The Monkey Cage

In a 2005 Pew Research Center survey, 47% of self-described conservative Republicans said they were “very happy,” a mood that only 28% of liberal Democrats shared. Pondering these results, conservative columnist George Will concluded that “liberalism is a complicated and exacting, not to say grim and scolding, creed. And not one conducive to happiness.”

If we take this liberal-conservative happiness gap as a given, then a question naturally arises: Why? Why isn’t liberalism as conducive to happiness as conservatism is?

First, though, should we take the gap as a given? In a recent study, NYU psychologists Jaime Napier and John Jost (drawing on data from the World Values Survey) replicate the Pew Center survey’s result. In the U.S., they report, “right-wing orientation” was indeed predictive of one’s sense of personal well-being (a compound of satisfaction with one’s own life and self-rated happiness). Even after statistical controls for the standard demographics (income, education, age, sex, marital status, employment status, and church attendance) were instituted, right-wingers scored higher on the subjective well-being scale. So the gap couldn’t be written off as an artifact of demographic differences between right- and left-wingers.

So again, why?

Continue reading "Why Is This Man Glowering When He Should Be Smiling? Conservatives, Liberals, and the Happiness Gap" »

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 04:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

This New York Times article discusses the current politics of immigration in Italy — in particular, new measures to crack down on illegal immigrants, who are believed to increase the crime rate. In a 2002 survey, respondents in Italy and 19 other European nations were asked whether immigration tended to improve or worsen crime. In a 2005 survey, this same item was asked of an American sample. Respondents gave their answers along a 0-10 scale. Here are the percent who gave an answer on the “worsen crime” side of the scale:

In almost every country, a majority of respondents believed that immigrants worsened crime. Interestingly, both Americans and Italians were less likely to say this than were respondents in most other nations. Forty-eight percent of Americans said that immigration worsened crime, as did 61% of Italians. These surveys also asked about the consequences of immigration for the government revenue and services and for national culture. On average, respondents were more concerned about the consequences for crime than for these other areas. Jack Citrin and I discuss these and other results in this paper.

The measures recently proposed in Italy have garnered the support of a majority of Italians:

Do you support or oppose each of these measures?

Allowing citizens from other EU countries to stay in Italy for more than three months only if they have enough income and inform the authorities of their whereabouts, and provide their name and address: 63% support.

Expropriating the houses that are rented to illegal immigrants: 58% support.

Allowing immigrants to reunite with their relatives only after a DNA test has been performed: 56% support.

More survey data are here (US only) and here (US and abroad).

Here is a study by Rubén G. Rumbaut and colleagues about crime among immigrants in the United States. One of its findings is this:

The finding that incarceration rates are much lower among immigrant men than the national norm, despite their lower levels of education and greater poverty, but increase significantly over time in the United States for those who arrived as children and especially among the second generation, suggests that the process of “Americanization” can lead to downward mobility and greater risk of involvement with the criminal justice system for a significant minority of this population.

Posted by John Sides at 09:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Eric Rauchway has an interesting post on the reasons why the Democrats lost the South.

ever since Nixon’s “southern strategy”—it’s been commonplace to assume that the Republicans picked up where the Democrats left off in courting bigoted whites, in the South and elsewhere. … Along come some political scientists to tell us this Republican racism is a bit of a side show, that the real story of the GOP’s new southern eminence has to do with the emergence, at long last, of a New South, ushered (ironically) into being by Democratic programs of New Deal and wartime mobilization. … One of the best-known works in this line was co-written by a friend and former colleague of mine, Byron E. Shafer, together with Richard Johnston, titled The End of Southern Exceptionalism. They argue that more, richer white southerners means more Republican white southerners.

Shafer and Johnston sometimes contribute to this confusion themselves, nowhere more than in the short section they devote to the influence of George Wallace on southern politics. Now, we think we know this story, too: Wallace helped loosen the loyalty of southern whites to the Democratic Party in 1964 and in 1968; the sort of person who voted for Wallace in 1968 was the sort of person who’d voted for Goldwater in 1964 and if he couldn’t have Wallace in 1968, he’d rather have had Nixon than Humphrey … But—say Shafer and Johnston—not so fast. … in the South the Democrats ultimately kept the Wallace voters, while the Republicans picked up the Johnson voters. It’s provocative, all right. Is it true?

Eric argues (using graphs of county level data and the aptly named ICPSR variable #666, George Wallace’s share of the presidential vote in 1968), that Shafer and Johnson may be missing part of the picture.

I don’t see what Shafer and Johnston see—I’d bet from looking at this that Nixon got the Wallace vote in ’72, when probably not so much had changed demographically since ’68. But in later elections, people have moved around a lot and just looking at race and income, the constituencies for the same counties look pretty different. Which isn’t to say Shafer and Johnston are wrong, per se—(1) I’m looking at counties, not districts; (2) I spent all of a couple of afternoons on this; (3) I may well be missing something incredibly obvious, such that it’s better to look at districts than counties, or something. Political scientists in the readership who want to look at this and tell me how I got it all wrong are welcome. It’s just to say, I don’t see what Shafer and Johnston see.

