Status Consistency and Political Preference: The Australian Case

In this paper Australian data are used to test the hypothesis that status inconsistency is linked with political liberalism. Status inconsistency is here defined operationally in two different ways: (1) as a score following Lenski's original procedure and (2) as specified combinations of status categories. Since for behavioral studies status inconsistency is better conceived in terms of interaction between specific status categories rather than as a generalized score, the method of regression analysis with dummy variables is used to assess the explanatory power of alternative statistical models. Although status inconsistency in general has no clear effect on voting behavior, specific types of inconsistency do.