The Monkey Cage

The Monkey Cage has gone on record recently arguing that process in the health care reform debate is ultimately not going to matter that much (see Henry and John) in terms of driving support for the bill. Well, now we can quantify “not much”.

This graph appeared last month in a Gallup report. As a political scientist, I was less interested in the overall support levels (which apparently have already shifted a bit in favor of passing reforms since these polls were taken), but rather in the difference between the two graphs.* According to Gallup, respondents were first asked if they favored passing the health care bill, and then asked if they favored passing it using reconcilliation. The “process” in this case apparently cost about 3% points of support. So it is not irrelevant, but hardly a game changer in terms of public opinion.

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*Slightly more wonkish technical discussion: It should be noted that Gallup did not use a true experimental design here, with half of the respondents being randomly assigned to receive one version of the question and the other half the other. So it is possible that a desire to remain consistent might bias respondents towards giving the same answer to both questions. On the other hand, it may also be possible that the fact that the question about reconciliation was asked second may have been cuing respondents that there was something “different” about reconciliation, and, given the media’s fascination with the issue, that perhaps this was supposed to change their opinion. Personally, I find in interesting that the number of “don’t knows” didn’t change. This suggests that reconciliation is not really having any affect on people who don’t already have an opinion on health care, although of course it is possible that reconciliation pushed some supporters into don’t knows and don’t knows into opposing, although my gut instinct is that this is not likely to be the case. For those interested in Don’t Know responses, see Adam Berinsky’s Silent Voices.

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 06:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Clive Crook resurrects the canard.

In the last big push to get reform through, using whatever deals, scams, ruses and parliamentary evasions fall to hand, the public and their concerns are pushed ever more to the periphery of Washington’s vision. … Recovering voters’ respect for the outcome, even assuming the outcome is good, looks an ever more distant prospect. … Democrats facing tight elections are right to worry that “in due course” might be a long time. It is hard to see how the public will forget this mess between now and November. … passing an unpopular bill by questionable means is unlikely to prove an electoral tonic.

John, of course, has been all over this. However, he merely has ‘data’ and ‘analysis’ on his side. Clive Crook, in contrast, has the punditocracy’s trump card - confidently-worded assertions. Less sarcastically (OK - only slightly less sarcastically), when I become world dictator, my first act will be to decree that pundits who promiscuously write about how “the public” thinks this or that, without any reference to data on what the ‘public’ (a dubious concept in most of these debates anyway) actually thinks will be required, under pain of death, to rewrite their columns so as to substitute the word “I” and related personal pronouns/possessive adjectives for the word “the public” throughout. In the interim, readers are invited to make the necessary substitutions themselves. As illustrated by the following

In the last big push to get reform through, using whatever deals, scams, ruses and parliamentary evasions fall to hand, me and my concerns are pushed ever more to the periphery of Washington’s vision. … My respect for the outcome, even assuming the outcome is good, looks an ever more distant prospect. … Democrats facing tight elections are right to worry that “in due course” might be a long time. It is hard to see how I will forget this mess between now and November. … passing an unpopular bill by questionable means is unlikely to win my vote.

which happily has the dual advantage of being punchier and more accurate than the original.

Posted by Henry at 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Short answer: they self-segregate. Or such is the finding of a newly published paper by Henry, Eric Lawrence, and myself. Find it here (gated) or here(ungated pdf). (See also these earlier posts). Here is the abstract:

Political scientists and political theorists debate the relationship between participation and deliberation among citizens with different political viewpoints. Blogs provide an important testing ground for their claims. We examine deliberation, polarization, and political participation among blog readers.We find that blog readers gravitate toward blogs that accord with their political beliefs. Few read blogs on both the left and right of the ideological spectrum. Furthermore, those who read left-wing blogs and those who read right-wing blogs are ideologically far apart. Blog readers are more polarized than either non-blog-readers or consumers of various television news programs, and roughly as polarized as US senators. Blog readers also participate more in politics than nonblog readers. Readers of blogs of different ideological dispositions do not participate less than those who read only blogs of one ideological disposition. Instead, readers of both left- and right-wing blogs and readers of exclusively leftwing blogs participate at similar levels, and both participate more than readers of exclusively right-wing blogs. This may reflect social movement-building efforts by left-wing bloggers.

Posted by John Sides at 09:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sanjay Srivista draws some interesting connections between a recent Obama speech and a paper by P. E. Tetlock published in a psychology journal in 1981 (!). In general, I think we as political scientists don’t interact enough with research in psychology.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 08:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

There have been quite a few studies of late that analyze the genetic origins of political attitudes as well as those that examine the influence of social networks. I had not yet seen something that looked at the interaction between the two until this new paper (forthcoming in the Journal of Politics) by Jaime E. Settle, Christopher T. Dawes, Nicholas A. Christakis, and James H. Fowler. Essentially, the study finds that conditional on having a particular gene associated with novelty seeking, having more friends makes you more liberal. Here is the abstract:

Scholars in many fields have long noted the importance of social context in the development of political ideology. Recent work suggests that political ideology also has a heritable component, but no specific gene variant or combination of variants associated with political ideology have so far been identified. Here, we hypothesize that individuals with a genetic predisposition toward seeking out new experiences will tend to be more liberal, but only if they are embedded in a social context that provides them with multiple points of view. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we test this hypothesis by investigating an association between self-reported political ideology and the 7R variant of the dopamine receptor D4 gene(DRD4), which has previously been associated with novelty seeking. Among those with DRD4-7R, we find that the number of friendships a person has in adolescence is significantly associated with liberal political ideology. Among those without the gene variant, there is no association.This is the first study to elaborate a specific gene-environment interaction that contributes to ideological self-identification, and it highlights the importance of incorporating both nature and nurture into the study of political preferences.

Posted by Erik Voeten at 02:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In comments on my first post, Marty Gilens alerts me to errors in the 2008 ANES data file that involve the spending variables that I used (noted here on their webpage). It is my fault for not having seen this. I have downloaded the corrected variables and revised the graph, which is above.

The story changes with regard to two programs — welfare and foreign aid — both of which are far less popular than in the original graph. About 49% of conservatives want to cut or eliminate foreign aid; 35% want to cut or eliminate welfare. The other programs, however, are again quite popular. The average percentage of conservatives who want to increase spending is unchanged: about 54%.

Thus, the original point of the Salon piece (to which corrections are forthcoming) remains: despite opposition to government spending in general, conservatives do not advocate reductions in government spending on particular programs.

Update: the corrected Salon piece is here.

Posted by John Sides at 10:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

As Josh mentioned, Salon has started a new feature called The Numerologist. They describe it thusly:

The Numerologist is a Salon feature exploring the intersection between numbers and politics, wherein political experts use statistical information to shed new light on timely topics.

Josh, Andy, and I will be contributing occasionally, as will some other political scientists, I think. So watch that space.

My first contribution centers on the graph above. The post is here.

Posted by John Sides at 03:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

For those who haven’t tired of this subject, Mark Blumenthal of Pollster has a nice column at the National Journal. He was kind enough to cite my post on the myths about independent voters. See also this piece by Alan Abramowitz, which Mark notes and I (somewhat inexcusably) had not seen before.

Mark’s column updates my chart of Obama approval and also discusses the implications of “independent leaners” for the Tea Party.

Posted by John Sides at 11:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In response to my earlier post on congressional approval, commenter David Adam cites Jim Stimson’s book Tides of Consent (large pdf). Stimson’s findings are even more profoundly related to my subsequent post on political trust and the economy.

Stimson shows that the public’s approval of virtually every aspect of government — the president, Senators, Congress, governors, the government itself — trend together quite strongly:

Occasionally the trends diverge, such as when the public rallied to Bush during the Persian Gulf War, but that divergence is the exception. Stimson writes:

The most important point, however, is that the lines are hard to pull apart and distinguish because they are pretty clearly measuring the same thing…Approval and trust are generic, a syndrome of attitudes toward public affairs that only appears to be affected by and directed toward particular people and institutions.

And what is driving these trends? The economy. Stimson plots a measure of approval that averages all of the relevant trends against the Michigan Index of Consumer Sentiment:

The correlation isn’t perfect, obviously. For example, Stimson notes the divergence following September 11, 2001. But again, the correlation is quite strong. And the implication is this:

So what does it mean that citizens approve or trust? It appears to mean mainly that things are going well in the country. What is important about this pattern, and unexpected, is that the approval and trust are granted to those who have had no role in producing the outcomes. We have known for some time that presidents seemed to get more credit or blame than they deserved. With the pattern now extended to those who have had no conceivable role, we need to reassess what it means to approve.

Posted by John Sides at 11:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

As part of the purpose of this blog is to get political scientists more involved in the mass media’s discussion of contemporary political issues, I just wanted to highlight the fact that Marc Hetherington and Jonathan D. Weiler’s book was featured in Nicholas Kristof’s op ed column this weekend; see as well this previous post by John on the book.

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 04:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Barack Obama thinks it’s restrictions on lobbyists and more openness:

We face a deficit of trust — deep and corrosive doubts about how Washington works that have been growing for years. To close that credibility gap, we have to take action on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue to end the outsized influence of lobbyists, to do our work openly, to give our people the government they deserve.

David Brooks thinks it’s Barack Obama:

We can spend the next few years engaging in kabuki bipartisanship, in which each party puts on pseudo-events to show that the other party is rigid and rotten, or somebody can break the mold. We can spend the next three or seven years squabbling about the shrinking puddle of discretionary spending, or somebody can break out of the fiscal vise.

It would be an incredible legacy: Barack Obama restored America’s faith in its own institutions.

These prescriptions miss the point. It’s not special interests and partisanship that have made Americans lose their faith in government. In fact, nothing has been permanently lost: over the past 30 years, Americans have gained, lost, re-gained, and “re-lost” faith in government. Here is the trend in one indicator from the American National Election Studies. The survey question is:

How much of the time do you think you can trust the government in Washington to do what is right, just about always, most of the time, or only some of the time?

“None of the time” was accepted as a volunteered response, and I include those who did so in the graph below. For the sake of argument, consider a “trusting” response to include “just about always” and “most of the time.”

The secular decline in trust in government stopped in 1980. Trust increased and then decreased during the 1980s. Then it increased sharply in the 1990s, rising to levels not seen since the mid-1960s. It peaked in 2002 and declined again thereafter. Another measure of trust that combines this and other survey questions shows a similar trend.

It is difficult to make these ups and downs conform to a narrative about partisanship or special interests. Partisan polarization in Congress has been increasing consistently over this period. I can’t imagine that special interests or lobbyists or their ilk suddenly had less influence in the mid-1980s or 1990s.

What drives the trend in political trust? By and large, it is the economy. People trust government when times are good. They don’t trust it when times are bad. For the presidential election years from 1964-2008, I merged the trust measure with the change in per capita disposable income, courtesy of Douglas Hibbs. Here is the relationship between trust and the economy:

The relationship is striking. The economy explains about 75% of the variance in trust. If you delete 1964, which looks like a potential outlier, the economy still explains 73% of the variance.