Any political scientists out there who’d like to comment?

Posted by Henry at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Syracuse University political scientist Jeff Stonecash has been doing public opinion research for the last quarter-century, using university facilities and paying Syracuse students to serve as interviewers. He has conducted surveys for non-profit organizations and the local newspaper, among other sponsors, and for numerous candidates for public office — Republicans and Democrats alike. Now Stonecash is being told by Syracuse University authorities to cease and desist — this following complaints from a Democratic candidate about a survey that Stonecash recently conducted for his Republican opponent. The complainant alleges that Stonecash is a partisan Republican whose survey results are biased. (Actually, Stonecash is a registered Democrat.) When informed of these concerns, Stonecash indicated that he “would have done the same thing for [the Democratic candidate], but they never asked. I’m not a partisan pollster.”

This episode raises all sorts of questions about “applied” research in academic settings, especially in politically charged circumstances. For details, click here.

[Hat tip to Carol Sigelman]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 04:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Most Americans oppose last week’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling that detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba should be able to challenge their incarcerations in the civilian court system.

In the new Washington Post-ABC News poll, 61 percent said non-citizens suspected of terrorism should not have these rights under the U.S. Constitution; 34 percent said they should. The view that these suspects do not share these privileges cuts across party lines, with majorities of Democrats (53 percent), independents (56 percent) and Republicans (77 percent) taking that position.

From the Washington Post’s Behind the Numbers blog. More information is here.

Posted by John Sides at 08:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

I’m in Ireland at the moment, unwinding for a few days after sending in my book manuscript. But I’m not unwinding completely, As I note over at Crooked Timber, there is a quite important referendum taking place on Thursday. After the failure to ratify the so-called European Constitution (it was voted down in referendums in France and Holland), the EU member states are trying for a second bite of the cherry, with a somewhat modified document, the so-called Lisbon Treaty. In the wake of their problems the last time, they’ve decided not to give European voters the chance to turn it down, except in Ireland, where they have to for domestic constitutional reasons. This is an interesting test of arguments about European legitimacy, and in particular Andrew Moravcsik’s claim (see here for a relatively recent statement) that EU institutional changes neither need nor should have direct political legitimation.

Continue reading "Legitimating the EU" »

Posted by Henry at 05:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)

In his influential Atlantic magazine article, “One Nation, Slightly Divisible.” published after the 2000 election, David Brooks compared Montgomery County, Maryland, the liberal, upper-middle-class suburb where he lives, to rural, conservative Franklin County, Pennsylvania, a short drive away but distant in attitudes and values, with “no Starbucks, no Pottery Barn, no Borders or Barnes & Noble,” plenty of churches but not so many Thai restaurants, “a lot fewer sun-dried-tomato concoctions on restaurant menus and a lot more meatloaf platters.”

In Brooks’s home state of Maryland, there is no clear pattern of county income and Republican vote, and it was not difficult for him to go from Montgomery County, the prototypical wealthy slice of blue America, to a poorer, more Republican-supporting county nearby. Here are the data from 2000:

Brooks lives in a liberal, well-off part of the country. It is characteristic of the East and West Coasts that the richer areas tend to be more liberal, but in other parts of the country, notably the South, richer areas tend to be more conservative. A comparable journey in Texas would go from Collin County, a wealthy suburb of Dallas where George W. Bush received 71% of the vote, to rural Zavala County in the southwest, where Bush received only 25% of the vote:

When we showed our graph of Texas counties to another political scientist, he asked about the state capital, noted for its liberal attitudes, vibrant alternative rock scene, and the University of Texas: “What about Austin? It must be rich and liberal.” We looked it up. Austin is in Travis County and makes up almost all of its population. Travis County has a median household income of $45,000 and gave George W. Bush 53% of the vote in 2000, about midway between Collin and Zavala counties. (Austin has its own red-blue divide, with a highly Democratic university area and urban center, and strongly Republican suburbs.)

This is not to dismiss Brooks’s insights but rather to place them in the national context of income mattering more in poor states than in rich states, which is the subject of our forthcoming Red State, Blue State book (from which the above graphs were taken).

Posted by David Park at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

The first-ever, nationwide, random sample survey of Muslim Americans finds them to be largely assimilated, happy with their lives, and moderate with respect to many of the issues that have divided Muslims and Westerners around the world.

This is the summary of a Pew Center poll of Muslim-Americans — the first of its kind. Some other interesting findings:

• 65% are foreign-born. Of the native-born, 3 in 5 are converts to Islam.
• Just over half of Muslim-Americans consider themselves “American” first. In Britain, Germany, and Spain, most Muslims consider themselves Muslim first.
• A plurality (43%) says that Muslims-Americans should adopt American customs, rather than trying to be distinct.
• Muslims-Americans are more critical of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the broader war on terrorism, than is the American general public.
• “…native-born African American Muslims are the most disillusioned segment of the U.S. Muslim population.”
• “…younger Muslim-Americans – those under age 30 – are both much more religiously observant and more accepting of Islamic extremism than are older Muslim Americans.” That said, the number of Muslim-Americans who accept extremism (e.g., endorse suicide bombing) is small in both groups.

