Abstract
Previous measures of economic conservatism can be considered dated in the wake of the collapse of communist systems and the embrace of free market policies by social democrat political parties, arguably reflecting rejection of many left-Liberal positions. Testing of a traditionally worded 20-item scale of economic values on an Australian sample of 260 indicates poor reliability (alpha = .53), apparently because many items do not reflect contemporary ideological differences. Higher reliability (alpha = .65) is found in a two-factor eight-item scale involving attitudes to political action and social welfare. The short scale correlates significantly with other measures of conservatism (Pearson r with declared political leaning = .26, r with social conservatism .48).
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