Of course the economy is not the only important factor. But it gets far less attention than it deserves when the hand-wringing begins. So, sure, perhaps we can and should tinker with the political process. Clip lobbyists’ wings. Get leaders to make nicey-nicey with the opposite party. But the process is less important than outcomes. More people will trust the government again when times are good, even if government ain’t.

Posted by John Sides at 09:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

As one of the goals of the Monkey Cage is to get political scientists and their research involved in broader discussions of contemporary politics, we were very pleased to see that Del Ali of Research 2000 posted on Daily Kos Saturday to explain how they conduct their research. As frequent readers of this blog may recall, Research 2000 conducted the now fairly well known Republicans are Crazy poll for Daily Kos. And while correlation of course does not indicate causation, we did raise some concerns about the poll last week on the Monkey Cage in a guest post by Andrew Therriault. After looking Ali’s response, Andrew and I had the following thoughts:

Overall, Ali’s post is structured as a step-by-step guide to how polls are conducted. Much of the information included is very basic and not specific to Research 2000, but might be useful to anyone who hasn’t worked with surveys in the past.

But more important (for our purposes) is the degree to which the post provides new information which can be used to interpret the original results. Ali does answer one of the questions asked in our previous Monkey Cage post, which concerns the screening process, or the manner in which respondents were selected to participate in the poll. Research 2000 began their interviews by asking a fairly typical party identification question, and then only proceeded with respondents who answered “Republican” immediately—so, no leaners, as we’d thought.

This is actually a pretty crucial point. If we assume that extreme 5% of voters on either the left or the right have some pretty crazy ideas, then this alone can play a big role in coloring how “crazy” a given sample of Republicans (or Democrats) looks in a poll. To give a simple example, if somehow we restrict the Republican in our sample to only the farthest right 10% of voters (e.g., “strong” republicans) , then 50% of our sample of Republicans will look crazy, just on the basis of the 5% of crazies we’ve assumed to be out there. However, if we include as Republicans the farthest right 40% of voters (e.g., include strong Republicans, weak Republicans, and Republican leaners), then the 5% of crazies end up only making 12.5% of all Republicans look crazy. So by stopping at the initial probe of “Politically, do you consider yourself to be a Democrat, a Republican, an Independent, or of another party?” and not asking any follow up questions, the poll was setting itself up to probably get a more conservative sample of Republicans than if it followed the practice of, for example, the American National Election Study, and followed that question up by asking “Do you think of yourself as closer to the Republican Party or to the Democratic Party?”. Had Research 2000 asked this question and then included Republican leaners in the survey, the poll would probably have contained more “Republicans” with moderate views. (For more on leaners, see this previous post by John.) However, to be fair, had the poll followed up with a question that asked if the respondent was a strong or weak Republican and then restricted the sample to strong Republicans, the sample would have likely excluded even more moderate views, and thus could have produced even more “dramatic” findings. So while it is the case, as one of the commentators on Andrew’s previous post noted, that Kos can choose to survey whatever population they like, it is also the case that as you make a political population more restrictive, you are probably going to get higher proportions of people echoing political views that look less mainstream.

All of our other concerns with the poll, however, still remain. Consider first particular opinion question wordings used, Ali simply restates a few of the questions and asserts that the binary response options (yes/no, favor/oppose) are “straightforward and objective.” He does not comment on whether the choice of wordings may have influenced the results or whether the binary response options oversimplified and distorted the actual distribution of public opinion. This concern is not out of the blue—the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) suggests in its question wording guidelines that balanced questions have midpoints exactly to avoid the problems we mentioned.

Continue reading "Transparency in Polling: More on the "Republicans are Crazy" Daily Kos Poll" »

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 06:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

The Atlantic’s Chris Good says that it is:

Gallup released findings today on economic confidence by state, and it appears anxiety doesn’t give a clear partisan edge one way or the other.

Conventional wisdom says that an improved, or improving, economy is good for President Obama and Democrats, while economic anxiety is bad for the president’s party. Of the 10 states with the highest confidence ratings, five voted for Obama in ‘08 and five voted for John McCain; of the 10 states with the least confidence in the economy, six voted for Obama and four for McCain.

Five minutes later, the commenter “jennis psycho” said:

Your thesis does not follow from the data you cite.

And jennis psycho is correct. Good falls prey to our old friend, the ecological fallacy.

Better data is actually sitting immediately to the right of Good’s blog post: the ABC/WP consumer confidence index. You click on that link, then you click on the pdf in the ABC story.

Here is the consumer confidence rating of the three partisan groups (no word on how independent leaners were classified, but I am guessing they were classified as independents):

Republicans: -46
Democrats: -51
Independents: -49

So the difference here are small — especially compared to the differences across income groups, where consumer confidence ranges from -75 among those making $15,000 or less to -6 among those making $100,000 or more. It appears that a lack of consumer confidence is bipartisan.

But the most recent numbers obscure an important trend that indicates partisanship is at work. If you compare Democrats now to one year ago, their consumer confidence has improved by 10 points. But Republicans’ confidence has declined by 12 points. A year ago, Democrats were 27 points “less confident” than Republicans. Now they are 5 points less confident. Independents, meanwhile, are virtually unchanged.

A while back, Andy and I wrote up this basic finding and a number of others under the heading “Red and Blue Economies. The broader point is this. Even if Republican and Democrats currently have similar views of the economy — “bipartisanship,” in Good’s terminology — partisan bias may still be at work.

Posted by John Sides at 03:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

According to a recent report from Public Policy Polling, Democrats were rooting for the Saints by a 36%-21% margin, while Republicans were narrowly pulling for the Colts by a 26%-25% margin. Interestingly, Independents looked much more like Democrats, preferring the Saints by 33%-20%. Alas, no info on Tea Party supporters.

Oh, and one other vaguely related point. I watched the Super Bowl (very late at night…) in Madrid, Spain, where we had the UK feed of the game. The commentator they had for expert studio analysis: the Southern Methodist University wide receivers’ coach. Despite the fact that we got a good laugh out of this when he was first announced, I have to admit he actually provided pretty good commentary.

[Hat Tip to Pollster.]

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 06:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Remember that Daily Kos/Research 2000 Poll from earlier this week that swept through the blogosphere (see here, here , and here). Well, like any poll with new, dramatic take-away healdines, it’s probably worth a second look. I had put that on my Monkey Cage to do list for later this week, only to discover one of my own graduate students, Andrew Therriault (who incidentally will be on the job market next year), had already beaten me to the punch, providing a - dare I say it - fair and balanced look at the poll’s methodology here, which he has graciously allowed me to re-post on the Monkey Cage as a guest post:

There’s a new poll out from Daily Kos, conducted by Research 2000 (story, crosstabs), that’s getting a lot of attention this week (see discussion at FiveThirtyEight and Politico, for example). In brief, it claims that an alarming number of Republicans believe that Obama wants the terrorists to win, believe that ACORN stole the 2008 election, and hold other similarly-extreme beliefs and opinions. While the findings are pretty striking at first glance, there are a number of potential problems with the poll that should throw a little cold water on anyone getting too hysterical about the results:

Sample selection
The poll asked these questions of “2003 self identified Republicans”, but no details are provided about the screening process—-what the specific eligibility criteria were, what the response rate was, what percentage of respondents fit the eligibility screen, and so forth. I would wager that Republican leaners are not included, but that’s only part of the issue. The poll measures the opinions of people who (a) answered the phone and were willing to be polled far from election day, (b) identified as Republican without any follow-up prompts, c) were interested and patient enough to sit through a moderately-lengthy survey, and (d) did this despite a list of questions which sounds awfully like a push poll. Each of these factors could be reasonably expected to favor respondents who are highly engaged with politics and predisposed toward a particularly conservative viewpoint. As such, it is highly unlikely that the sample of respondents who sat through the full survey is even close to representative of the typical Republican electorate.

Opinion strength
Every opinion question is binary (yes/no, favor/oppose, etc.) with an option for “not sure”. Looking at the percentage of “not sure” responses, almost every question has double-digits in this category, and many have 20-30% or more. This is a much greater incidence than for most survey questions (though data is scarce when it comes to questions comparable to these in tone), and suggests that there is a wide range when it comes to the strength and certainty of respondents’ opinions. So of the 63% who think Obama is a socialist, for example, it’s unlikely that all of those respondents think he’s the reincarnation of V.I. Lenin. More likely, a handful really believe that, some more think he’s socialist in the European, democratic-socialist sense, others have heard their friends say it and think it might be true, a few more don’t really know but are guessing (not wanting to admit to the interviewer that they don’t know), and a bunch have no idea what a socialist is in the first place but know that it’s evil and so Obama must be one. By only allowing for binary answers, this poll ignores the complexities and uncertainties of public opinion, and force responses into categories which sound much more extreme than they might otherwise be.

Continue reading "Revisiting that "Republicans are Crazy" Daily Kos Research 2000 Poll" »

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 04:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Time emphasizes what Americans hate and distrust about the legislative process (which is, put simply, the workings of the legislative process), and that drives them away from the bill.

That’s Ezra Klein, drawing on the book Stealth Democracy, by political scientists John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse (buy it here!). Ezra quotes this passage from the book, which nicely summarizes their argument:

…they are consequently turned off by political debate and deal making that presuppose an absence of consensus. People believe these activities would be unnecessary if if decision makers were in tune with the (consensual) public interest rather than cacophonous special interests.

But there’s one problem in trying to explain opinion about health care with process considerations. What about the extraordinary partisan polarization on health care? See the graph from Gallup below:

Klein talks about what “Americans” think about the process and the bill. But there are no “Americans” here. There are groups of partisans with strongly divergent views. Clearly, the lengthy process isn’t turning off Democrats. In fact, their support has increased of late, according to Gallup:

Is it turning off Republicans? Perhaps. But a much more plausible explanation is that Republicans either didn’t support health care reform from the outset because it was associated with Obama and the Democratic Party, or came to dislike it after a barrage of criticism from Republican political leaders.

Okay, but what about independents? Are their views on health care due to their revulsion at “the process”? That would strike me as plausible if independents support for the bill kept declining as the process dragged on. In the graph above, there was a decline from the middle of September to the beginning of November. But no decline thereafter, even as the allegedly “worst” parts of the process — the Cornhusker compromise, the backroom conversations among Democratic leaders, etc. — took place. This is a point I’ve made before.

In fact, most of the growth in opposition to health care took place in the early stages of the process, not as the process wore on:

So while it’s true that opposition to health care reform is positively related to the length of the process, that doesn’t imply any causal relationship. The rapid increase in opposition and the partisan polarization in opinion suggests that the lengthy process matters not by opening people’s eyes to the cruel realities of legislating, but by giving opponents of reform additional time to attack it.

Posted by John Sides at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

David Shor writes:

I just read an idea for a pollster that crowd-sources statistical work, and was curious what you thought about the idea.

Here’s the idea:

Today, there is a new polling method available: IVR, or ‘Interactive Voice Response’ polling. Basically, the pollster records several questions, a computer auto-dials hundreds of landlines, and with the people who are willing to participate in the survey, they go through the script automatically.

Even though the old media pollsters and traditional polling organisations like AAPOR are busy discrediting those polls that they condescendingly call ‘robopolls’, there is not much evidence that they do any worse than live-interviewer polls- but they are much, much cheaper. . . .