And those come from just the first 6 pages of a 102-page report. The full report is here (pdf).

Posted by John Sides at 09:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In this Pollster blogpost, Charles Franklin presents a wealth of data on public opinion about gay marriage, apropos of the recent ruling by the California Supreme Court. One interesting question is whether the California court’s decision will have the same effect that the Massachusetts court’s decision had. Franklin writes:

During the year from November 2003 to November 2004, opposition to same-sex marriage rose by five points, from 55% to just over 60%. Meanwhile support fell by about eight points, from 38% to 30%, then rebounded by a point or so by election day. (These shifts slightly predate the Massachusetts decision, probably reflecting the increased visibility of the issue prior to the Court’s ruling.)…

…The California ruling, and the likely campaign over a proposition there to modify the state constitution this fall, will test whether increasing the salience of the issue will result in a replay of the 2003-04 dynamics, with opponents stimulated and supporters in retreat, or if the 2006 experience means that the issue is no longer the motivator it was in 2004. The 2003-04 data clearly show the potential for sharp changes when the marriage issue becomes extremely salient. That the fight will take place in the most populous state in the Union also guarantees national exposure. However, the fact that most states have already settled this issue through law or amendment, and that only three states (so far) are on track to have proposals on the ballot, means that the issue is more localized than it was in 2004.

See also his discussion of polling that includes a “civil unions” option:

When the “civil unions” option is added, opposition to gay rights drops significantly from about 55% to 40%. Likewise, support for gay marriage drops from 40% to 29%. The “comfortable” middle ground is then some 26% who are willing to support civil unions so long as they fall short of “marriage.”

This “half a loaf” approach is acceptable to only some in the gay rights community, but it is precisely the politically acceptable position that Democratic politicians think can move them from the losing side of public opinion to the winning side.

Posted by John Sides at 11:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As a quick follow-up to Henry’s post, here is some polling data on whether various nations should boycott the Beijing Olympics.

Denmark: 50% favor the boycott, 39% oppose it, 11% don’t know

France: 41% favor; 55% oppose; 4% don’t know. (53% would favor a Sarkozy boycott of the opening ceremony.)

Canada: 37% favor; 56% oppose; 7% don’t know.

United States: 31% favor a boycott; 48% favor a boycott of the opening ceremonies by elected officials. [NB: Zogby on-line poll]

Posted by John Sides at 01:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Mark Penn’s departure from the Clinton campaign — after a friendly meeting with Colombian representatives to discuss promoting a trade agreement that Clinton opposes — provides a motivation to examine American opinion about trade. Doing so reveals the barriers that trade agreements face.

Public skepticism about free trade is rampant and hardly new. In his book on American attitudes toward foreign policy, Ole Holsti notes that in a series of Gallup polls in 1993, an average of only 38% of respondents favored NAFTA. More recently, Bryan Caplan finds that the public is, on average, likely to believe that trade agreements cost jobs or, at best, make no difference in job creation or loss. Many similar findings are here. The public’s attitude contrasts sharply with those of economists and other elites, who tend to support trade agreements (see again Holsti and Caplan, as well as the piece by Daniel Drezner that I discussed last week).

The contours of mass attitudes are even more interesting. In the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, respondents were asked this question:

This year Congress also debated a new free trade agreement that reduces barriers to trade between the U.S. and countries in Central America. Some politicians argue that the agreement allows America to better compete in the global economy and would create more stable democracies in Central America. Other politicians argue that it helps businesses to move jobs abroad where labor is cheaper and does not protect American producers. What do you think? If you were faced with this decision, would you vote for or against the trade agreement?

Only 27% supported the agreement, 46% were opposed, and 27% did not know.

Notably, this is one of the few issues in American politics where you will not find a significant partisan cleavage. 51% of Democrats opposed CAFTA (vs. 22% support), as did 41% of Republicans (vs. 36% support). Independents mirrored Democrats.

Better predictors of attitudes are education and income. Those with less than a 4-year degree tended to oppose CAFTA (50% vs. 24%), but those with at least a 4-year degree were evenly split (39% vs. 39%). Support also increases with income, although only among the wealthiest respondents (those making $150K or more) was there even bare majority support for CAFTA.

In his new book A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World, William Bernstein writes:

The world’s increasing dependency on the continuous flow of trade has made us both prosperous and vulnerable.

It’s clear that the public agrees with the latter but not the former.

Posted by John Sides at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

For more than half a century, realist scholars of international relations have maintained that their worldview is inimical to the American public. For a variety of reasons – inchoate attitudes, national history, American exceptionalism – realists assert that the U.S. government pursues realist policies in spite and not because of public opinion. This paper takes a closer look at the anti-realist assumption by examining survey data and the empirical literature on the mass public’s attitudes towards foreign policy priorities and worldviews, the use of force, and foreign economic policy over the past three decades. The results suggest that, far from disliking realism, Americans are at least as comfortable with the logic of realpolitik as they are with liberal internationalism. The persistence of the anti-realist assumption might be due to an ironic fact: American elites are more predisposed towards liberal internationalism than the rest of the American public.

