Liberal and conservative trends in the United States since World War II. Public Opinion Quarterly 54

Abstract Analysis of 455 survey trends during the post-World War II period shows that America has generally moved in a lib-eral direction. The growth of liberalism has not been uniform across topics and time however. Trends dealing with equal rights and individualism had the most consistent liberal movement. Trends dealing with economic regulation and government power showed mixed change, while movement was mostly in the con-servative direction on the topic of crime. Liberal growth was strongest during the 1960s and early 1970s. In the mid-1970s, many liberal trends slowed, with some stopping their advance and a few reversing direction. On average, liberal growth leveled off, but did not move in a conservative direction. In large part, this shift in social change represents a response to the events of the period, but it may also be a periodic alternation of the cycle of reform. Studies of social change tend to be of two extreme types. At one end there are the general works on social change, especially sweeping studies covering the life and death of civilizations and discussing the process of modernization. These works are usually either broad, his-torical overviews or are theoretical (Applebaum, 1970; Boudon, 1983