Now, the next step to make polls even easier to access for everyone is there- with the mid-January start-up of the IVR pollster Precision Polling.

From Precision Polling’s website:

Automated Phone Surveys are phone calls where a recorded voice asks you questions and you type in responses on your keypad (e.g. “Who will get your vote for mayor? Press 1 for Joe…”). This provides a fast and affordable way to get answers from real people.

What do I think? I think it’s evil. These robopolls “fast and affordable” for the pollster but not for the person being hassled by the phone call. I think these machine phone calls should be illegal—yes, I would eagerly support a law making it illegal to call someone if there’s no human making the call (fax and data transmission excepted, of course). This would have the side benefit of making all those pre-election endorsement auto-calls illegal, as well as various obnoxious calls used by collection agencies.

It’s simply an abuse of the phone system, just as it would be an abuse of the electrical system to sneak into your neighbor’s house one night, plug in a really long extension cord, and run it out their window to your house to power your appliances.

“Fast and affordable,” indeed! Fast, affordable, and abusive is more like it.

P.S. I feel bad even giving these dudes publicity, but I figure, once it’s on Daily Kos it’s already been read by a million people, so I hope the good I’m doing by disparaging this idea outweighs the harm I’m doing by publicizing it.

P.P.S. I’m not saying the Daily Kos diarist (“twohundertseventy”) is evil, or even that that the people at Precision Polling are bad guys. I just don’t know if they’ve thought through the ethical implications of their suggestion, which amounts to bombarding millions of people with irritating calls at dinnertime. Or perhaps they have a retort to my ethical argument, something like: Lots of people enjoy answering polls, or Polls are essential to democracy. OK, if they’re so damn essential, try paying people to participate in your poll. You’re making money off of them, why not give something back to the people you’re hassling? Grrrr.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

…the fastest growing group of Americans are [sic] independents. That should tell us both something.

Barack Obama, at the House GOP retreat. The video is at C-SPAN. I’m just now listening, but early reports are that the Q&A was pretty interesting.

Posted by John Sides at 03:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Janice Sinclaire of Miller-McCune sends along this July piece from their magazine, entitled “‘Independent’ Voters Are Generally Not.” There’s lots of good quotes therein.

Peter Brown of Quinnipiac:

There are an awful lot of people who call themselves independent because it’s fashionable in some circles. But their voting behavior is predictable. They are not swing voters.

Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling:

While a disproportionate numbers of swing voters are independents, two-thirds of independent voters are not swing voters.

Scott Keeter of Pew:

This idea of the sage citizen who eschews party affiliation, is unbiased and persuadable by reason and facts, is very much a myth. Most people are committed to a party. They may not like the label, so some call themselves independents. But there are very few people who fit the archetypes of the wise, centrist independent. People who don’t have a lot of opinions tend to be disengaged from politics and less likely to vote.

The piece also quotes from political scientist John Petrocik, who recently published an article entitled “Measuring party support: Leaners are not independents” (gated, sorry). From the abstract:

Many Americans, especially middle class and better educated ones, call themselves independent and citizens who choose the better candidate regardless of party affiliation. Their numbers seem to have increased in recent decades to nearly 40% of the electorate. The description and estimate are misleading. Very few Americans lack a party preference. Our largely unchanged high levels of party voting and the willingness of most ‘‘independents’’ to acknowledge a party preference after a bit of probing indicates that independence is more a matter of self-presentation than an accurate statement about our approach to elections, candidates, the parties, and politics in general. Most of the independents in national surveys and most of the increase in their numbers are contributed by ‘‘leaners’’ (those who initially describe themselves as independents but then acknowledge a preference for either the Democrats or Republicans). Leaners are partisans. Characterizing them as independents underestimates the partisanship of Americans and leads to inaccurate estimates of party effects and the responsiveness of the electorate to short-term electoral forces.

Posted by John Sides at 09:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

The Pew Research Center has a new report out on the US Public’s Top Priorities. Here is the headline finding:

Healthcare and helping the poor (a clear component of health care reform, if one not often discussed) are still thought of as a top priority by a majority of the population, but it is clear that they are not at the top of the list. Nor are energy and global warming, another of the Obama administration’s top domestic priorities. Interestingly, though, tax cuts, a big theme of the tea-party movement, are also near the bottom of this list. Deficit reduction, however, is in the top half of the list, although, it should be noted, deficit reduction is far below concern over the economy and jobs, the top two items on this list.

How might these figures filter into actual policy making in the year to come? On the one hand, as I pointed out previously, the Democrats still clearly have the votes to do whatever they would like (for the most part) for the rest of 2010. As has been pointed out repeatedly (see in particular John Stewart’s excellent take on this a few nights ago), Obama still has more votes in the House and the Senate that George W. Bush ever had, and Bush certainly managed to advance elements of his legislative agenda. On the other hand, one thing Democrats in congress will want to do is get re-elected, so one can only imagine that close attention will be paid to these numbers. Exhibit one: The State of the Union Address?

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 04:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Fareed Zakaria:

…tens of millions of independents, the vast middle ground where elections are won and lost in America…

Matt Bai:

Even more consequential, though, is the fast-growing swath of voters who can summon no affinity for either party. As in other aspects of modern American life, brand allegiance in politics is at an all-time low; more than a third of Americans (and more than half of all Massachusetts voters) identify themselves as independents rather than as members of the blue team or the red.

Jon Bernstein beat me to this, but he has other fish to fry with Bai. Plus, I want to yell.

INDEPENDENTS ARE NOT A “VAST MIDDLE GROUND.”

INDEPENDENTS DO NOT COMPRISE MORE THAN “A THIRD OF AMERICANS.”

How many DAMN TIMES must this be said before this MOST BASIC OF FINDINGS — first explicated at length almost 20 YEARS AGO! — sinks into the heads of pundits.

I will keep linking to this post as long as it takes. To repeat: true, honest-to-God independents are about 10% of the American population. Declining support for Obama among independents accounts for less than a fifth of Obama’s overall decline in support.

Posted by John Sides at 04:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (19)

The Washington Post describes this finding from the poll I noted earlier:

Among Brown’s supporters who say the health-care reform effort in Washington played an important role in their vote, the most frequently cited reasons were concerns about the process, including closed-door dealing and a lack of bipartisanship. Three in 10 highlighted these political maneuverings as the motivating factor; 22 percent expressed general opposition to reform or the current bill.

Karen Tumulty says that this dovetails with what she was hearing on the ground in Massachusetts:

Normally, you’d be surprised if people in Massachusetts even know who the Senator from Nebraska is. But the number of people I talked to who brought up Ben Nelson’s name, unprompted, was striking. I’m also told, by some who were doing phonebanking, that they got an earful about it over and over.

Voters I talked to also brought up the deal with labor. How come, they wanted to know, that everyone has to pay this “Cadillac Tax” on high-cost insurance plans except for the unions, who get a five-year exemption? People are so disgusted by the process, I think, that they have ceased to believe that there is anything in this bill for them.

Jon Bernstein tackles this from one angle, and I agree with him that Tumulty’s reporting is important. But I want to tackle the role of “process” from a public opinion standpoint. “Process” does appear salient in the minds of 30% of MA voters who voted for Brown. But there are three challenges in interpreting its importance:

1) What does process mean?
Well, according to the Post — see p. 5 of the pdf — it could mean “don’t like the way it is being handled” or “politics” or “deal-making” or “too complicated” or “not what the people want” or “partisanship” or “moving too fast” — among other things. The category is very broad and includes multitudes of different sentiments. Tumulty refers to something that sounds like the Post’s “deal-making.” The problem is that deal-making isn’t separated from “politics” or “don’t like the way its being handled” and several other sentiments. So the 13% who were classified as saying something in that category may or may not have in mind the deals with Ben Nelson or labor unions.

I would guess that only a small percentage of voters could tell you that there was a Cornhusker compromise and perhaps what it was. That’s just a hypothesis, but it strikes me as plausible because of the low levels of knowledge of many political facts, especially arcane ones like the Nelson deal. To take one example, 69% of respondents in a recent CBS poll (pdf) couldn’t even provide a basic favorable/unfavorable for the Tea Party movement, and it has been in the news for months.

2) How many opponents of health care reform care about process?
In Post’s poll the fraction of self-reported voters who (1) considered health care extremely or very important, (2) were therefore asked the open-ended question, (3) cited something related to process and (4) voted for Scott Brown was about 7% of their sample (my math).

So we’re not talking about a large number of people. It’s possible that they were easy for Tumulty to find in Massachusetts — at rallies or wherever — but this is not necessarily a widespread phenomenon.

3) Is process really the reason why people oppose health care reform?
Here I am pretty confident in saying no — and I would be equally confident even if large numbers of people knew of the Nelson deal. First, it’s important to remember that the “reasons” that people give for their choices — e.g., as in the Post’s open-ended question — are not necessarily the factors that actually caused those choices. People do not report accurately on their own mental processes, and often times their “reasons” are rationalizations. Lee had a nice post on this.

Second, there has been no increase in opposition to health care reform in the last couple months, even as the Nelson deal and the exemption for labor unions came together. In fact, according to the Pollster chart, there’s actually been a slight decline in opposition, although I doubt that’s anything meaningful. The Nelson deal didn’t seem to change anyone’s mind. It just gave bill opponents another reason to hate the bill, and it was salient enough at the time of the Post poll in Massachusetts for some unknown fraction to cite it.

Given how quickly partisan polarization on health care reform emerged, I think most people’s opinions were formed via the usual cue-taking from elites (as John Zaller’s work would suggest). The public routinely complains about aspects of the legislative process — see John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse’s work — but these are
general concerns not so much concerns about specific bills.

Tumulty thinks that the Cornhusker compromise was “one of the biggest blunders in modern political history.” I think that absent the deal, public opinion about health care reform would be no different whatsoever. Ultimately, most people do not base their views of legislation on the process by which it was debated or enacted. And after a months-long debate, I doubt that details of the process are changing many people’s minds.

Posted by John Sides at 05:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A nice tidbit from the Washington Post/KFF/Harvard poll of MA special election voters (pdf):

As you may know, Massachusetts has a law that is aimed at assuring that virtually all Massachusetts residents have health insurance. Given what you know about it, in general, do you support or oppose the Massachusetts Universal Health Insurance Law?

Among Brown voters, 51% support this law and 44% oppose it.

Posted by John Sides at 09:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

That’s Ben Smith’s phrase. He cites George Packer:

Part of Obama’s weakness has been this unwillingness or inability to say a few simple things passionately, which would let Americans know that he is on their side. Reagan knew how to do it, which meant that, even when his popularity was sinking at a similar point in his presidency (remember 1982?), the public still knew where he stood, not necessarily on the details of policy, but on a few core principles that he could at least pretend never to sacrifice. This is partly a problem of communication, worsened by a tendency of the White House (as if the campaign never ended) to make Obama’s the face on every issue, so that the more he says, the less people know what he wants.

And William Finnegan:

He wants to accomplish too much, both domestically and beyond. So I see him being subtly changed by these pressures of office, becoming less incisive and cool, getting broader, more conventional, more conservative.