That is from a recent paper by Daniel Drezner (ungated version here). Drezner surveys a vast amount of polling data and argues that there is an “intuitive realism” or “folk realism” in American public opinion:

• Americans prioritize realist goals — e.g., protecting the U.S. against terrorist attacks — more than internationalist goals — e.g., promoting democracy and human rights.

• Americans favor the use of force much more when the mission is based on realpolitik (e.g., missile strikes against Sudan and Afghanistan in 1998) than when it is based on humanitarian concerns (e.g., Haiti in 1992-95).

• Americans are “mercantilist” with regard to trade, expressing concerns about the loss of American jobs and favoring a relative gains approach.

Drezner argues, convincingly, that the null hypothesis among some IR scholars is “the American public is hostile to realism.” If that’s the null, then Drezner has amassed impressive evidence to reject the null.

At the same time, I wondered if this folk realism was, well, entirely real.

Continue reading "Is the American Public Realist?" »

Posted by John Sides at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In this Politics magazine piece, Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch of Reason magazine envision a future when a candidate like Ron Paul is President:

And when that future arrives — and it will, sooner or later — we’ll all look back at the failed campaign of a guy who said he didn’t want to run our lives, the economy, or the world, and wonder what took us so long.

How does one get to such a conclusion? Follow these easy steps:

#1. Extrapolate political trends from cultural trends. Use hackneyed cultural references when possible:

The key to such an optimism is recognizing that politics is a lagging indicator of American society, which has been moving with broadband-like speed [hackneyed #1] into an era of Do It Yourself culture and not-so-rugged individualism. Think of what Americans have come to expect and insist upon in their social and economic lives: increasingly individualized service, culture and consumer products at every level (“You want soy with that decaf mocha frappucino?” [hackneyed #2]); more and more control over education, healthcare and retirement; and a nearly full-throttled embrace of lifestyle tolerance and pluralism that was unimaginable in a pre-Netflix, pre-”Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” pre-iPod America [hackneyed #3, 4, and 5].

Gillespie and Welch will have to explain to me the connection between individualism and “Queer Eye” — perhaps that’s what “not so rugged” implies? — but in any case I can give them one piece of disconcerting news. Every year since 1982, the National Election Studies has asked this question:

Some people think the government should provide fewer services, even in areas such as health and education, in order to reduce spending. Other people feel that it is important for the government to provide many more services even if it means an increase in spending. Where would you place yourself on this scale, or haven’t you thought much about this?

The percentage who wanted government to provide many more services has increased in the past 10 years to 43%, while those who want the government to provide fewer services has decreased to 20%. The data are here. Maybe “not so rugged” just means “not.”

Continue reading "The Active Fantasy Lives of Libertarians" »

Posted by John Sides at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)

One way to think about the electoral landscape and make predictions for November is to focus on the “fundamentals,” such as the state of the economy. As I discussed earlier, those fundamentals tilt in Democrats’ favor.

A second way is to answer to two questions: what is the most important problem facing the country, and who can best handle that problem? Below are some recent data (from a March 7-10 NBC/Wall Street Journal poll and a Feb. 28-Mar. 2 ABC/Washington Post poll) that get at Americans’ priorities and their evaluations of the front-runners, respectively:

(Note: The ABC/WP poll did not ask comparable items about Hillary Clinton.)

Obama does just as well and sometimes better among independents; see here.

Attitudes about the parties show similar patterns:

(Source: Feb. 20-24 Pew poll.)

The issues that are most salient right now are issues where the public is more likely to trust Obama and the Democrats than McCain and the GOP. McCain tends to fare better than his party in that the “gap” between him and Obama is smaller than that between the parties. But nevertheless he trails with regard to the economy, health care, and immigration, and has a statistically insignificant lead with regard to Iraq.

Thus, the issue agendas of (some, perhaps crucial) voters may lead them to vote Democratic. The political science research undergirding this notion is by John Petrocik (article here, gated). Note also that this model of choice is less complicated that one based on issue positions — whose role Lee and I have complicated previously (here and here).

Posted by John Sides at 02:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Despite the growing scientific consensus about the risks of global warming and climate change, the mass media frequently portray the subject as one of great scientific controversy and debate. And yet previous studies of the mass public’s subjective assessments of the risks of global warming and climate change have not sufficiently examined public informedness, public confidence in climate scientists, and the role of personal efficacy in affecting global warming outcomes. By examining the results of a survey on an original and representative sample of Americans, we find that these three forces—informedness, confidence in scientists, and personal efficacy—are related in interesting and unexpected ways, and exert significant influence on risk assessments of global warming and climate change. In particular, more informed respondents both feel less personally responsible for global warming, and also show less concern for global warming. We also find that confidence in scientists has unexpected effects: respondents with high confidence in scientists feel less responsible for global warming, and also show less concern for global warming. These results have substantial implications for the interaction between scientists and the public in general, and for the public discussion of global warming and climate change in particular.

That’s from this paper by Paul Kellstedt, Sammy Zahran, and Arnold Vedlitz. It was featured yesterday on John Tierney’s blog at the New York Times.

