as in past

Immigration Culture 21 Immigrants are culturally conservative

Immigration Culture 22 Immigrants do not like that American culture is abandoning its traditional values

145 Code Label Code

Immigration Culture 23 Immigrants enrich American culture

Immigration Economy 08 No shortage of domestic labor

Immigration Economy 09 We need cultural homogeneity to preserve economy

Immigration Economy 10 Immigration increases poverty

Immigration Economy 11 Immigration attracts people with talents and skills to America

Immigration Economy 12 Competition for (low-wage) jobs leads to higher unemployment

Immigration Economy 13 Competition for jobs leads to higher crime rates

Immigration Economy 14 Immigration redistributes wealth away from the working class towards the wealthy

Immigration Economy 15 Minorities tend to work low-wage jobs

Immigration Economy 16 Immigrants migrate to the US even if economy is bad

Immigration Economy 17 Economy is doing well

Immigration Economy 18 When economy is good, less opposition to immigration

146 Code Label Code

Immigration Economy 19 We have a post-industrial economy

Immigration Economy 20 Job shortage for low-skilled workers

Immigration Economy 21 Historically, immigration to the US has been beneficial to the economy

Immigration Economy 22 Skilled immigration lowers wages of the wealthy

Immigration Economy 23 Reducing immigration would hurt the economy

Immigration Economy 24 Immigration creates jobs

Immigration Economy 25 Economies expand to accommodate immigration

Immigration Economy 26 Reducing immigration will not create jobs

Immigration Economy 27 Immigrants do not take jobs from natives

Immigration Economy 28 No link (relationship) between immigration and economic effects

Immigration Effects 01 Mass immigration undermines confidence in government

Immigration Elections 01 Illegal immigration influences elections even if illegal immigrants don’t vote

147 Code Label Code

Immigration Elections 02 Illegal residents are counted for apportionment in elections

Immigration Elections 03 Voters in districts with illegal immigrants have more powerful votes

Immigration Elections 04 Illegal immigrants are voting in US elections

Immigration Elections 05 Immigrants settling in large electoral college states

Immigration Elections 06 No major political candidate has won by opposing immigration

Immigration Elections 07 Republicans lost California because of Proposition 187

Immigration Elections 08 Immigrant groups are increasing in political power

Immigration Immigrant networks make it easier to hire Employment 03 immigrants than natives

Immigration Immigrants not particularly Entrepreneurs 01 entrepreneurial

Immigration New immigrants less likely to be self Entrepreneurs 02 employed than older immigrants

148 Code Label Code

Immigration Immigrant entrepreneurs don’t create Entrepreneurs 03 more jobs than native entrepreneurs

Immigration Higher rate of entrepreneurship among Entrepreneurs 04 natives than immigrants

Immigration Law 01 There’s a trend of being lenient towards immigrant crime

Immigration levels 01 Immigration levels not historically abnormal

Immigration levels 02 Worrying about immigration levels (wanting to control immigration) unnatural

Immigration levels 03 We have always tried to control immigration levels (Past control of borders a fact)

Immigration levels 04 Country cannot accommodate high levels of immigrants

Immigration levels 05 Immigration controls are a historical anomaly

Immigration not the same We should separate feelings about as immigrants 01 immigrants from preferences over immigration policy

149 Code Label Code

Immigration Policy 01 Immigrants are a significant part of the US population

Immigration Policy 02 In favor of moratorium on legal immigration

Immigration Policy 03 In favor of reducing family reunification

Immigration Policy 04 In favor of reducing illegal immigration

Immigration Policy 05 In favor of reducing immigration

Immigration Policy 06 In favor of reducing legal immigration

Immigration Policy 07 In favor of restricting illegal immigrant’s access to public services

Immigration Policy 08 Against Citizenship USA program

Immigration Policy 09 People who should not be naturalized are being naturalized

Immigration Policy 10 In favor of sponsor-deeming

Immigration Policy 11 In favor of enforcing current immigration law

Immigration Policy 12 Sponsor deeming helps prevent immigrants from becoming fiscal burdens