These perpectives dovetail with Maureen Dowd’s, discussed last week:

No Drama Obama is reticent about displays of emotion. The Spock in him needs to exert mental and emotional control. That is why he stubbornly insists on staying aloof and setting his own deliberate pace for responding — whether it’s in a debate or after a debacle. But it’s not O.K. to be cool about national security when Americans are scared.

Ah, the narrative is starting to take shape. Unsurprisingly, it’s one bereft of evidence. Consider these data from a January Pew poll. What follows is the percent who say that a phrase describes Obama:

“Warm and friendly”: 77%
“Cares about people like me”: 64%

That’s hard to square with the idea that Obama is too cool or not “connecting.”

But Packer suggests something more than style: “this unwillingness or inability to say a few simple things passionately…” I couldn’t find any poll that directly speaks to this, but consider this from the Pew data:

“Strong leader”: 62%
“Good communicator”: 83%

And consider this question as well, “In making decisions, is Obama too impulsive, too cautious, or about right?” Only 20% said “too cautious.” 46% said “about right,” and 26% said “too impulsive” (a sentiment far more common among Republicans, naturally).

None of this squares with the notion that Obama has failed as a communicator. In short, Obama is more popular as a person than a president. There is little reason for him to adjust his personality.

More fundamentally, in these sentiments is yet more primitive magical thinking about what presidents can do if they only have just the right message or right tone. Perhaps Obama could give some speech (e.g., SOTU) that would reinvigorate key constituencies or congressional Democrats. But let us not fool ourselves that effective speech-making is going to have any real impact on public opinion. There is scant evidence that speeches may much difference.

There’s a further irony in Packer’s analogy to Reagan. He thinks Reagan articulated a core set of principles, and Obama hasn’t. But then he notes that Obama is in exactly the same position as Reagan was at this point. Their approval trends are virtually overlapping. So how is it that articulating core principles matters? If Reagan did and Obama didn’t, and they were both sitting at 50% after one year, what difference does the rhetoric make?

The analogy to Reagan actually suggests something quite the opposite: structure, not speeches, matter. A weak economy took its toll on Reagan and it’s taken its toll on Obama. Presidents are, as Brendan Nyhan put it, often “prisoners of circumstance.”

There is no cleverly crafted message that’s going to turn around Obama’s approval. Nor is there much evidence that his personality is the fundamental problem.

Posted by John Sides at 09:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

That’s the argument of political scientists David Brady and Douglas Rivers, along with business and law professor Daniel Kessler. Here are the key graphs:

We have polled voters in 11 states likely to have competitive Senate races in November on how they feel about health reform and how they might vote in November. The interviews were conducted from Jan. 6-11 with 500 registered voters in Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Louisiana, Missouri, Nevada, North Dakota, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

…Health reform is more popular in some of these states than in others. Where it’s popular, Democratic candidates don’t have too much of a problem, but where it’s unpopular—and that includes most states—the Democratic Senate candidates are fighting an uphill battle. Support for health reform varies in these 11 states from a low of 33% in North Dakota to a high of 48% in Nevada. Democrats trail Republicans in six of the states; three are toss-ups; and in two, Democrats have a solid lead. Support for the Republican Senate candidates in these races is closely related to voter opposition to the health-care Senate bill.

…How do we know that it’s the health-reform bill that’s to blame for the low poll numbers for Democratic Senate candidates and not just that these are more conservative states? First, we asked voters how their incumbent senator voted on the health-care bill that passed on Christmas Eve. About two-thirds answered correctly. Even now, long before Senate campaigns have intensified, voters know where the candidates stand on health care. And second, we asked voters about their preference for Democrat versus Republican candidates in a generic House race. As in the Senate, the higher the level of opposition to health reform, the greater the likelihood that the state’s voters supported Republicans.

Voters’ knowledge of how senators voted is key. In an earlier post, I argued that voters don’t often make decisions based on policy. In part this is because they don’t necessarily know where the candidates stand. But perhaps that won’t prove true with regard to health care reform in 2010.

UPDATE: Brendan is more skeptical.

Posted by John Sides at 09:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Jon Cohen of the Washington Post nails it:

Only one of Monday’s five publicly released Massachusetts Senate polls asked prospective voters anything beyond their ballot preference, opinion of the candidates and a few demographics.

…Good survey research clarifies, providing data about “why” prospective voters make choices, both in terms of whether they will vote and how they will cast their ballots. Producing a solitary horse-race number is essentially a publicity stunt. That number may end up hitting the mark, but without any explanatory information behind it, it’s of no value to understanding the election.

Posted by John Sides at 11:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here’s a thought experiment. You’re a Coakley supporter in MA, and you feel like neither the candidate nor your fellow Democrats are taking the election seriously because everyone believes she’ll win by a large margin. A pollster calls you and asks you for whom you are planning on voting. What should you say? You could tell the truth and say Coakley, and risk yet another poll that shows her with a big lead and risks lulling Democrats even further into complacency. Or you could say Brown, in the hope that a closer than expected poll would light a fire under your co-partisans and/or convince some people who are planning on voting for Brown to “make a statement” because they think he has no choice of winning to avoid doing so.

This got me thinking: do we, as political scientists, really have a good handle on why and when people tend to tell the truth to pollsters? Much has been made of building up and tearing down the so-called Bradley effect, whereby whites voters might be less likely to admit to voting against black candidates. We also know from Adam Berinsky’s work in particular that sometimes certain voters are unable to articulate positions that they probably hold (see for example here or here). But what about situations like the one above, where it would serve the partisan interest of the respondent to lie about her intended vote choice? Or, to give another example, Adam Meirowitz and I have a formalized argument about why certain poll respondents ought to exaggerate their positions on policy positions (see the section entitled Intuition here; for more generalizable formal work on this topic by Meirowitz see here.)

Yet at the end of the day, we usually do seem to be able to predict most election results from the final set of polls before that election, which suggests people aren’t systematically lying in election polls. I’m not sure if we have any similar findings in terms of policy questions, but I certainly have never seen systematic evidence suggesting they do. So this seems to be an interesting puzzle: if people ought to lie to pollsters to advance their own political agenda, why don’t they? I posed this question to my colleague Neal Beck, and his guess was essentially that people who answer surveys want to get off the phone as quickly as possible, and putting any thought into answering a survey question would slow down that process. I’m curious as to what other people think. Why don’t people lie more often to pollsters? In my piece with Meirowitz, we raise the idea of a “small psychic cost” to lying, but why should that kind of psychic cost be any more troubling than, for example, not voting for your preferred candidate in an election for strategic reasons? Could it be that people don’t think politicians look at poll results? That seems overly naive. We could of course fall back on the “what would one different response matter?” argument, but we know that people vote strategically; certainly one strategic poll respondent out of 1000 can have a larger impact than one strategic voter out of a million.

Anyone aware of empirical research on these or related topics? Perhaps from the political pysch literature?

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 04:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)

One of the most fascinating things about political ideology is the following juxtaposition:

1. An ideology typically makes complete sense to the person holding the ideology—that is, it is internally coherent.

2. Different people have all sorts of different ideologies; thus, there is external incoherence.

To put it another way, one person might strongly believe in A & B, while somebody else equally strongly feels that A & not-B go together. The logic of ideology is not fully determined by what goes into it.

I remember thinking about this several years ago regarding positions on legalized gambling (casinos, state lotteries, and the like). Some commentators were iberal and pro-gambling (people should be allowed to gamble if they want, without fundamentalist bible thumpers telling them what to do), some were conservative and pro-gambling (people should be allowed to gamble if they want, without do-gooder liberals telling them what to do), and similarly on the other side. And I recall reading passionate arguments from various of these perspectives.

On aggregate, I suspect there’s a slight correlation between being a liberal or Democrat and supporting gambling (it’s a traditional morals issue, after all, William F. Bennett notwithstanding), but the correlation is surely weak if there at all, and it doesn’t stop all four of the above positions from making internal sense.

I thought about the issue again more recently when reading this discussion by Dennis Mangan (I found his site via a link from Seth’s blog) of the fascinating story of a businessman who built a minaret next to his shoe warehouse in Bussigny, Switzerland. From the news article:

In November, Switzerland voted to ban the construction of new minarets, the towerlike structures that adorn mosques. A week or so later, in an apparent act of defiance, a new minaret unexpectedly sprang up here.

But the new minaret is not attached to a mosque; this small town near Geneva doesn’t even have one. And it’s not the work of a local Muslim outraged by Switzerland’s controversial vote to ban the structures, which often are used to launch the call to prayer.

Instead, Bussigny’s minaret is attached to the warehouse of a shoe store called Pomp It Up, which is part of a Swiss chain. It was erected by the chain’s owner, Guillaume Morand, who fashioned it out of plastic and wood and attached it to a chimney. The new minaret, nearly 20 feet high and illuminated at night, is clearly visible from the main highway connecting Lausanne and Geneva.

“The referendum was a scandal,” Mr. Morand said recently at his cavernous warehouse, near pallets piled high with shoe boxes as pop music played on an old stereo system. “I was ashamed to be Swiss. I don’t have the power to do much, but I wanted to give a message of peace to Muslims.”

Continue reading "Internal vs. external coherence in political ideology" »

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 09:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

This was Dowd, as quoted in my previous post:

But it’s not O.K. to be cool about national security when Americans are scared.

Today, Gallup buttresses the CNN data noted previously:

U.S. Fear of Terrorism Steady After Foiled Christmas Attack

In a Dec. 11-13 poll, 39% were somewhat or very worried about “you or someone in your your family” becoming a “victim of a terrorist attack.” In a Jan. 8-10 poll, 42% were somewhat or very worried. The margin of error is plus or minus 4 points.

Posted by John Sides at 07:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

ABC News has new and remarkably thorough report available on their website on public opinion in Afghanistan (see here for the accompanying article discussing the report). This could undoubtedly represent quite a treasure trove of data for anyone studying this topic, which then led me to the question of whether there were actually any political scientists working on this topic. I did a quick Google Scholar search of “Afghanistan” and “Public Opinion” and couldn’t find anything, so I would like to invite readers of The Monkey Cage to comment if they know of any relevant papers or article. In particular, I’d be very interested in any studies of the reliability of the polls referenced in the ABC report.

On to the substance of the report, there are really a lot of interesting topics covered - and in most cases time series data are provided - including attitudes toward security and the US forces in the country, beliefs about corruption generally and fraud in the most recent presidential elections, and even questions on topics such as whether women should be allowed to work disaggregated by demographic characteristics of the respondents. But two of the most eye-catching results are as follows:

Here we can see that there has been a rather dramatic increase in Afghans’ optimism about the future essentially since US President Obama took office in January of 2009. Note that this appears to be both a short term optimism about one’s own life as well as a more long term optimism about the hope for one’s childrens’ lives.

Also interesting is the fact that there seems to be a reversal in blame for the violence in Afghanistan. A year ago, slightly more than a third of Afghans felt the US/NATO forces were primarily to blame for the violence while only slightly more than a quarter blamed the Taliban. Now more than twice as many people (42% - 17%) blame the Taliban as blame the US/NATO forces.

As mentioned previously, it would be great to know if anyone had any research on the reliability of these figures.

