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What determines the political beliefs people hold? In this article, we investigate the role ofvalues and group identifications in structuring political beliefs. Viewing both as aspects of self-identity, we use Q methodology to discover overall patterns of personal and political values, and group identifications. We find that distinctive patterns of both elements of self-identity are identifiable, and that values and group identifications are interrelated. Furthermore, both have a substantial effect on issue positions that are independent of party and ideological self-identification.
Conover et al. (Sun,) studied this question.