Immigration Policy 13 Against national ID card

150 Code Label Code

Immigration Policy 14 In favor of moving to skills based migration

Immigration Policy 15 In favor of increasing border security

Immigration Policy 16 Against employee protections for illegal immigrants

Immigration Policy 17 In favor of deporting illegal immigrants

Immigration Policy 18 In favor of letting states decide whether to provide public services to immigrants

Immigration Policy 19 In favor of waiving sponsor-deeming

Immigration Policy 20 In favor of allowing immigrants access to emergency services

Immigration Policy 22 Against employment verification

Immigration Policy 23 Against moving away from family reunification

Immigration Policy 24 US immigration law most generous in the world

Immigration Policy 25 Against hiring of illegal immigrants

Immigration Policy 26 Against reducing legal immigration

Immigration Policy 27 Legal immigrants not significant part of population

151 Code Label Code

Immigration Policy 28 In favor of employment verification

Immigration Policy 29 In favor of revoking citizenship (deporting) of immigrants who commit crimes

Immigration Policy 30 Immigration net negative (bad/cost) for America (Americans)

Immigration Policy 31 Against multiculturalism

Immigration Policy 32 Immigration net benefit for America (Americans)

Immigration Policy 33 Against Affirmative Action

Immigration Policy 34 Against reducing immigration

Immigration Policy 35 Against reducing skill-based immigration

Immigration Policy 36 In favor of reducing skill-based immigration

Immigration Policy 37 In favor of clearing immigration backlog

Immigration Policy 38 Immigration not a constitutional right

Immigration Policy 39 In favor of increasing H1-B (work) visas

Immigration Policy 40 INS is corrupt and mismanaged

152 Code Label Code

Immigration Policy 41 In favor of increasing business creation visas

Immigration Policy 42 Against amnesty/clemency for illegal immigrants

Immigration Policy 44 In favor of policies that encourage assimilation

Immigration Policy 45 Against increasing H1-B (work) visas

Immigration Policy 46 In favor of barring entry/citizenship to former illegal immigrants

Immigration Policy 47 In favor of Bracero program

Immigration Policy 49 Against open borders

Immigration Policy 50 Oppose reducing legal and illegal immigration simultaneously

Immigration Policy 51 In favor of a citizenship test

Immigration Policy 52 Against restricting illegal immigration (further)

Immigration Policy 53 In favor of points-based system of immigration

Immigration Policy 54 Against deportation of illegal immigrants

153 Code Label Code

Immigration Policy 55 Against prison camps for illegal immigrants

Immigration Policy 56 Against increasing border patrols

Immigration Policy 58 Against increasing border security

Immigration Policy 59 Against moratorium on immigration

Immigration Policy 60 In favor of national ID card

Immigration Policy 61 In favor of collecting biometric information of citizens

Immigration Policy 62 In favor of privatizing portions of the naturalization process

Immigration Policy 63 Against the privatization of certain portions of the naturalization process

Immigration Policy 64 In favor of increasing legal immigration

Immigration Policy 65 In favor of open border policy

Immigration Policy 66 Current immigration policy mistreats immigrants

Incentive 01 Arguments that a policy would incentivize following the law

Incentive 02 Wrong to reward law-breakers

154 Code Label Code

INS 01 INS has engaged in illegal acts

INS 02 INS discouraging or failing to encourage assimilation

INS 03 INS has tried to cover up Democrat’s use of immigration law to benefit party

INS 04 INS should be split into two agencies

INS 05 INS has two conflicting functions, providing services to legal immigrants and enforcing immigration laws