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 05:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Maureen Dowd:

No Drama Obama is reticent about displays of emotion. The Spock in him needs to exert mental and emotional control. That is why he stubbornly insists on staying aloof and setting his own deliberate pace for responding — whether it’s in a debate or after a debacle. But it’s not O.K. to be cool about national security when Americans are scared.

Percentage of Americans who were “somewhat” or “very worried” that “you or someone in your family will become a victim of terrorism”…

…two months before the attempted Christmas bombing: 36%
…two weeks after the attempted Christmas bombing: 34%

Percentage of Americans who had a “great deal” or “a moderate amount” of confidence “in the Obama administration to protect U.S. citizens from future acts of terrorism”…

…four months before the attempted Christmas bombing: 63%
…two weeks after the attempted Christmas bombing: 65%

Source: CNN.

Posted by John Sides at 01:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Not any more than you would expect a largely Democratic group to dislike her. Seth Masket has the definitive back-of-the-envelope math.

Posted by John Sides at 09:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Henry noted the dust-up between the netroots and wonkosphere over health care. This has occasioned all kinds of speculation about whether Obama has a problem with the Democratic Party’s liberal base.

Mark Blumenthal provides some evidence to the contrary: Obama’s standing among liberals and among liberal Democrats is very high and hasn’t declined. Some relevant Gallup data are here.

Nate Silver pointed out a few weeks back that the visibility of viewpoints should not be confused with their prevalence. Another way of stating this — and one back by, oh, a half-century of political science — is that the public is often and at best a pale reflection of the views of politicians, journalists, bloggers, etc.

Posted by John Sides at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Fascinating blog by Nate Silver on different ways a survey organization can be biased (or not). Issues of question wording, and of which questions to ask in a survey, come up from time to time.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 04:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A prefatory apology: some of the material in here is in previous posts (e.g., here), and all of this material will be very familiar and therefore unexciting to many political scientist readers. But elsewhere, people don’t get it, and so attention must be paid.

The three myths are:

1) Independents are the largest partisan group.

2) Independents are actually independent.

3) Change in the opinions of independents is always consequential.

Continue reading "Three Myths about Political Independents" »

Posted by John Sides at 12:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Last week, I linked to my comments at the TPM Book Club on Mark Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler’s book Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics. I post two criticisms of the book, both intended as friendly and constructive. Marc and Jonathan replied here. Marc and I then began some further correspondence via email. The comments below capture my synthesis of these exchanges.

The underlying question: Is the American public more polarized today than in some previous period?

Continue reading "What We Don't Know About Polarization" »

Posted by John Sides at 04:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This has been circulating for a few months on conservative blogs and websites — or so a Google search suggests — but it was just forwarded to me by a relative:

DO NOT MISS YOUR CHANCE TO CAST YOUR VOTE:

Finally, a chance to vote on President Obama’s performance on this Economy and where he is taking this nation… AT&T/YahooPoll… This totally non-partisan poll asks but one question. The question is stated very simply… and, to the point. No tricks. No hidden messages. JUST ONE SINGLE, SIMPLE QUESTION. I don’t know why this hasn’t been done before..

I’m impressed with the fact that the question is NOT “phrased” in a way that it can be interpreted or misrepresented later…to fit someone else’s desired answer.

http://js..polls.yahoo.com/quiz/quiziframe.php?poll id=46067

NOTE: After you vote, you will see a second page that shows the running total and what these voters opinions are.

Then pass it on… so others may cast their vote.

So I click the link and here is the question:

The president’s progress with the battered economy has been both praised and criticized. How well are his efforts measuring up with you?

• Extremely well. We are undoubtedly moving in the right direction.
• Fairly well. There’s still a long way to go.
• Not well at all. His plans are hurting more than helping.
• Not sure/No opinion.

At first I thought this was a hoax, but some searching didn’t suggest that this was true.

So then, where to begin? We’ll ignore the nonsense in the email — e.g,. the notion that only “finally” are people being asked their opinions about Obama and the economy. The bigger issue is the question itself. This is a poll sponsored by AT&T and Yahoo and this is what they come up with? Does the concept of “double-barreled” mean anything to them? What if I think that he’s done extremely well, but we have a long way to go? What if I think that we’re headed in the right direction and have a long way to go? Etc.

Obama’s performance on the economy has been measured over and over using better questions — questions that would even meet the author’s standards (“non-partisan,” “simple,” etc.):

More on the data is at Pollster.

And it will probably not surprise readers of this blog that the self-selected sample of respondents — and there have been over 40 million responses (not respondents, naturally) — tends toward strong opinions: 37% say “extremely well” and 61% say “not well at all.” Only 1% say “fairly well.”

This is the opposite of what is actually true. When given more options than “approve” and “disapprove” most people cluster in the middle options, not the extremes. For example, a November Harris Interactive poll found that 34% considered Obama’s performance on the economy to be “pretty good” and 30% it to be “fair.” Only 13% said “excellent.” Only 23% said “poor.”

I note that other AT&T Yahoo polls have this same problem. Here’s one on Lou Dobbs:

Longtime CNN anchor Lou Dobbs is making trouble for the network, reported a story popular on AT&T Yahoo! this week. His coverage of the “birther” movement, which questions the authenticity of Barack Obama’s birth certificate, has brought the most fallout. His persistence with the story has embarrassed CNN execs and also contributed to a drop in ratings, say insiders. The bad press has put his job in jeopardy.

What do you think? Should Lou Dobbs keep his job?

• Yes. He’s an important voice in the news industry.
• No. It’s time for him to go.
• Not sure/No opinion

Much better would be just “yes” or “no.” It’s entirely possible to think he’s an important voice but that it’s time for him to go.

I am wasting my time yelling at random internet polls, of course. But you’d think with big corporate dollars behind this, At&T and Yahoo could come up with something better.

Posted by John Sides at 03:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

When I was giving talks on Red State, Blue State, I’d always get a laugh with the Starbucks/Walmart graphs. One thing I realized is that everybody hates Starbucks. From the left, Starbucks is a creepy bit of corporate America, whereas the right sees the ubiquitous chain of coffee shops as a snobby overpriced slice of big-city liberalism. Not everybody feels that way, of course—let’s not forget the zillions of latte-swilling customers out there—but the Seattle-based sugar-and-caffeine-dispensary does seem to be disliked by both ends of the political spectrum.

As is White House economist Lawrence Summers, who is despised on the left for his Wall Street connections, his links to the bank bailouts, and, of course, that infamous “pollution memo”—while also being mocked on the right for being an economic redistributionist who couldn’t even hold down the job of president of Harvard (a post that traditionally has a turnover rate closer to that of Popes than that of manager of the Steinbrenner-era Yankees).

P.S. The second link above comes from our co-blogger Henry. I found the first link by Google searching blogs for “Larry Summers.” It wasn’t hard to find some negative things!

P.P.S. It’s beyond my competence to make any judgments on Summers’s competence on economic issues. Heck, as a non-coffee drinker, it’s beyond my competence to judge Starbucks! I wouldn’t be surprised if Summers drinks a lot of coffee, though.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 04:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The New Republic has suggested that an op-ed I wrote last month with my colleague Pat Egan, and which I previously discussed in a Monkey Cage post here, ought to be recommended reading before viewing the president’s speech tonight. The first half of the piece draws on the issue ownership literature to explain why Afghanistan is a particularly difficult challenge for a Democratic president, while in the second half of the piece we lay out some suggestions for how Obama ought to try to present his decision to the American public once he made it. This included (1) framing his decision entirely in terms of US national security and (2) possibly invoking a similar logic to the “surge” in Iraq — bringing in more troops in the short term to improve the situation sufficiently so you can take out more troops in medium term — if he did indeed decide to add a significantly large number of new trips.

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’ve written before on opinion toward various proposals about the public option — e.g., the option alone vs. with an opt-out provision. Last week, Quinnipiac released some new data that speaks to this question. These come from a poll of registered voters conducted from Nov. 9-16, 2009. At my request, they also supplied some additional cross-tabs, for which I am grateful.

The poll included questions about the public option, the opt-out provision, and the trigger:

Do you support or oppose giving people the option of being covered by a government health insurance plan that would compete with private plans?

There is a proposal that would allow states to opt out of a public option - that is it would be left up to each state to decide whether or not to give people the option of being covered by a government health insurance plan. Do you think that is a good idea or a bad idea?

Some have suggested that the creation of a public option should only be triggered if the private market does not meet benchmarks to extend coverage to all Americans. Do you think this is a good idea or a bad idea?

In this poll, 57% favored the public opinion, 43% thought the opt-out provision was a good idea, and 38% thought the trigger was a good idea.

Obviously, we want to know about combinations of attitudes. For example, how many supporters of the public opinion are also supporters of the opt-out or trigger? Are their opponents of the public option that would support a triggered version? Etc. This is where the cross-tabs are useful.

The graph above focuses on those respondents who had opinions on both issues in each combination (public option and opt-out, public option and trigger). This is about 87% of respondents.

The graph shows that supporters of the public option are relatively evenly divided between supporting a pure public option and supporting a public option with either a trigger or opt-out provision. Opponents of the public option are evenly divided about the opt-out, but tend to oppose the trigger.

Thus, about one-third of the sample supports the “pure” public option. A slightly smaller group, roughly 30%, supports a “qualified” public option that features either an opt-out provision or a trigger. About 20% of the public oppose the option, but would support it with an opt-out provision. Thirteen percent oppose it but would support it with a trigger. Finally, there is a “diehard” group of public option opponents, who are about 20-25% of the population.

There is grist for both supporters and opponents of the public option in these findings. Supporters could take heart that about 75-80% of the sample supports some sort of public option — at least given how these various proposals are described by Quinnipiac. Opponents could take heart that only about a third of respondents supports the pure public option.

I also note that the “median” member of the public appears to support a qualified public option, which is not that different than the view of the hypothetical median Senator, at least as far as I can tell.

Posted by John Sides at 04:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I was reading Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler’s “Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics”: for a forum elsewhere on the internets and came across this interesting finding. Using ANES data from 2004, Hetherington and Weiler find that 95% of those who scored the minimum on their scale for authoritarianism (e.g. attachment to strong and traditional notions of public morality etc) thought that gay people ought to be allowed join the armed forces, as against 79% of those with middling levels of authoritarianism and 67% of those who maxed out the scale. Hetherington and Weiler are interested in what this tells us about the differences between authoritarians and non-authoritarians. But it also begs an interesting political question. Assuming that these values have not shifted dramatically in the intervening five years (and if they have, I would guess that they have shifted so as to make authoritarians more rather than less likely to support gays in the military), why has the Obama administration has not pressed for public changes, despite repeated promises, visible anger from supporting constituencies etc? If Hetherington and Weiler are right, the answer is not to be found in public opinion. More than two thirds of the population segment where you would expect to find most opposition is, in fact, in favor of allowing gay people to join the military. Other potential explanations?

Posted by Henry at 04:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

A new PPP poll finds that 49% of McCain voters think that ACORN stole the election for Obama. 20% of McCain voters are not sure. Only 31% think that he legitimately won the election. By comparison, 93% of Obama voters believe that he legitimately won the election.

