Ideology or Self-Interest? Medical Students' Attitudes Toward National Health Insurance.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of political ideology and self-interest on the attitudes of medical students toward national health insurance. Previous empirical studies of the relative importance of ideology and self-interest in explaining attitudes and behavior have been conducted on general population samples. This is the first empirical test of the effects of these factors on the attitudes of professionals in general and of medical students in particular toward a policy issue which is important to their material interests, but which evokes ideological responses at the same time. The findings show that political ideology as well as objective and subjective self-interest are independent dimensions. Both factors are related strongly to medical students' attitudes toward national health insurance. Their relative strength varies considerably with the salience of the issue at hand. Almost uniformly, political ideology has a more pronounced impact on attitudes than does objective self-interest. The differences between the effects of political ideology and of subjective self-interest, however, are not always substantial or significant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]