INS 06 Lack reliable data to confirm immigration status

INS 07 Corruption in INS’ privatized citizenship program

INS 08 INS did not do quality control of private citizenship programs

INS 09 INS is too expensive

INS 11 Immigrants complaining about INS incompetence

Interest Groups 01 Immigration reform opposed by powerful interest groups

155 Code Label Code

Interest Groups 02 Interest groups don’t represent the voters

Interest Groups 03 Various interest groups breed resentment towards America among immigrants

Intermarriage 01 Current immigrants (Mexicans) not intermarrying with natives

Labor 01 If labor gets expensive, employers will mechanize low-skill labor

Labor 02 Less workers than jobs available (a shortage of labor)

Labor Unions 01 Unions in favor of immigration

Lawbreakers 01 Deporting people who break laws will ease the minds of middle class Americans

Legal Immigrants 01 Wrong to impose burdens on legal immigrants because of illegal immigrants

Legal Immigrants 02 Legal immigrants are model immigrants

Legislative Argument 1 Argument that a policy has legislative support

Legislative Argument 2 Argument that policy change should go through standard legislative procedures

Liberal Policies 01 Minimum wage destroys jobs

156 Code Label Code

Liberal Policies 02 Regulations harm the economy

Liberal Policies 03 Tax increases harm the economy

Liberal Policies 04 Government spending harms the economy

Liberal Policies 05 Welfare policy bad for America

Liberal Policies 06 Affirmative Action bad for the economy (costs too much)

Liberals not immigrants 01 Problems associated with immigration fault of liberal policies

Mexicans 01 Mexicans high proportion of immigration

Mexicans 02 High levels of illegal immigration from Mexicans

Mexicans 03 Low levels of naturalization among Mexican immigrants

Mexicans 04 Mexican immigrants concentrated on southern states

Mexicans 05 Mexicans resentful over loss of Mexican land during Mexican-American war

Mexicans 06 Mexicans send money they earn in US back to Mexico

Mexicans 07 Cling to their language and culture

157 Code Label Code

Mexico 01 Mexican gov letting expats own property in Mexico

Minority Voters 01 Democrat’s organizing around minority issues stronger than in the past

Minority Voters 02 Proposition 187 has activated/alienated minority voters

Minority voters 03 Immigration lowers political power of minorities

Movement of Labor 01 Movement of labor across borders is example of supply and demand

Multiculturalism 01 Multiculturalism threatens, is opposed, to American Culture

Multiculturalism 02 Multiculturalism hurts assimilation

Multiculturalism 03 Best way to assimilate is to be immersed in culture

Multiculturalism 04 Bilingual/multicultural education bad for education

Multiculturalism 05 In favor of English as national language

Multiculturalism 06 Immigration leads (increases demands) to multiculturalism

158 Code Label Code

Multiculturalism 07 Costly to teach English as a second language

Multiculturalism 08 Multiculturalism leads to divisions (tensions) across cultural groups

Multiculturalism 09 View of assimilation as imposing white culture (or racist, imperialist) makes assimilation hard to defend

Multiculturalism 10 Opposition to bilingual education is not racially motivated

Multiculturalism 11 Bilingual education is bad for immigrants

Multiculturalism 12 In favor of waivers to have children educated in language other than English

Multiculturalism 13 Multiculturalism increases demands for reducing immigration

Multiculturalism 14 Acceptance of multiculturalism is on the rise

Multiculturalism 15 Opposition to bilingual education

Multiculturalism 16 Concerns about immigration driven by opinions about bilingual education

Nation State 01 Immigration harms the nation state

159 Code Label Code

Nation State 02 In favor of defending the nation-state and its interest

Nation State 03 We need ethnic and cultural homogeneity to preserve nation

Nation State 04 People against immigration reform want to end the US as we know it

Nation State 05 Preserving nation state necessary for social order

Nation State 06 The concept of a nation state dropping in relevance

Nation State 07 America (USA) not a nation of immigrants

National ID 01 National ID will require collection of biometric information

Native Minorities 01 Minorities negatively influence immigrants

Native Minorities 02 Native minorities mock immigrants if they assimilate

Native Minorities 03 Stoke feelings of discrimination and resentment in immigrants