Let’s first acknowledge that this is one poll, with one question wording. The pollster in question, PPP, uses interactive voice response (aka robo-calls), which generate lower response rates than standard polls. A reasonable question, then, is whether this small self-selected sample is — even with sample weighting — skewed towards the kind of politically engaged citizens who are more likely to think and act as partisan or ideologues.

Second, let’s put this finding in some degree of context by considering opinions after the 2000 presidential election. In various polls, we see similarly large divisions among Bush and Gore supporters about the fairness of the process, whether the Supreme Court had partisan motives, who the real winner would have been under a full recount, etc.

Perhaps most relevant is this question from a December 2000 Newsweek poll: “”Will you consider Bush to be a legitimate president, or not?”

Nearly all Republicans (97%) said yes, as compared to 56% of Democrats. Forty percent of Democrats said no.

I am not suggesting that the 2000 controversy and the PPP question about ACORN are equivalent, of course. I just wanted to show that partisans of both stripes can be disgruntled after an election — leaving aside the relative merits of their cause, the empirical basis for their beliefs, etc.

The bigger question is whether suggesting that a president is “illegitimate” has any real consequence. Democratic voters didn’t rebel against Bush after 2000. Indeed, they rallied to his side for a brief time after September 11th.

Moreover, the kinds of Democrats and Republicans who consider an opposition President to be illegitimate — strong partisans, for the most part — would be unlikely to support that President’s policies or vote for him in 4 years even if their doubts about his legitimacy were removed.

We can also question the causal status of suspicions of ACORN. It’s entirely possible that opposition to Obama makes people more likely to suspect ACORN — rather than the other way around. So dispelling this suspicion wouldn’t make anyone support Obama.

Finally, we have to be careful in imputing some tangible political consequence to the responses that respondents give to a PPP robo-call. Simply stating a suspicion doesn’t imply that people will act one it. Moreover, there is a ritualistic quality to this sort of discontent that makes its true impact difficult to discern.

Posted by John Sides at 02:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Jon Bernstein wants new polling data on the filibuster. The new CNN poll has one question about this:

As you may know, the filibuster is a Senate procedure which has been used to prevent the Senate from passing controversial legislation or confirming controversial appointments by the President, even if a majority of senators support that action. A vote of at least sixty senators out of one hundred is needed to end a filibuster. Do you favor or oppose the use of the filibuster in the U.S. Senate?

Just over half, 56%, favor the use of the filibuster, and 39% oppose it. Very few (5%) report having no opinion.

Of course, one poll with one question wording is hardly dispositive. I agree with Jon that we need more.

Posted by John Sides at 04:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

A new CNN poll asked:

Now thinking specifically about the health insurance plans available to most Americans, would you favor or oppose creating a public health insurance option administered by the federal government that would compete with plans offered by private health insurance companies?

A majority, 56%, favored the public option when described that way; 42% were opposed.

Then CNN asked:

Would you favor or oppose that plan if state governments were able to decide that the public health insurance option administered by the federal government would not apply to all people living in those states?

Then a vast majority, 66%, were opposed to the plan, and only 28% were in favor.

That surprised me because the public-option-with-the-opt-out has always been presented as a sort kinder, gentler public option that would appeal to more people — or at least to more members of Congress. Perhaps the CNN question wording doesn’t do it justice. I’m not well-versed enough on the opt-out to say, nor have I seen other polls on this specific provision.

Posted by John Sides at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

The Pew Global Attitudes Project has a new public opinion report out entitled The Pulse of Europe 2009: 20 Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall. The report is based on surveys in nine post-communist countries (Germany, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, Russia, Bulgaria and Ukraine) that asked close to 60 questions in all of these countries; there are also surveys from five established democracies (US, Spain, France, Italy, and Great Britain) for comparative purposes. The full report, with marginals for all of the questions, can be downloaded here, but here are a few particularly interesting tables:

We can see that in eight of the nine post-communist countries, a majority of the population continues to approve of the change to democracy; in four of these countries at least 70% of respondents approved. Ukraine is the clear outlier here, with support having dropped by 42% to only 30%. Particularly interesting in these findings is the fact that a greater proportion of Russians than Ukrainians continue to approve of the change to a multiparty system, despite the fact that the latter actually has functioning multiparty politics while one would be hard pressed to claim anything of the sort exists in the former.

Interestingly, support for the transition to a market economy remains almost as high across the region generally as support for the transition to multiparty politics. Once again, Ukraine anchors the bottom of the scale, but in this category it is joined now by Hungary, which has seem support for the transition to a market economy collapse almost in half, from 80% to 46%. With the Baltics and Hungary being among the hardest hit Eastern European countries in the current economic crisis, the fact that Hungary and Lithuania can both be found at the bottom of the table ought not to be too surprising.

As we look to the future, this final table raises interesting questions. Across the board, younger citizens are both more supportive of the transition to a market economy and to a multiparty political system. Only time will tell whether democracy and capitalism are always more favorable to the young than to the old or if this will turn out to be more of a cohort effect, with aggregate support for democracy and capitalism increasing over time people who have come of age under post-communism occupy an increasingly larger portion of the population. Of particular interest here is Russia, where a very sharp divide apparently exists between those under and over the age of 50 in terms of support for both multiparty democracy and market economies.

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 02:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A couple weeks ago, I did two posts on the link between perceptions of crime and the actual crime rate. The puzzle was why perceptions of crime were so tightly linked to reality from 1989-2001, and then much higher in 2002-2008, even as the crime rate remained stable.

One thing that occurred to me is that the decline in the crime rate in the 1990s coincided with an economic recovery. And the perceptions of more crime from 2002-2008 coincided with a weaker economy. Could the economy also affect perceptions of crime?

A provisional answer is yes: it appears that people perceive more crime when the economy is doing badly. The following graph plots the percent who believe that crime has increased in the past year against consumer sentiment from the quarter in which the survey was taken (as near as I can tell from the original Gallup data):

The relationship is pretty strong, although there are outliers. If you regress perceptions of crime against the violent crime rate and consumer sentiment, both are statistically significant, and they explain about two-thirds of the variance in perceptions.

The logic could be: If the times are bad, people must be bad too. To be sure, this is a purely correlational analysis based on a small number of datapoints. But it does suggest a possible reason why more people perceived an increase in crime after 2002, even as the crime rate remained constant.

Posted by John Sides at 10:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Really, the title of the post says it all…

[Hat tip to my colleague Pat Egan, who, for whatever reason, decided to scroll all the way down the different demographic characteristics in the Survey USA optional disaggregation category. And a big thumb’s up to Survey USA, for making so many different cross-tabs available for free(!), unlike certain other polling agencies who restrict this confidential information to premium members….]

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 02:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

As my own personal rebuttal to Senator Coburn and Patricia Cohen of the NY Times (see here and here), my colleague Patrick Egan and I have an article at The New Republic today that - gasp - attempts to use political science research to inform the discussion of an important contemporary political issue, in this case President Obama’s coming policy announcement on Afghanistan. Here are the first few paragraphs, you can find the full article here

President Obama faces an enormous political challenge in figuring out how to respond to General Stanley McChrystal’s request for more soldiers in Afghanistan. One the one hand, resisting troop requests from the military during a time of war is difficult for any chief executive—particularly for Democratic presidents. On the other hand, Americans are showing little stomach to once again commit more troops to a distant, war-torn region: No recent survey has found majority support for the idea.

No matter what choice Obama makes, he should not be deluded into thinking that his rhetorical gifts can move public opinion on this issue. According to research by Professor George Edwards of Texas A&M University, recent presidents, no matter how golden-tongued, have had virtually no power to change public opinion on foreign policy. Bill Clinton, for example, kicked off a high-profile call to send U.S. peacekeepers to Bosnia with a nationally televised address in November 1995. In response, public approval for the idea hardly moved at all, hovering around 40 percent for the next two years. Likewise, despite repeated pleas to the public, Ronald Reagan never moved support for aiding the Nicaraguan contras beyond the mid-30s.

Additionally, Democratic presidents like Obama face a particular handicap when making major foreign policy moves: For decades, the public has distrusted the Democrats on issues related to national security. That remained true throughout George W. Bush’s disastrous handling of the Iraq War. And even in early 2008, when the Republican Party was near its nadir in terms of popularity, survey data from the Pew Research Center indicated that Democrats’ best issues remained on the domestic front—health care and education—while foreign policy, terrorism, and even Iraq were all at the bottom of the list.

Click here to continue reading ‘The Hard Sell: How Obama should play the politics of an Afghanistan troop surge’

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 01:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An ABC/Washington Post poll finds that more people support an individual mandate for health insurance when you tell them that the government will help lower-income Americans buy insurance. Kevin Drum writes:

I have an assignment for an ambitious young PhD candidate with some free time on her hands. I’ve seen poll results like this a million times, and when you add some additional detail you always get a certain number of people to flip sides. I’m pretty sure you could quote a couple of lines from Jabberwocky, ask an “in that case” followup question, and get a fair number of people to change their minds. So what I’d like to know is: what’s the average flip rate?

I don’t know of any calculations of a “flip rate.” I can address Drum’s point that “when you add some additional detail you always get a certain number of people to flip sides.” A lot is going to depend on what is considered “detail,” and how many “a certain number is.” But on its face, I disagree with the statement: sometimes manipulations to survey questions affect response, and sometimes they do not.

For example, adding “death tax” to a question about the estate tax did not change responses very much at all.

In this article by Adam Berinsky, adding information to survey questions about Iraq — information citing the costs in lives or resources — didn’t seem to affect opinion much. (See Table 4.)

These are cases where survey respondents were randomly assigned to be asked different questions. They are not cases where survey respondents gave an answer, then were supplied with information, then were asked the initial question again. But I think the basic point holds. In the book by Howard Schuman that I previously summarized, he also notes that changes in survey questions do not always change in the distribution of opinion.

Whether people’s opinions change will depend first on the information provided. Is it new to them? Do they make a connection between the information and the issue? Are they able to counter-argue or rationalize away this information? Second, opinion change will depend on the individuals themselves. People with a larger store of cognitively consistent considerations will have much more “ballast” for their opinions than people who, for the most part, have never thought about the issue and have very little to support any particular opinion.

So those are a couple factors worth considering. We have a decent grasp of the second factor — based largely on theories of persuasion. The first factor is less well-understood. Only with a quite wide-ranging and verging-on-systematic study of information effects in polls could we begin to calculate anything approximating an average flip rate.

I would appreciate cites to other relevant studies in the comments. I’ve only scratched the surface here.

Posted by John Sides at 11:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

In comments on my earlier post, Andy and then Michael suggest that the proper comparison is between the Gallup item (“Is there more crime in the U.S. than than there was one year ago, or less?”) and the change in the crime rate. So here are three more scatterplots. They plot the percent saying “more” against the change in the crime rate vs. the previous year, 2 years ago, and 3 years ago. With each additional “lag,” particular years are lost, of course — and there is missing survey data in some years as well — but this comparison is still instructive. I put the correlation and associated p-value under each plot.

The challenge here is to figure out what people’s frame of reference is when they answer this question. My original post showed that, from 1989-2001 there was an extremely strong correlation (r=.97) between the violent crime rate and the percent saying “more.” However, after 2001, this relationship disappeared and a larger percent of people said “more” even as the crime rate remained flat.