The finding that information leads to less concern for global warming is obviously counterintuitive, and spawned a number of comments at Tierney’s blog. The few I read were by global warming skeptics who felt vindicated, as in the first comment on Tierney’s post:

Educated well informed people who trust the scientific process understand that the predictions of imminent doom by CO2 are simply hogwash and that we can afford to take our time.

I think the best explanation is a more prosaic one. Kellstedt et al. did not actually measure what respondents knew. They asked respondents how much they felt that they knew.

We measure a respondent’s level of information by asking each respondent to report “how informed do you consider yourself to be” about global warming and climate change…

This is not a measure of knowledge per se, but a measure of perceived informedness. So their finding regarding information simply suggests that people who feel more informed are less concerned about global warming. Kellstedt and colleagues write in the conclusion:

It should be noted that the information effects reported in this article are limited to self-reported information. Objective measures of informedness about global warming and climate change might produce different effects. And indeed there is some scholarly evidence to suggest that this might be the case. In their models of mass assessments of the risks of genetically modified foods, Durant and Legge found that self-reported informedness and objective measures of informedness were almost entirely uncorrelated, and that their effects worked in opposite directions. Clearly, this is an area that is ripe for subsequent research.

Thus, we have no way of knowing whether actual information — i.e., knowledge of key scientific findings about global warming — would produce this same counterintuitive effect.

Posted by John Sides at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Sunday’s Boston Globe carried a feature on race and gender stereotyping by Drake Bennett with brief overviews of several pertinent psychological research projects. Especially interesting in the context of the Obama versus Clinton competition. Click here.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 02:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

In a provocative new study (abstract here), James Gibson finds that the American public is somewhat more politically tolerant now than it was during the McCarthy era of the early 1950s, but also that “the level of intolerance of the American people today is still remarkably high.” More specifically, 68% of those polled in 1954 for Samuel Stouffer’s classic study of Communism, Conformism, and Civil Liberties expressed an unwillingness to permit a Communist to give a speech. In 2005, 51 years later, 54% of those polled in Gibson’s 2005 survey took the same position. This was not a reflection of lessened public concern about communists in particular, for more or less the same result held when the reference was the individual survey respondent’s “least liked” group rather than communists.

Over the same period, Americans have come to perceive government as placing greater restrictions on their personal freedom, as indicated by the following survey responses:

Continue reading "Is Joe McCarthy Still With Us? Political Intolerance and the Sense of Repression in the U.S." »

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 01:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here’s the abstract of a new paper by Christopher Dawes (pictured with his canine friends) and James Fowler, both of the Department of Political Science at UC-San Diego.

Previous studies have found that both political orientations (Alford, Funk, & Hibbing 2005) and voting behavior (Fowler, Baker & Dawes 2007, Fowler & Dawes 2007) are significantly heritable. In this article we study genetic variation in another important political behavior: partisan attachment. Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we show that individuals with the A1 allele of the D2 dopamine receptor gene are significantly less likely to identify as a partisan than those with the A2 allele. Further, we find that this gene’s association with partisanship also mediates an indirect association between the A1 allele and voter abstention. These results are the first to identify a specific gene that may be responsible for the tendency to join political groups, and they may help to explain correlation in parent and child partisanship and the persistence of partisan behavior over time.

And here is the paper itself.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 11:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

“Once Mighty, Slightly Used.”

“At Least We’re Not French.”

“We Apologise for the Inconvenience.”

“No Motto Please, We’re British.”

These were some of the suggested national mottoes submitted to a “cynical” content sponsored by the Times of London. The contest was provoked by Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s proposal for “pride-bolstering measures”:

The government’s plans also include coming up with a definition of British citizenship; formulating a “bill of rights and duties” for citizens; and even considering writing down a constitution (it is currently unwritten, an accrual of precedents). There is also talk of a “British Day,” similar to Independence Day; a “museum of Britishness”; and a revisiting of the national anthem, “God Save the Queen,” one of whose later verses advocates annihilating the “rebellious Scots,” which is not very nice to the Scottish.

The story is here.

These cheeky mottoes were, in my estimation, better than some bandied about in the House of the Lords. They ranged from the puerile to the pompous:

Play up, and play the game.

Keep right on ‘til the end of the road. (From the Birminghan City Football Club.)

Nemo me impune lacessit. (“No one attacks me with impunity”)

Dieu et mon droit. (“God and my right”)

Brown has apparently been influenced by the “strong sense of national identity” in the United States. By contrast, in Britain, people are proud to be British, but do not know what it means to be British.

Interestingly, some survey data suggests differences between the US and Britain in their levels of national pride. In the World Values Survey, people were asked “How proud are you to be [American/British]: very proud, somewhat proud, not very proud, or not at all proud?” In the US in 1999, 72% said “very proud” and 23% said “somewhat proud.” In Britain in 1999, 49% said “very proud” and 41% said “somewhat proud.”

But the question of what it means to be American or British is, of course, more complex. Indeed, some research in the US suggests that Americans hold no straightforward view:

A complex and contradictory set of norms exist, and it is difficult to reduce them into a single measure of “Americanism.”

This is from a very interesting article by Deborah Schildkraut (here, gated). If her conclusions are any indication, the content of British national identity may be similarly difficult to pin down.