160 Code Label Code

Nativism 01 Greater immigration restrictions would feed nativism/racism

Nativism 02 Author believes we shouldn’t stoke nativism/racism

Nativism 03 Nativist policies assume markets don’t work

Nativism 04 Nativist policies assume society is zero-sum

Nativism 05 Nativist policies assume America is in decline

Nativism 06 Nativism is growing in the US

Open Borders 01 Immigration cannot be free and unrestricted

Open Borders 02 Unrestricted immigration can only happen at specific times

Open Borders 03 Free unrestricted immigration is natural state of world

Open Borders 04 Immigrants would not ‘flood country’ if wehadopenborders

161 Code Label Code

Open Borders 05 Having open borders is the moral thing to do

Parties 01 High levels of immigration will harm both parties

Parties 02 High levels of immigration may lead to the rise of third parties

Parties 03 Both parties support multiculturalism

Point-based Immigration 01 Evidence that point-based immigration systems work

Politicians 01 Elected official ignoring problems of immigration

Politicians 02 Politically toxic to deal with issues that involve minorities/immigrants

Polls 01 Voters/Public want reduction in legal immigration

Polls 02 Americans favor reducing illegal immigration

Polls 04 Ignoring the will of the people is wrong

Polls 05 Immigrants/Hispanics want to reduce illegal immigration

162 Code Label Code

Polls 05A Majority of Hispanics want reduction in immigration levels

Polls 06 Voters against bilingualism

Polls 07 White voters want immigration reduced

Polls 08 Immigrants/Hispanic oppose bilingual education

Polls 09 Immigrants/Hispanic oppose affirmative action

Polls 10 Hispanics/immigrants oppose multiculturalism

Polls 11 Asians and Hispanics oppose reducing immigration

Polls 12 Americans against affirmative action

Polls 13 Voters favor reducing immigration

Polls 14 Polls that say voters favor immigration reductions are deceptive

Polls 15 Americans oppose increasing population

Polls 16 African Americans favor reducing immigration

163 Code Label Code

Polls 17 Voters want to restrict immigrants’ access to welfare

Polls 18 White voters want to restrict immigrants’ access to welfare/public services

Polls 19 Asian voters want to restrict immigrants’ access to welfare/public services

Polls 20 African American voters want to restrict immigrants’ access to welfare/public services

Polls 21 Hispanics/Latinos favor increasing border security

Polls 22 Hispanics/Latinos favor national ID card

Polls 23 Hispanics/Latinos oppose increasing deportations

Polls 24 Hispanics/Latinos oppose denying work to illegal aliens

Polls 25 Hispanics/Latinos oppose restricting immigrant’s access to public services

Polls 26 Ethnic groups with high number of immigrants support reducing immigration

164 Code Label Code

Polls 27 Some Hispanics/Latinos wanted to reduce immigrants access to public services

Polls 28 Voters don’t think immigration is an important issue

Polls 29 Voters/Americans don’t want to deport immigrants

Polls 30 Voters/Americans think immigration/immigrants is/are good for America/US/Country

