ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors examine two avenues of the potential political impact of dominant-ideology beliefs. Although it is possible to question whether the beliefs and attitudes held by the American public in general have much political significance, there is much less doubt about the significance of the beliefs and attitudes held by certain subgroups. The authors deal with the exception of occasional political referenda, the American public does not directly make social policy. Employee findings suggest that ownership, both in the qualitative sense of being one's own boss and the quantitative sense of amount of wealth owned, shape beliefs about how the stratification order does and should work. The use of data in conjunction with the representative sample permit more reliable comparisons among people who exercise different amounts of control over economic resources and people at different levels of wealth ownership than is possible with data from any strictly representative survey of 1500 respondents.