Posted by John Sides at 01:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Several years ago, I experienced fifteen minutes of fame as a consequence of writing a series of tongue-in-cheek papers that purported to provide scientific evidence that Democrats are stupid, ugly, and morally defective. Some Democrats weren’t at all amused, and some Republicans took it all quite seriously. (In fact, one day a long-lost cousin who is a rabid Republican called, absolutely thrilled, to tell me that Rush Limbaugh had just quoted me on the air.)

Several years later, as editor of the American Political Science Review, I stirred up a bit of a hornet’s nest when I accepted for publication a paper on the genetic bases of political orientations. (Click here for a copy.)

So I should know better, but here I go again.

In a study (abstract here) reported in the latest issue of Psychological Science, Ian J. Deary, G. David Batty, and Catharine R. Gale begin by reviewing previous research on the link between intelligence and sociopolitical orientations. The balance of existing evidence, they note, “shows that people with higher cognitive ability tend to hold less authoritarian attitudes.” They immediately add, though, that most of this research has generated more heat than light, because it is based on research designs that leave that old bugaboo, the issue of causality, under a cloud. Are intelligence and sociopolitical attitudes components of a bundle of traits that vary together without being related to one another in any direct, cause-and-effect manner, or is there really a causal connection?

To date, studies of this issue have tended to be based on small, unrepresentative samples of respondents in cross-section surveys rather than panel studies, and haven’t always dealt adequately with the need to hold constant other factors, such as education and socioeconomic status. To try to overcome these problems, Deary, Batty, and Gale analyzed data from the British Cohort Study, a very large-scale panel study of individuals born in Britain during one particular week in April, 1970. Data on the personal and family characteristics of about half of these individuals, including their mental ability, were recorded at age 10, and at age 30 reinterviews were held that focused on the political and social attitudes of more than 7,000 members of this cohort, via questions pertaining to social liberalism, racism, political trust, and support for working women.

The study’s key finding is what Deary and his associates characterize as a “strong association between higher [mental ability] at age 10 and generally more liberal, nontraditional social attitudes at age 30,” even controlling for the effects of the other factors that they considered. This early intelligence-later attitudes connection could mean, as others have argued, that “those with greater cognitive skill are able to form more individualistic and open-minded attitudes than those of lesser cognitive ability,” or that people of higher ability read more and are therefore more likely to encounter and adopt anti-traditional views, or that smarter people are simply more likely to recognize what they shouldn’t tell a researcher. Whatever the exact cause of the effect, Deary et al. conclude, brighter 10-year-olds are, at age 30, more likely to articulate “a philosophy emphasizing reason and individualism rather than tradition, which is how The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines enlightenment.”

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 01:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As a general rule, the American public rallies to the president’s support in times of international crisis, causing the presidential popularity trend line to curve upwards — and often steeply so. For example, the week before the onset of Operation Desert Storm in 1991, President George H.W. Bush’s popularity rating was 64%; within just a few days it climbed to 86%. A decade later the same scenario played out in the the wake of the September 11 attacks, as President George W. Bush’s rating shot up from 51% to 85%.

Aggregate trends like these, however, often conceal as much as they reveal, for the dynamics of aggregate change depend on trends that operate beneath the surface, at the level of specific subgroups of the public — some of which move in one direction, some in another direction, and some hardly at all.

Our cross-town colleague Jonathan Ladd has recently provided an interesting case study of such beneath-the-surface opinion trends (abstract here). Focusing on American public reactions to September 11, Ladd probes the possibility that the responses of citizens who were more politically aware were governed by different considerations than the responses of those who were less politically aware. Ladd hypothesizes that in such circumstances a “pure” (my terminology, not his) rally effect occurs among those who don’t follow politics closely, while the responses of those who are more politically aware reflect their ideological or partisan predispositions. Ladd’s analysis of data from a panel survey conducted in 2000 and 2002 reveals that ratings of Bush rose significantly among the less politically aware irrespective of their predispositions concerning U.S. defense policy. Meanwhile, among the more politically aware the rally effect was smaller across the board and, consistent with Ladd’s interpretation, it was closely tied to defense policy predispositions. September 11 apparently “primed” these more politically aware citizens to weigh defense policy issues more heavily in their overall assessments of Bush, while the less aware reacted more viscerally to the crisis itself.

Looking at this set of results, different people might reach different conclusions. Here is Ladd’s own take:

As it (unexpectedly) became clear that security issues would be a central part of George W. Bush’s presidency, a conscientious response could be to increasingly base one’s presidential evaluation on whether the President’s views on this issue matched one’s preferences. The normative implications of the ordinary rally experienced by the less politically aware are less clear. It could be thought of as either an example of dangerous gullibility or as a sensible response to a temporary national crisis. …In the end, a normative assessment of whether rallying or being primed are sensible public responses to a national crisis may depend on the importance one assigns to delegate versus Burkean notions of representation, one’s belief about the trustworthiness of the person holding the presidency at the time of the crisis to behave in good faith, and on the nature of that particular crisis.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 02:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My, my, aren’t we — the American electorate — in a cheery mood?