If people are answering this question as it’s worded, then the topmost figure above — which depicts the change in the crime rate vs. the previous year — should show the strongest correlation. It does not. The strongest correlation is actually with the crime rate three years ago, although this correlation shrinks dramatically (to r=.43; p=.17) when 1992 and 1993 are excluded. So I’m not all that confident in this relationship. Such are the limitations of small datasets.

But let’s assume that this correlation vs. 3 years ago is real. It is puzzling, to say the least. In other areas — for example, the economy — voters are much more myopic, willing even to discard years of bad economic performance and reward incumbents for the most recent 6 months of economic gains (see this paper by Larry Bartels and Chris Achen). So why would perceptions of crime change so slowly?

All in all, these three plots illustrate my original point: there is a striking gap between perceptions and reality. You have periods with movement in opinion, such as in 2002-2008, but no real change in the crime rate. Moreover, consider the absolute level of opinion. There are many years in which the majority of the public says “more,” but crime has decreased relative to the previous year, 2 years ago, and 3 years ago.

Nothing in either of these posts is conclusive. But I’m still struck by the disjuncture I noted in the first post, and by how much perceptions simply don’t correspond that closely to crime rates.

Posted by John Sides at 08:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

A new survey from Gallup suggests that “Americans perceive increased crime in U.S.” The increase in the last 8 years is notable:

Do perceptions meet reality? Gallup says:

Whether there actually has been an increase in crime this year is hard to substantiate at this point, since official crime statistics for 2009 will not be released until next year. The most recent statistics, for the year 2008, show that crime in the U.S. decreased last year from 2007. Consistent with that change, Gallup’s 2008 measurement also showed a decline in the percentage of Americans perceiving more crime in the United States, from 71% in 2007 to 67% in 2008.

This misses the most important finding, however. Since 2001, perceptions of crime have become far worse even as the actual crime rate has remained stable. I took FBI’s violent crime rate from 1989-2008 and matched it up as best as possible to Gallup poll numbers for each year (eyeballing the graph above to determine the year in which each poll was conducted). Click here or click the graph to make it larger and more legible.

For 1991-2001, perceptions line up nicely with reality. But in 2002-2008, a larger percentage of Americans perceived an increase in crime than one would expect, given the actual crime rate. It appears that 2009 will only continue this trend. A graph with the property crime rate would show a similar finding.

One can speculate about the reasons. September 11th seems an unlikely cause, especially of the increase since 2005. Local television news consumption affects certain beliefs about crime, according to this research by Frank Gilliam and Shanto Iyengar. But I don’t really think there’s been a massive uptick in local news consumption, or local news coverage of crime (which seems a perennial staple — if it bleeds it leads, etc.).

I welcome additional speculation in comments.

Posted by John Sides at 02:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Several weeks ago, I discussed “Similarities between Left Wing and Right Wing Radicals,” an article by Herbert McClosky and Dennis Chong, and in particular noted how both camps can end up with similar views because of their strong distrust of

A contemporary example is the H1N1 vaccine:

Swine flu may have an unexpected side effect: political unity. The far left and far right agree that they’re sure as heck not getting vaccinated against swine flu…

…Now, thanks to the government’s plan to ship 250 million doses of H1N1 flu vaccine to all 50 states this month, the two sides have finally found common cause. They may hold different political opinions, but they share a worldview: distrust—of doctors and modern medicine or of government.

That’s from Slate. See also Brendan Nyhan.

[Hat tip to Chris Moore.]

Posted by John Sides at 01:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Keith Ellis writes:

I’ve been wondering about are the use of sophisticated mathematical techniques to discover what are the real-world political ideologies, starting without conventional preconceptions. The core idea I had when this came to many years ago was by way of reading some technical articles about color vision. I was struck by one paper, which I could barely understand, which attempted to determine the “spatial” dimensionality of color vision…I recall vaguely that the conclusion was that it is best described in a 28 or so dimensional space. This connected up, conceptually in my imagination, with what was then the nascent specialty of the stuff involved in the Netflix prize—I can’t recall the technical term…preference modeling?

Continue reading "Studying the dimensionality of political preferences" »

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 04:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I was in the library the other day and saw a new book, Why are Jews Liberals?, by O.G. neoconservative Norman Podhoretz. This is right up my alley, research-wise, and so I took a look. I don’t think Podhoretz’s book will match the sales of Thomas Frank’s similar record of frustration, “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”—there are very few writers out there who can match Frank’s skill with the perceptive quip—but this new book has something to offer, if nothing else by presenting the view of an influential battler in the world of political ideas.

Podhoretz’s argument (here’s a quick summary) goes as follows. Jews in America vote overwhelmingly for Democrats, even though you’d expect from their income levels that Jews would lean Republican. Expanding this, Podhoretz gives three reasons why Jews should vote for Republicans:

Continue reading "Why are Jews liberals?" »

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 10:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Rassmussen Reports has a lead story on its website trumpeting the fact that 43% of the country thinks Obama’s trip to Copenhagen is a bad idea. Fair enough, but my immediate suspicion was that the vast majority of the survey respondents holding that opinion would be people inclined to see anything Obama does as a bad idea. So I set off to try to find some cross-tabs for this question (being particularly interested in partisanship and region), only to find the following announcement:

Crosstabs and ( sic ) are available to Premium Members

Premium members, it turns out, are those willing to pay $19.95 a month, which immediately raised two questions in my mind. First, is there anyone out there who is willing to pay $19.95 a month for cross-tabs from Rasmussen? Second, how bad must the rest of their business be going if they have been reduced to selling cross-tabs on line?

More seriously, what is the responsibility of polling organizations that provide marginals that will clearly be quoted in news stories to also provide cross-tabs so we can begin interpret exactly what those marginals mean? Let me then add my voice to other bloggers following public opinion (here and here) calling for survey firms to make more of an effort to provide pertinent cross-tabs with their survey reports (and especially cross-tabs for partisanship and region).

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 03:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

So the Pew Center is back, again saying that “support for abortion slips,” again using various vague questions, and again pretending that there are no other polls but its own.

Fortunately, Jon Cohen of the Washington Post saves me from having to write another post like this one:

The reason for skepticism (or at least restraint) is simple: other polls, including the Washington Post-ABC News poll have not picked up such a basic reorientation on this divisive issue…

…Elsewhere the trend is decidedly different, as there has been no fundamental realignment on the question of legal abortion in Post-ABC polls (we ask the identical question). Nor have recent Post polls in Virginia picked up any such change in that key swing state. National polls by the AP, CBS News and the New York Times and Quinnipiac University also show no big increase in opposition to legal abortion.

His post is here.

Posted by John Sides at 03:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Thomas Friedman has an interesting column in the NY Times today. In it he argues that “a cocktail of political and technological trends have converged in the last decade that are making it possible for the idiots of all political stripes to overwhelm and paralyze the genius of our system”. What exactly are these trends?

1. “the wild excess of money in politics”
2. Gerrymandering of congressional districts
3. the 24 news cycle
4. a permanent presidential campaign
5. the emergence of a blogosphere that “at its best enriches our debates, adding new checks on the establishment, and at its worst coarsens our debates to a whole new level, giving a new power to anonymous slanderers to send lies around the world” (I’m going to assume he’s talking about The Monkey Cage in the former part of that quote).

As a political scientist, my response is that, OK, all of these seem like credible explanations, but how would we know if any of them are actually correct? After all, we’ve got five explanations here for what is essentially one observation: the current state of the US political system. To be fair to Friedman, he’s probably got an implicit N (the number of observations) of 2 in mind: the US now, and the US in the past. This would at least get us variation on some of the variables he has proposed (e.g., the 24 news cycle, the blogosphere, and the permanent presidential campaign), but would still leave us with more explanations than observations.

One way to get more observations would be to put the question in more of a comparative framework by examining other political systems around the world, and then seeing the extent to which both the dependent variable (the ability of idiots to overwhelm political debate, which would of course have to operationalized somehow) and the independent variables proposed by Friedman varied across different contexts. My sense is that the 24 news cycle and the blogosphere are pretty ubiquitous phenomena in most democracies these days, but that the permanent presidential campaign and gerrymandering are not. I’m not aware of any comparative research to date that tests the effects of these types of variables on the civility of politics, but would invite anyone aware of such research to add to the comments section of this post.

Of the possible explanations put forward by Friedman, the claim that gerrymandering is at the heart of problems in our political system strikes me as an important one to explore. Intuitively plausible - gerrymandering makes most congressmen or congresswomen in the United States need to worry more about a possible primary challenger than an opponent from the opposite party - it also has the advantage of being something that ostensibly could be fixed by legislation (as opposed to, for example, the 24 hours news cycle). However, based solely on my own observation of the way politics are conducted the post-communist countries I tend to follow, there would seem to be little out there to support a claim that politics is inherently less civil and more idiot-prone in the US than elsewhere.

Turning to more rigorous analysis, Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal have a recent article in the American Journal of Political Science on the effects of gerrymandering entitled “Does Gerrymandering Cause Polarization?” (gated, earlier ungated version). Contrary to popular belief, they find:

Both pundits and scholars have blamed increasing levels of partisan conflict and polarization in Congress on the effects of partisan gerrymandering. We assess whether there is a strong causal relationship between congressional districting and polarization. We find very little evidence for such a link. First, we show that congressional polarization is primarily a function of the differences in how Democrats and Republicans represent the same districts rather than a function of which districts each party represents or the distribution of constituency preferences. Second, we conduct simulations to gauge the level of polarization under various “neutral” districting procedures. We find that the actual levels of polarization are not much higher than those produced by the simulations. We do find that gerrymandering has increased the Republican seat share in the House; however, this increase is not an important source of polarization.

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 02:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

It is: trumpet the significance of small changes in responses to vague questions in a single poll. To wit:

Americans’ views of the proper government role in promoting traditional values had moved in a more liberal direction since 2005, to the point that last year, as many said the government should not promote traditional values as said it should. If that trend had continued, 2009 would have marked the first time Gallup found more Americans preferring that the government refrain from actively promoting traditional values. Instead, Americans’ attitudes reverted to a more conservative point of view on the matter. Now, Americans favor the government’s promoting traditional values by an 11-point margin, similar to the double-digit margins favoring that view through much of the prior two decades.

This “finding,” combined with their previous “findings” on abortion attitudes and on attention to the news, illustrate the tendency.

This focus — on the results of a single poll that is different from some previous poll or polls — ignores the possibility that this one poll could prove an outlier. This is what happened with the abortion result, even though Gallup actually conducted two polls to ensure that their “pro-life majority” finding was robust. The next Gallup poll showed that the this majority proved ephemeral.

Gallup often relies on survey questions that are hopelessly and unhelpfully vague. With the abortion finding, it was “…would you consider yourself to be pro-life or pro-choice?” I discussed that previously.

With the news finding, it was “how closely do you follow the national news (very, somewhat, etc.)?” Can people accurately report on their attention to news? No. Even if they could, does 36% vs. 30% in 2007 signal any meaningful difference? It strikes me as weak tea. (See also Nate Silver.)

