Surveys of American Public Culture
The Politics of Character—2000
Principal Investigators: James Davison Hunter and Carl Desportes Bowman
Sampling and Fieldwork by the University of Virginia Center for Survey Research
Surveys on contemporary politics abound, but surveys of political culture, the underpinning of politics, are lacking. The Politics of Character survey attempts to bridge the gap between ephemeral opinion and enduring understandings of character, linking the latter to the moral communities to which American citizens belong. A principal finding is that understandings of character are vague and weakly grounded, and that “character” in politics is more important rhetorically than practically. It is an ideal in search of substantive content.
Full survey details and data on ARDA (this link will navigate you away from www.iasc-culture.org)
Survey Report (download full report)
- Politics and Political Culture: The Critical Difference
- Part I: Character and Democracy
- Part II: Character and the American People
- Part III: Character and Political Leadership
- Part IV: Moral Communities and the Question of Character
- Part V: Character and Confusion
- Part VI: Does Character Really Matter?
- Endnotes
- Demographic Profile
- Questionnaire
- Summary Tables
Citation: James Davison Hunter and Carl Desportes Bowman, Politics of Character: Survey of American Public Culture (Charlottesville, Va: Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, University of Virginia, 2000).
Who We Are
The Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture is an interdisciplinary research center and intellectual community at the University of Virginia committed to understanding contemporary cultural change and its individual and social consequences, training young scholars, and providing intellectual leadership in service to the public good.