Polls 31 Immigrants trust in government dropping

Polls 32 Americans’ trust in government is dropping

Polls 33 Americans/voters don’t want to reduce immigration

Polls 34 Americans (voters) want immigrants to assimilate

Polls 35 Americans think immigration was good for America in the past

Polls 36 Americans don’t think immigration is good for America

165 Code Label Code

Polls 37 Americans think immigrants take jobs Americans don’t want

Polls 38 Americans think immigrants are good for the economy

Polls 39 Americans think immigrants are bad for the economy

Polls 40 Americans think immigrants drive down wages

Polls 41 Americans want immigration levels to remain as they are

Polls 42 Immigrants think they should assimilate

Polls 43 Immigrants feel law system better in US than home countries

Polls 44 Immigrants think hard work is rewarded in the US

Polls 45 Americans have negative view of immigrants

Polls 46 Americans think immigration overburdens welfare/public service system

Polls 47 Americans think immigration raises taxes

166 Code Label Code

Polls 48 Americans think immigrants take jobs from Americans

Polls 49 Americans think immigration increases social and ethnic conflict

Privatization 01 Private companies are more adaptable than government agencies

Privatization 02 In favor of privatizing social welfare programs

Protestants 01 Protestant values lead to prosperous cultures

Protestants 02 Belief in a protestant work ethic

Public Services 01 Public services should go to those who pay taxes

Refugees 01 Refugee policy is too generous/we should reduce our refugee program

Refugees 02 Current refugee policy has too broad a definition of persecution

Refugees 03 Refugee policy is too costly

Refugees 04 Against facilitating access to refugee status

167 Code Label Code

Refugees 05 Against increasing number of refugees coming into country

Religious Voters 01 Religious wing of the Republican Party (GOP) growing in power

Religious Voters 02 Religious voters and their leaders could leave the GOP (Republicans)

Religious Voters 03 Religious voters feel/could feel the GOP (Republicans) don’t represent them

Religious Voters 04 Religious voters no longer loyal to Republicans simply because they are scared of what Democrats will do

Religious Voters 05 Feel like things couldn’t get worse in America

Religious Voters 06 No longer interested in tolerance and compromise

Republicans 01 Republicans (GOP) would benefit from reducing immigration

Republicans 02 Opposition to immigration not hurting the GOP electorally

Republicans 03 Republicans would suffer electorally if they took a pro-immigration stance

168 Code Label Code

Republicans 04 Increasing immigration hurts (won’t help) the GOP electorally

Republicans 05 As immigrants assimilate they become more conservative/Republican

Republicans 06 Republicans would benefit from opposing affirmative action

Republicans 06A Opposition to multiculturalism will benefit the Republicans

Republicans 07 [White] Voters will punish Republicans for not reducing immigration

Republicans 08 Republican Party refuses to reduce immigration

Republicans 09 Wanting to reduce immigration insults Reagan’s legacy

Republicans 10 Reagan was in favor of immigration reform

Republicans 11 Republicans will not win the Hispanic vote

Republicans 12 Republican party likely to become minority party

169 Code Label Code

Republicans 13 Republicans losing votes from immigrants

Republicans 14 Republicans at electoral disadvantage when immigrants become ethnically conscious

Republicans 15 Republicans will not benefit from supporting immigration

Republicans 17 Eliminating legal immigration will hurt the Republican Party

Republicans 18 Asians and Hispanics (immigrants) tend to vote Republican (GOP)

Republicans 19 Number of Republican-leaning immigrants greater than Democratic-leaning immigrants

Republicans 20 The Republican Party (GOP) needs to stop antagonizing/ignoring their base

Republicans 21 Opposition to immigration will hurt Republicans

Republicans 21A Republicans are hypocrites

Republicans 22 The Republican Party is becoming more liberal (less conservative)

170 Code Label Code

Republicans 23 GOP tried to get rid of proposals to eliminate Department of Education

Republicans 24 Republicans have supported making taxes more progressive

Republicans 25 Republicans no longer oppose affirmative action

Republicans 26 Republican Party is (still) a conservative party

Republicans 27 Republicans should support protectionist policies (oppose free trade)

Republicans 28 Opposing free trade will win Republicans votes

Republicans 29 Republicans in favor of a National ID card

Republicans 30 Republicans seen as an anti-immigrant party

Republicans 31 Republicans want to reduce immigration

Second Generation 01 Second generation immigrants are more successful than their parents

171 Code Label Code

Second Generation 02 Second generation immigrants less likely to succeed than their parents

Skilled Immigrants 01 Skilled immigrants are good for the country

Skilled Immigrants 02 Makes no sense that US educates immigrants and then lets them leave