According to a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll conducted January 10-13:

• 60% of adults nationwide describe themselves as “more enthusiastic about voting than usual,” verus 29% who are “less enthusiastic.” That figure tends to fluctuate — just three months ago it was 65%-23%, so perhaps we’re already getting tired of all the campaigning, with a very long way to go. Still, compared to answers to the same question in January of 2000 (43% “more enthusiastic,” 38% less so) and 2004 (55% versus 34%), we’re just bubbling over with enthusiasm as of now.

• Unsurprisingly, given the current outlook, Democrats and Democratic leaners are positively giddy: 74% are “more enthusiastic” than usual (way up from the counterpart figures for 2000 — 39% — and 2004 — 59%. Republicans, by contrast, are if anything a bit more blase than ever — 49% “more enthusiastic” now, compared to 51% in 2000 and 53% in 2004.

• We’re also close to a record high in the public’s sense that “it make[s] a real difference to you who is elected president” (87% now, but only 54% back in January 2000).

• Similarly, 84% answer “yes” when asked whether there’s “any candidate running this year that you think would make a good president.” Back in January of 1992, just 40% thought so.

• And despite all the grumbling over the years about the issuelessness of presidential campaigns, most people (72%) actually think “the presidential candidates [are] talking about issues you really care about” (January 2000 counterpart: 54%).

I’m not exactly sure of what to make of this — whether it’s just a blip, why — if it’s true — it’s happening, and what difference it might make as the elections draw near. Any ideas?

(For a fuller presentation of the survey results, click here.)

[Hat tip to the Washington Post’s “Behind the Numbers” blog.]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Zoltan Hajnal says no:

What implications does the growing economic divide between poor and middle class blacks have for the political arena? Traditional accounts suggest that increased economic diversity should lead to increased political division as the middle class becomes more conservative. Others maintain that race will continue to trump class because of ongoing racial inequality and widespread racial discrimination. I argue for a third alternative. I suggest that for blacks and possibly for other racial minorities increasing class status reinforces race. Class gains may increase the salience of race because economic success often means working in a predominantly white world and experiencing discrimination more regularly. I test these theories using the vote in direct democracy. I find that middle class blacks are more rather than less likely to support a liberal or black agenda. Class works differently for African Americans than for whites.

The published paper is here (gated). A final draft version is here (in MS Word). The data are from a pooled set of Los Angeles Times exit polls in California, which produces an unusually large sample of African-Americans.

If this article’s conclusions are correct, the future economic advancement of blacks will not necessarily lead them to a more conservative politics.

Posted by John Sides at 10:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

As a war drags on and as American casualties mount with no clear end in sight, war-weariness sets in among members of the mass public, who increasingly come to question whether the perceived benefits of the war outweigh the costs. This idea — that successes and failures on the battlefield determine the public’s willingness to support American military involvement overseas — is a key element of the conventional wisdom concerning public opinion and foreign policy.

In “Assuming the Costs of War: Events, Elites, and American Public Support for Military Conflict” (Journal of Politics, November 2007), Adam Berinsky puts this piece of conventional wisdom to the test. If Berinsky is right, the conventional wisdom is wrong.

Analyzing data from World War II and the Iraq War, Berinsky finds “little evidence that citizens make complex cost/benefit calculations when evaluating military action.” Rather, it is dissensus among members of the political elite that undermines public support for a war.”During times of war,” Berinsky writes, “individual-level knowledge of the most basic facts of war is weak; the power of elite cues is not.” Thus, an interpretation of mass opinion dynamics premised on well informed cost-benefit calculations is bound to fall short.

After Pearl Harbor, members of Congress of both major parties converged in support of the U.S. military effort and the public followed along, notwithstanding the terrible toll that the war was taking on the country. By contrast, the split between Republican and Democratic leaders in endorsement of the Iraq War (strong advocacy by the Republican leadership, headed by President Bush, versus a mixed response from Democratic leaders) has been directly reflected in the dynamics of mass opinion. None of this is to say that what happens on the battlefield has no impact on public opinion; whether it matters, Berinsky concludes, depends on the cost-benefit calculations of the elites from whom the mass public derives its political cues rather than on the direct cost-benefit calculations of ordinary citizens themselves.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 10:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From this piece (gated) in Campaigns and Elections magazine:

Since most Republicans live in rural America, where they are less likely to have broadband Internet, “we’re not fighting with a fair piece of the pie,” [“Republican Internet strategist David] All says. [Carol] Darr [a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School] also points to differences between the parties. “The people who are white and working-class tend to be Republican, particularly those who are white, working-class, and religious.” She characterizes Democrats as “ostensibly being the part of the poor and working class, but they end up being the yuppie party and most people at universities tend to be Democrats.”

Percentage of Republicans who live in rural areas: 24%
[Source: 2004 American National Election Survey]

Percentage of Republicans who have Internet access: 77%
Percentage of Democrats who have Internet access: 69%
[Source: 2004 American National Election Survey]

Percentage of Republicans who do not have broadband access: 21%
Percentage of Democrats who do not have broadband access: 21%
[Source: November 2006 Pew Survey. Lack of broadband access is defined as someone who uses the Internet at home via a dial-up modem.]

