You'll never get consensus on what "conservative" means; conservatives themselves will never agree completely, just as liberals will never agree on liberalism, Marxists on Marxism, etc. It's a political question. If we accept the paper's definition for the sake of argument, then maybe we can have an interesting discussion about it.

Of course, it's a given that the definition and the means of measurement determined the results, so the definition used in the paper is extremely important to interpreting the results. Whether the definition is correct, however, isn't important.