Skilled Immigrants 03 Skilled immigrants earn more money than average immigrants

Skilled Immigrants 04 Skilled immigrants pay more in taxes than average immigrants

Skilled Immigrants 05 Skilled immigrants rely less on welfare than average immigrants

Skilled Immigrants 06 Skilled immigration increases wages

Skilled Immigrants 06A Americans could learn skills from skilled immigrants

Skilled Immigrants 07 Skilled migration will reduce inequality

Social Security 01 Immigration cannot save social security

Social Security 02 Immigration can save social security

172 Code Label Code

Social Security 03 Trying to prop up social security through immigration is like running a Ponzi scheme

Social Security 04 Current immigrants will become social security recipients

Social Security 05 High levels of immigration needed to prop up social security

States Rights 01 Education falls under the 10th Amendment

States Rights 02 Opposition to shifting fiscal burdens to the states

Taxes 01 Citizens pay taxes

Taxes 02 Immigrants pay fair-share (or more) of taxes

Taxes 04 Older immigrants usually ineligible for benefits

Technology 01 Technology allows for communication across vast distances

Temporary Immigration 01 Not all illegal immigrants settle permanently

173 Code Label Code

Temporary Immigration 02 Increasing border security increases costs of temporary migration

Treatment of immigrants 02 Immigration policy punishes immigrants who come to US seeking work

Visas 01 Immigrants will not wait for legal visas

Visas 02 Immigrants are overstaying their visas

Visas 03 Immigration backlog would be easily fixed if we issued more visas

Visas 04 Clearing the immigration backlog would take too long and priority should not be assigned on a first-in-first-out basis

Visas 05 Current investor (business creation) visa program inefficient

Visas 06 There is a backlog of people waiting for visas

Wages 01 Low wages help fight off inflation

Wealthy Voters 01 Wealthy voters increasingly more Democratic

174 Code Label Code

Wealthy Voters 02 Wealthy voters are cosmopolitans and uncomfortable with Republicans’ social conservatism

White Voters 01 Will not support immigration if immigrants feel resentment towards America

Work Visas 01 Work (H1-B) visas give recipients too little freedom

Work Visas 02 H1-B recipient stuck with one employer they can’t leave

Work Visas 03 H1-B recipients cannot strike or bargain for better conditions

Work Visas 04 Once worker-visas end, the immigrant becomes a public charge (burden)

175 Appendix C

Extended Example of Coding

This appendix provides a detailed example of how the data for this dissertation was collected. All the examples here are drawn from the actual coding procedures used for this project. For the purposes of this example, I will repeatedly refer to the work done on article NationalReview1997-28. NationalReview1997-28 is an article, titled “Illegal Means a Lot”, published in the June 16, 1997 issue of The National Review (Krikorian, 1997)

C.1 Coder Recruitment and Training

I recruited coders for this project through the Ohio State Political Science Department. A request for undergraduate research assistants was sent out to interested students. Potential recruits would volunteer to serve as research assistants for the summer term. As the project extended into the fall term, coders were allowed to continue or drop their participation, and replacement coders were recruited to replace those who did not go on into the fall. I interviewed potential research assistants to before being drafted as coders. During the meeting, I introduced them to the nature of the work and their expected workload (to read and code ten articles a week). If they remained interested in

176 becoming coders, I would provide resources to train them in argument diagramming. I based their lessons on materials made public by the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University.1 After going through an example of argument diagramming, they were given five articles to code before meeting again for a second interview. Potential recruits who scheduled a second interview were asked to make diagrams of the five documents they received in the previous meeting. I reviewed their work and provided guidance and advice. This pattern of practice and inspection continued until I felt that the coders were ready to work on the project.

