Social Conservatism And The Tea Party

James Farney describes North American conservatism as an ideology focused on reacting to progressivism, resisting any changes from the perceived natural and historical. The three major areas of change that concern conservatives are the breakdown of the community, the breakdown of laissez-faire capitalism, and the breakdown of traditional family and gender roles. Each of these concerns maps onto one of the three branches of modern conservatism: traditionalists are primarily concerned with the community, laissez-faire conservatives (fiscal conservatives) are primarily concerned with government intervention into the economy and the social conservatives are primarily concerned with the changing nature of gender and family roles. Of these three
How similar are these group, and can you apply evidence that there is a correlation in one group to the other? In a recent interview with Ezra Klein, Theda Skocpol discussed the ways that grassroots Tea Party Activists and elite groups, like Americans for Prosperity that early on in the Tea Party movement would have said that they spoke for the Tea Party, have developed over the last several years. Despite many American distancing themselves from the Tea Party label, Skocpol argues that the grassroots people who were heavily involved in the Tea Party, are still making an impact on the 2016 election, supporting people like Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, but these were not the candidate that the elite groups supported. The top-down and the bottom-up parts of the organization did not fit together smoothly, in fact coming into conflict with each other in the 2016 primaries.
In this analysis, the social conservative value dimension combines attitude towards abortion, gay, lesbians and religiosity and the anti-welfare values dimension is used to measure fiscal conservatism. Table 2 (see appendix) shows a cross tabulation between social conservatism and anti-welfare values (fiscal conservatism). In both Canada and the US, there is a positive correlation between these two value dimensions. In Canada, about 13% of those surveyed held low social conservative values, but about 25% of those with low anti-welfare values hold low social conservative values. Among those with high anti- welfare values, only about 4% hold low social conservative values, 10 points lower than the population average for those with low social conservative values. For high social conservative values, we see the opposite, with 23% of the population of the total survey respondents holding high social conservative values. 14% of those with low anti-welfare values have high socially conservative values, and 26% of those with high anti-welfare values have high socially conservative values. This effect is consistent with the effect in the US. The Person correlation coefficients of