Demography Is Not King, or Why David Brooks Is a Hedgehog, Not a Fox
In this recent piece, David Brooks sees a nation divided:
…some social divides, mostly involving ethnicity, have narrowed. But others, mostly involving education, have widened. Today there is a mass educated class. The college educated and non-college educated are likely to live in different towns. They have radically different divorce rates and starkly different ways of raising their children. The non-college educated not only earn less, they smoke more, grow more obese and die sooner…
…The ensuing segmentation has reshaped politics. We’re used to the ideological divide between Red and Blue America. This year’s election has revealed a deep cultural gap within the Democratic Party, separating what Stuart Rothenberg calls the two Democratic parties.
In state after state (Wisconsin being the outlier), Barack Obama has won densely populated, well-educated areas. Hillary Clinton has won less-populated, less-educated areas. For example, Obama has won roughly 70 percent of the most-educated counties in the primary states. Clinton has won 90 percent of the least-educated counties. In state after state, Obama has won a few urban and inner-ring suburban counties. Clinton has won nearly everywhere else.
What is wrong with this characterization? First, Brooks uses aggregate-level data (from counties) to infer the individual-level behavior of voters. This is the ecological fallacy. When you look at actual exit polls from some recent primaries, the results are far less stark. In Pennsylvania, voters without a college degree favored Clinton, 58-42. Voters with a college degree favored Clinton too, 51-49. (See also Ohio.) Somehow I don’t see the “deep cultural gap.”
Second, more systematic data show that the education “divide” within the Democratic party is at times non-existent and, when it exists, has not “widened” over time. Using the National Election Studies, I will compare the views of Democratic respondents with and without a college degree. Below is the percent among each group who voted for the Democratic nominee for president:
Democrats have grown more loyal over time (as discussed briefly in this post). Moreover, any education “gap” is miniscule as of 2004, and certainly hasn’t grown over time.
More data, and more on Brooks-as-hedgehog, are below the fold.
Below, in order, are graphs of Democratic opinion on whether to increase or decrease government services and spending, whether to give more or less government aid to blacks, and whether to have more or fewer restrictions on abortion. (Question wordings are here, here, and here.) These items tap the potential lines of cleavage (e.g., economic, racial, and social issues) and also allow over-time comparisons.
These graphs show that, while college-educated Democrats tend to be more liberal than other Democrats on two of these items, the gap between these two groups is not growing over time. There is no evidence whatsoever of a “widening” divide within the Democratic party based on education. Moreover, what divide does exist doesn’t really seem to matter much on Election Day: Democrats are highly loyal regardless of their level of formal education. Which is, by the way, why we should expect current divisions among Democrats to be pretty much mended by November.
Why does Brooks make mistakes like this? Hedgehogs, in Berlin’s famous characterization, know one big thing. Brooks knows one big thing: that the world can be easily divided into groups (preferably two) and these groups are really, really different for each other. That is, of course, the thrust of his original piece on “red” and “blue” states (despite some post-9/11 caveats at the end). Brooks also desperately wants to infer political divisions from sociological divisions. If divorce rates and obseity and child-rearing and smoking and mortality are associated with education then certainly some political outcome is too? Right? Right?
Unfortunately, Brooks’ mode of pop sociology obscures far more than it reveals, and forces him to bend the facts to suit this thesis. See also Sasha Issenberg’s famous take-down of the red/blue state piece.
The sad thing is, David Brooks actually appears to read and enjoy social science, and can even talk about it reasonably well (see this earlier post). But in columns like this, he seems content to ignore the data, or else fail to examine it closely.
If it’s asking too much for Brooks to spend half an hour with the National Election Studies before writing a column like this, then consider this my job application. David Brooks, I will make pretty graphs and easy-to-read cross-tabulations for you. Just say the word. (David Park is ready to run your regressions.) Give us a call.
Comments
John;
Your last paragraph (tongue in cheek, I guess) makes me wonder: what do you think is the right symbiosis between good journalism and good social science?
I ask because: I think good journalism needs to take risks. I am a big David Brooks fan and I will cut him a lot of slack on factual precision, because he asks good questions, and he always entertains me. While he writes about his social disparity ideas a lot, I don't agree that he's completely vested in one interpretation (see the last paragraph of this Atlantic piece). http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/12/brooks.htm
Sure, some pundits get it wrong, habitually, because of self-serving motives, and thus poison the conversation. I think you would agree: Brooks isn't one of them.