C.2 Article Labelling

Once I selected articles for analysis, each document was assigned a code. The codes followed the following style MagazineNameYYYY-##,where:

• MagazineName is AmericanEnterprise, AmericanSpectator, Reason, PublicIn- terest, PolicyReview, NationalReview, WeeklyStandard, or Human Events

• YYYY is the year the article was published

• ## is an unique number for an article within a magazine year

C.3 Argument Outlines

Once all articles were assigned a corresponding code, each article was assigned to two coders. Each coder was assigned 10 articles a week. Coders were asked to read the articles in detail and create argument outlines. The argument outlines were intended

1http://oli.cmu.edu/courses/free-open/argument-diagramming-course-details/

177 to capture the main conclusions of the article and the reasons given in defense of it. If necessary, they also included arguments that the author of the article thought to be contradictory and sources of evidence the author referenced in defense of their arguments. Once each coder had made an outline for an article, I would merge their outlines to create a final outline for coding. InthecaseofNationalReview1997-28 the following outline was generated after merging the ones created by the coders:

Sergio D´ıaz

10/10/2016

Summary by [Redacted]

National Review 1997-28: Illegal Means a Lot

1 Conclusion: In order to cut illegal immigration it is necessary to cut legal immigration.

a Reason: Because legal and illegal immigration are closely tied together and essentially are the same problem.

i Evidence: Legal and illegal immigration increased simultaneously over three decades

b Reason: Because legal immigrants provide housing and jobs for illegal aliens.

i Evidence: Because many immigrant households have both legal and illegal members

c Reason: Because the long waiting times for green cards encourage people to immigrate illegally.

178 i Evidence: Data on waiting times.

The outline above reflects the arguments made in the article itself (emphasis added):

PARTICIPANTS in the immigration debate often promote measures to control illegal immigration as necessary to preserve public support for legal entries. The image usually employed is “closing the back door of illegal immigration to keeep opten the front door of legal immigration.”

Though such support for the rule of law is heartening, they betray a funda- mental misunderstanding of how immigration works. The ineluctable fact is that legal and illegal immigration are two parts of the same problem.

[Data on simultaneous increases of legal an illegal immigration.]

While overlapping graphs don’t prove anything in themselves, it is no coincidence that legal and illegal immigration have risen in tandem. Com- munities of legal immigrants serve as incubators for illegal immigration, providing housing and jobs for their compatriots who haven’t yet managed to procure a green card. In fact legal and illegal aliens often live under the same roof, members of the same family.

[...]

One of the perverse elements of our legal-immigration system is amazingly long waiting lists for green cards.

[Data on waiting times.]

Obviously waits of this kind suggest a seriously flawed mechanism for selecting immigrants—and they encourage those who have been selected but asked to wait, simply to settle with their relatives illegally.

179 [...]

Last year, about one-quarter of “legal” immigrants were, in fact, illegal aliens using the legal immigration system to launder their status

[...]

Clearly cutting legal immigration is a prerequisite to controlling the latter.

(Krikorian, 1997)

C.4 Coding of Arguments

Once outlines were created for all the articles in the corpus, the arguments in the outlines were coded. Instructions were to assign one code to each argument. Appendix B contains a list of the codes used to code the arguments. Each outline was first coded by myself. After being coded a copy of the coded document was made in Atlas.ti, a content analysis program. The codes used in the original document were removed from the copy and the copy was then assigned to a coder. The coder would then code the text on their own. Once finished, the original and the student’s coded outline were merged together using tools available in the Atlas.ti program. The instructions given to the coders were as follows:

“When you are assigned this task you will be assigned a series of argument diagrams. You will be responsible for attaching codes to the elements in the diagram. Each code represents a theme or family of arguments. It is possible that some elements can be coded with more than one code, but this should be an exception to the rule. Be as austere as possible in your coding, assigning, whenever possible, only one code to each element.

180 When coding, you will be working with a list of codes that will be handed to you prior to work on the documents. In order to code, follow these instructions:

1. Before you do any coding go over the code list and familiarize yourself with the codes and their descriptions. You can ask for a codelist from the project administrator at any time.