The claims that “most” Republican live in rural areas and that Republicans have less access to high-speed Internet access are easy to verify. Too bad no one did.

Posted by John Sides at 09:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

The answer, it seems, is yes. In a 2001 survey conducted by Mark Peffley and Jon Hurwitz, a random subset of whites was asked:

“Do you favor or oppose the death penalty for persons convicted of murder?”
Somewhat favor: 29%
Strongly favor: 36%

Another random subset of whites was asked:

“Some people say that the death penalty is unfair because most of the people who are executed are African-Americans. Do you favor or oppose the death penalty for persons convicted of murder?”
Somewhat favor: 25%
Strongly favor: 52%

That is a 12-point increase in overall support. There is much more to Peffley and Hurwitz’s analysis:

Although there exists a large and well-documented “race gap” between whites and blacks in their support for the death penalty, we know relatively little about the nature of these differences and how the races respond to various arguments against the penalty. To explore such differences, we embedded an experiment in a national survey in which respondents are randomly assigned to one of several argument conditions. We find that African Americans are more responsive to argument frames that are both racial (i.e., the death penalty is unfair because most of the people who are executed are black) and nonracial (i.e., too many innocent people are being executed) than are whites, who are highly resistant to persuasion and, in the case of the racial argument, actually become more supportive of the death penalty upon learning that it discriminates against blacks. These interracial differences in response to the framing of arguments against the death penalty can be explained, in part, by the degree to which people attribute the causes of black criminality to either dispositional or systemic forces (i.e., the racial biases of the criminal justice system).

Find the paper here.

Posted by John Sides at 04:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Following up on a previous post I’ve add the mean ideology for Red, Purple and Blue Americas. As a crude measure of Red, Purple and Blue, I used the percentage support for Bush in 2000 as follows: Red > 55%, 45% < Purple < 55%; and Blue < 45% (see below for a list of specific states). We can see that the mean ideology of Purple America is almost identical to the US and that Red and Blue Americas are equally distant (in the expected directions) from the US mean.

Continue reading "How (Ideologically) Different is a Rur'l Republican Texan from an Urban Democratic New Yawker? (Update)" »

Posted by David Park at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Back in the late 1950s, 60% of the second-graders in a study by political scientist Fred Greenstein said that President Eisenhower was “the best person in the world” — even better, apparently, than Mom or Dad or that other venerated figure of the period, the police officer. That a U.S. president should occupy such a high place in the American pantheon, at least among impressionable young children, should have occasioned no great surprise in light of a Gallup Poll finding from the preceding decade: In that survey, 28% of those polled called Franklin Delano Roosevelt “the greatest person, living or dead, in world history.” Finishing second, with 15%, was Jesus.

When I began teaching American politics to college freshman several decades ago, I routinely cited poll results like these as evidence of the tendency of ordinary Americans to idealize their president. Now, many years later, I still cite these results, but no longer to make the same point.

Continue reading "Presidents, Good and Evil" »

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

“Decline of the Tenure Track Raises Concerns” in the NY Times notes that there are more adjunct than tenured professors in U.S. universities and colleges. Universities are hiring adjunct faculty due to financial pressures and their desire for more flexibility in hiring (and of course firing). Adjunct faculty are usually hired without health benefits and only with a semester or year contract. Universities are thought of as liberal bastions yet when they are asked to apply those principles to their own institutions they seem to be acting more like conservative business owners.

[I]t is liberals rather than conservatives who are most beset by value conflict over social welfare because they are the ones who must somehow reconcile activist government with traditional principles of economic individualism and laissez-faire.

Posted by David Park at 07:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

A title like that can only derive from an August 2007 poll conducted for Radar Magazine (N=603). Among the findings:

- 54% of respondents said that they "hated" Bush, but 67% said they "hated" Paris Hilton. Democratic respondents were more likely to hate Bush (80%) than Hilton (54%).

- 55% of respondents think that Dick Cheney is going to hell. 38% said heaven. 4% said purgatory.

- 36% said "yes" when asked "Did the U.S. government know about the 9/11 attacks before they happened?" It is unclear how much of that 36% is composed of hardcore conspiracy theorists as opposed to those who are merely thinking about early warnings like the famous PDB.

Posted by John Sides at 05:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

How polarized is the American electorate? According to Fiorina et al’s “Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America” not very. Fiorina et al. do a wonderful job of laying out the claim that it is the elites that are polarized, not the electorate. So how ideologically different is a Republican rur’l Texan from an urban Democratic New Yawker? Here I plot the mean ideology (measured on a -1 to 1 scale with -1 being extremely liberal and 1 extremely conservative) for the US, rural Republican Texans and urban Democratic New Yorkers.

My co-blogger John Sides noted that “the liberal fair-trade coffee-drinking Per Se-dining New Yorker is closer to the US median than the conservative truck-drivin’ Toby Keith-lovin’ Texan.” This simple analysis does seem to call into question the perceived notion that red America is more authentically “American” than blue America, but we’ll explore this in more detail in some further posts.

Posted by David Park at 09:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)