At the same time, nobody wants to be flat out wrong (I think). Maybe social scientists and journalists really can help each other. Proactively and hate free. And still make deadlines and stay interesting.
Posted by: Ian McDonald | May 5, 2008 11:29 PM
Hmmm. Smoke more, eat more (and fattier foods), get less education.
All indications of a high (personal) Discount Rate.
So they probably invest less in their infrastructure, too: living in "towns" that are less likely to thrive than people planning for the longer term. (Poorer air quality, a limited selection of medium-to-higher-end restaurants, and a community college branch at best do not attract long-term planners to an area.)
Dang. I can do this pop-sociology too. Can I get a NYT column?
Posted by: Ken Houghton | May 6, 2008 09:29 AM
"I ask because: I think good journalism needs to take risks. "
I agree. However, looking at 51-49 splits and seeing big cultural divides is not 'taking risks', it's lying. Even moreso when the 51-49 split goes *against* the theory being proposed.
That's the real criticism of Brooks, that the man is so often so wrong that he's no longer in the range of honest error.
Posted by: Barry | May 6, 2008 09:36 AM
College educated favored Clinton by 2 points; non-college favored her by 16 points. Is that a trivial difference?
Posted by: Jay Livingston | May 6, 2008 10:38 AM
Check out this useful reference link on David Brooks:
http://www.dickipedia.org/dick.php?title=David_Brooks
Posted by: I Hate Stars | May 6, 2008 05:17 PM
Jay, is the difference trivial? Not necessarily. I would call it "modest at best" -- in that the "causal effect" of education is to decrease Clinton's support by only 7 points (at least in PA). Is it a "deep cultural divide"? Absolutely not.
Ian, Ken, Barry: I will say more in a future post, which will appear soon.
Posted by: John Sides | May 6, 2008 06:42 PM
John, I agree that the numbers don't support the caricature that Brooks draws. But what if polls showed that against McCain, Clinton would win by 51-49, and Obama would win 58-42? A modest difference? Even the 7-point difference (HRC winning by 2, Obama by 9) seems important -- maybe not for establishing cultural divides, but for winning elections.
I liked your graphs on presidential votes and key issues. But I wonder about using only Democrats. The graphs show no large divide and no widening divide between college and non-college Democrats. But what if the non-college Democrats left the party? And what if they did so precisely because of disagreement with the party position on the issues you cite (abortion, etc.)?
Posted by: Jay Livingston | May 6, 2008 10:27 PM
Jay, I don't imagine the data that way. I think of this not as trial heats but as the effect of an independent variable (education) on a dependent variable (candidate preference). I imagine a room of 100 non-college graduates in which suddenly we conferred a college degree on them. According to the PA exit poll, exactly 7 people would switch from Clinton to Obama. It's just not a large effect.
I used only Democrats in the graphs because that was Brooks' argument. He said it was a gulf within the party. Have non-college-educated people left the Democratic Party? I looked at the percent of Dems and Reps with a college degree from 1952-2004, and I saw no evidence that Democrats were becoming more educated relative to Republicans. In fact, Republicans are consistently more likely than Democrats to have a college degree.
Posted by: John Sides | May 7, 2008 10:07 AM
Wow! Thanks for posting this. David Brooks used to be one of my favorite conservative commentators. Now I'll be more cautious consumer of his work.
Posted by: anon | May 8, 2008 11:29 AM
"I looked at the percent of Dems and Reps with a college degree from 1952-2004, and I saw no evidence that Democrats were becoming more educated relative to Republicans." I looked briefly for this data online and couldn't find it. Is it some place easily accessible?
It's interesting. I assume that the party shift in the South occurred irrespective of education, maybe even more so among the college educated. But what about the "Reagan Democrats"? Did they remain Democrats?
Posted by: Jay Livingston | May 8, 2008 06:15 PM
Jay, I tabulated those numbers myself using the NES cumulative file, which is available at electionstudies.org.
For more on the party shift in the South, see Richard Johnston and Bryon Shafer's new book, The End of Southern Exceptionalism. They argue that the realignment in the South was as much about class as race.
As for the Reagan Democrats: to know whether they remained Democrats, we'd need panel data, which we do not have in the early 1980s. So it's hard to say. Others may know more about this than I do.
Posted by: John Sides | May 8, 2008 08:33 PM