2. Once you are familiar with the codes, for each outline you were assigned:

(a) Highlight the first element within the outline.

(b) Then click the “Code-by-list” button on the left side toolbar or

choose Coding/ Code by List from the menu

(c) From the list with applicable codes select the one or mode codes (while holding the Ctrl key) and click OK

(d) Repeat steps 2(a-c) until you have coded all the elements of the outline.

(e) Once you finish coding an outline, call the project administrator. He will check and save your work. Then begin work on your next outline.”

Once all documents were coded by myself and another coder, they were reviewed. The goal was to revise coding wherever the coder and I had assigned a different code to an argument. Usually disagreements were resolved in favor of one of the two codes. Sometimes, however, both codes were preserved. Both codes were kept when either the coder or I agreed that an argument was best represented by two codes, or if we failed to agree on a singular code to use for the argument. Figure C.1 shows the end result of this step.

181 Argument Code 1 Code 2

1. Conclusion: In order to cut [Immigration 07] [Immigration 07] illegal immigration it is necessary to cut legal immigration. a. Reason: Because legal [Immigration 07] [Immigration 07] and illegal immigration are closely tied together and es- sentially are the same prob- lem. i. Evidence: Legal and [Evidence] [Evidence] illegal immigration in- creased simultaneously over three decades. b. Reason: Because legal [Immigrants 18] [Immigrants 18] immigrants provide housing and jobs for illegal aliens. i. Evidence: Be- [Evidence] [Evidence] cause many immigrant households have both legal and illegal mem- bers. c. Reason: Because the long [Visas 1] [Visas 1] waiting times for green cards encourage people to immi- grate illegally. i. Evidence: Data on [Evidence] [Evidence] waiting times.

Each argument in an outline would be assigned a code by the author and another coder. Arguments were coded individually and then compared. Reliability measures were obtained of the individual coding before resolving discrepancies.

Table C.1: Example of coded article outline

182 C.5 From Outlines to Networks

Coded outlines were transformed into networks using Atlas.ti’s network view func- tionality. Network view allows Atlas.ti users to create links representing relationships between codes. Because I was interested in collecting data on which arguments sup- ported and underlie conservative beliefs, the ability to specify relationship between codes was extremely useful. Links between codes were created according to the following rules:

1. For each outline

• Create a node representing each code in the outline.

• Create a link between two nodes if one represents an argument that is one level lower than the argument represented by the other node.

• Assign the link between two nodes a code in the following style MNYYYYLink- type.

– MN represent the magazine the outlined article is from.2

– YYYY represents the year the outline article was published.

– Linktype represent one of the three types of constraint (Explain, Contradicts, Data) used in the ECHO algorithm.

∗ Because of how I built the ECHO algorithm, Explain and Data link types in Atlas.Ti were directed, with nodes representing premises serving as sources and nodes representing conclusions being targets. This was necessary because the functions that built the networks for the ECHO algorithm needed to distinguish

2AE =American Enterprise,AS=American Spectator,HE=Human Events,NR=National Review,PR=Policy Review,PI=Public Interest,RE=Reason,WS=Weekly Standard

183 Source Node Link Type Target Node

Immigration 18 NR1997Explains Immigration 07 Visas 01 NR1997Explains Immigration 07 Evidence NR1997Data Immigration 07 Evidence NR1997Data Immigration 18 Evidence NR1997Data Visas 01

Table C.2: Example of argument network in table form

between source and target nodes to appropriately assign link weights for these types of relationships. Once link weights were assigned, the ECHO algorithm treated all links in the networks as symmetric and not directed.

Figure C.1 shows the end result of this step for the sample article.

C.6 From Networks to Data Sets

Once networks for all the outlines were created following the rules above, I used Atlas.ti’s exporting tools to transform the networks for each magazine year into data sets. Table C.2 shows how Figure C.1 was transformed into a data set.

184 185

Figure C.1: Example of a Network