And then there is the question on traditional values. What are “traditional values”? How do people interpret that term? I don’t know. Gallup doesn’t say. Democrats and particularly independents are the ones shifting, not Republicans. Maybe it doesn’t reflect a conservative shift at all. Maybe it just reflects the fact that Democrats and some independents are more willing to say that the government should promote traditional values when a party they favor is in power. This is also evident in the small, though not statistically significant, shift in the percentage of conservatives who said “not favor any set of values.”

I don’t know if that interpretation is true. The problem is that the Gallup question’s ambiguity admits of too many interpretations. No single survey question, or any combination of questions, is going to provide a bulletproof depiction of public opinion, but surely we can do better. Gallup is up to the task at other times — e.g., in this comparison of multiple surveys on health care, each of which uses somewhat different questions. They should do more of this, which is a much more satisfying meal than bowls of mush about “traditional values.”

Posted by John Sides at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Percent who have not heard of Glenn Beck: 42%

Percent who have heard nothing about the Baucus health care bill: 45%

Percent who have heard nothing about the ACORN prostitution scandal: 43%

Percent who have heard nothing about the 9/12 rally in Washington: 40%

(source; source)

Posted by John Sides at 03:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Seth Masket:

The conclusion, again, is that the question “Is opposition to Obama based on race?” does not have a simple answer. Racial resentment definitely exists in America today, but it’s more polarized along party lines than it has been in a long time. Many people who do not like blacks oppose Obama, but they would likely oppose him even if he were white since they’re Republicans.

Posted by John Sides at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)

The Atlantic asks:

After President Obama’s five Sunday-show appearances this weekend, and his appearance on Letterman last night, we ask: How much do media appearances actually influence opinion? Do enough people notice, and does the impact last?

The answers, on average: very little, no, and no.

Posted by John Sides at 09:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler write:

As evidence of the link between health care and racial attitudes, we analyzed survey data gathered in late 2008. The survey asked people whether they favored a government run health insurance plan, a system like we have now, or something in between. It also asked four questions about how people feel about blacks.

Taken together the four items form a measure of what scholars call racial resentment. We find an extraordinarily strong correlation between racial resentment of blacks and opposition to health care reform.

Among whites with above average racial resentment, only 19 percent favored fundamental health care reforms and 57 percent favored the present system. Among those who have below average racial resentment, more than twice as many (45 percent) favored government run health care and less than half as many (25 percent) favored the status quo.

No such relationship between racial attitudes and opinions on health care existed in the mid-1990s during the Clinton effort.

It would be silly to assert that all, or even most, opposition to President Obama, including his plans for health care reform, is motivated by the color of his skin. But our research suggests that a key to understanding people’s feelings about partisan politics runs far deeper than the mere pros and cons of actual policy proposals. It is also about a collision of worldviews.

On the “collision of worldviews,” see their new book, Authoritarianism & Polarization in American Politics.

Posted by John Sides at 02:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Andy’s post — and the ensuing discussion — about racial prejudice got me to thinking about the broader nature of prejudice, racial and otherwise. And then, coincidentally, Jim Gimpel sends along a link to this study by Penny Edgell, Joseph Gerteis, and Douglass Hartmann:

Despite the declining salience of divisions among religious groups, the boundary between believers and nonbelievers in America remains strong. This article examines the limits of Americans’ acceptance of atheists. Using new national survey data, it shows atheists are less likely to be accepted, publicly and privately, than any others from a long list of ethnic, religious, and other minority groups. This distrust of atheists is driven by religious predictors, social location, and broader value orientations. It is rooted in moral and symbolic, rather than ethnic or material, grounds. We demonstrate that increasing acceptance of religious diversity does not extend to the nonreligious, and present a theoretical framework for understanding the role of religious belief in providing a moral basis for cultural membership and solidarity in an otherwise highly diverse society.

I suppose it’s possible to envision a group less tolerated than atheists, but surely atheists are at the top — or, perhaps, bottom. (See also these earlier posts.)

Could this change? Perhaps James Wood, in reviewing Terry Eagleton’s new book, has his finger on a species of atheism that might render it less anathema:

What is needed is neither the overweening rationalism of a Dawkins nor the rarefied religious belief of an Eagleton but a theologically engaged atheism that resembles disappointed belief.

Posted by John Sides at 11:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

I found the following somewhat stunning graph on Steve Benen’s Political Animal blog at the Washington Monthly; Bremen created the graph from data from the Daily Kos Weekly State of the Nation Poll, which can be found here.

I have no a priori knowledge about the reliability of the Daily Kos poll, but even if it had a generally left or right wing bias, that still shouldn’t affect the variation across regions. While I am not surprised that the Republican party is more popular in the South than other regions, the starkness of this distinction is beyond what I had expected. Moreover, while I would have expected the Republican party to be unpopular in the Northeast, I did not expect such similar numbers from the West and Midwest. Quite seriously, if I saw this type of regional distribution of support for a political party in a country like Slovakia, I would assume the party represented an ethnic minority. For comparison’s sake, here is the vote share received by the Hungarian Coalition - an ethnic minority party - by region in the 2006 Slovak parliamentary election:

Click here for a larger (and more legible) version of the table.

With all this mind, my question for those who study public opinion and partisanship in the United States is whether this distribution of regional support is unique in the modern postwar era. Has there ever been a period of time when one of the parties was this disliked across so much of the country while enjoying such proportionately stronger support in one region of the country? Either way, what should we infer about the future of the Republican party from this distribution of support?

One other interesting point from the Daily Kos data: despite all the noise about Obama’s falling approval ratings, outside of the South of 82% of those in the Northeast have a favorable view of Obama (vs. 10% having an unfavorable view), 62% have a favorable view (vs. 31%) in the Midwest, and 59% (vs. 34%) have a favorable view in the West. It is only in the South, where 67% (!) have an unfavorable view of the president (vs. 27% holding a favorable view) that Obama appears to have a serious problem. Again, the regional distribution is quite dramatic.

Taken together, I wonder if we’ve hit the point where the mainstream media ought to be reporting support for the president, congress, political parties, etc. not in terms of the country as a whole, but rather by providing two numbers: support in the South and support in the rest of the country excluding the South?

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 10:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (17)

Lynn Vavreck writes:

I just heard the Carter interview about Obama and racism. Simon Jackman and I have a bit of evidence on this from the Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project. These are data from white, registered voters nationwide about stereotypes of different groups. You can see, roughly a third of the people think blacks are inferior to whites on lazy v. hardworking and similarly on intelligent/unintelligent:

[click for larger version of the table]

This, of course, doesn’t answer the question about whether Carter is right — but, it does provide some systematic evidence for his claim that many Americans don’t think African Americans are “qualified” (his words) to lead this country.

Some people would take these data as evidence of racism, but I have a more positive spin. The table gives the average rating for whites, and for southern whites, and from these you can back out the implied rating for non-southern whites. And we’re lookin good. We’re as intelligent as Asians and almost as hardworking! In the words of a famous non-hardworking, non-southern white: Woo-hoo!

Of course I don’t buy this—no way are non-southern whites as hard-working and intelligent as Asian Americans—I mean, c’mon. But it’s good to know that white people, at least, still think this. Now I want to see Lynn and Simon break down their respondents by where they live. Do southern whites themselves think they are lazier and dumber than non-southern whites??

P.S. The question stem reads:

Now, some questions about different groups in our society. Rate each group on the following scale, where “1” means you think almost all of the people in that group are “lazy”; and “7” means that you think almost everyone in the group is “hardworking.”

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 04:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (12)

Two more perspectives on Obama’s speech are worth attention. One is Brendan Nyhan on why people don’t understand that speeches don’t affect poll numbers very much:

What’s so striking is that reporters and politicos alike still don’t understand this point. Why? One explanation is that people tend to conflate domestic policy with foreign policy, where the president has more freedom of action, the public has less information, and the opposition is often more deferential to the president (and is thus less likely to offset his message). In addition, some cases like the Reagan and Bush 43 tax cuts in which the president raised the salience of a relatively popular issue (but didn’t change public opinion) are often misinterpreted. Finally, there’s a tendency to explain away past failures via post hoc narratives of failed presidential leadership, bad communication strategy, etc. However, it’s not likely that any kind of leadership or PR tactic can overcome an offsetting opposition message and change public opinion on a controversial domestic policy issue under normal political circumstances.

And Mark Blumenthal provides an useful summary of the challenges in doing the “instant reaction” polls that are likely to be splashed all over the news tomorrow. His take-aways:

1) Instant response polls measure only speech-watchers.

2) The audience is usually skewed toward the President’s fans.

3) Instant impressions can be fleeting.

4) Some pollsters have reservations about instant reaction polls.

5) Focus groups have value, but they are not surveys, and should be treated with far more caution.

And, finally, he notes that speeches don’t tend to create lasting changes in attitudes; here’s a nice post by Charles Franklin on SOTU addresses.

Posted by John Sides at 04:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

If history is any guide, not much. Nevertheless, speculation abounds. Over at Political Wire, David Moore Johnson writes:

Remember, traditionally after a President addresses the nation on an issue we see between a 5% to 10% increase in support.

This is a fantastical statement, one which a reader (who I happen to know is a political scientist) quickly convinced Goddard to correct:

A Political Wire reader emails to say that a systematic study of whether presidential speeches have an impact on poll numbers is reported in the book, On Deaf Ears, and finds shows that in general, major presidential speeches do not lead to a significant shift even in short-term polls.

On Deaf Ears, by political scientist George Edwards (here), shows that big presidential speeches have almost no systematic impact on presidential approval. Edwards surveys public opinion before and after every televised presidential speech between 1981-2001 and concludes:

…statistically significant changes in approval rarely follow a televised presidential address. Typically, the president’s ratings hardly move at all. Most changes are well within the margin of error— and many of them show a loss of approval.

But couldn’t this speech be different? Nate Silver thinks so:

The truth is, in fact, that this is a speech the conservatives at the Weekly Standard and elsewhere out to be pretty nervous about. When Bill Clinton delivered his big speech to the Congress on health care 16 years ago, his approval rating shot up by 10 points almost instantenously (sic).

Edwards reports this same 10-point change after Clinton’s speech in September 1993.

But there’s one problem: both Silver and Edwards focus only on Gallup data, and other polls don’t show that same shift. (Silver doesn’t cite a source of data, but I gather it’s Gallup.) Here is a graph of all the presidential approval polls for Clinton in 1993-1994 (courtesy of Roper). I include a smoothed trend line, and highlight the pre- and post-speech Gallup polls in red to show how they are misleading.

The trendline shows no increase in Clinton’s approval immediately after the speech.

Silver argues against a Weekly Standard post by Mary Katherine Ham, who claims that the public has already made up its mind and a speech from Obama is not likely to help. Silver writes:

This argument has it pretty much backward. People like Mary Katherine Ham have heard Obama talk a lot about health care — but that’s because it’s Mary Katherine Ham’s job to pay attention to everything the White House does. It’s not the job of an ordinary voter in Ohio or Florida. And whether design or by poor execution, Obama hasn’t really had a moment that would resonate with those folks. Two thirds people like these are confused about what the Democrats’ health care package actually entails, and are presumably quite willing to get some clarity from Obama.

While the public may not know a lot about specific health care reform proposals, the people most likely to tune into the speech or coverage thereof probably have already made up their minds.

This speech could impact opinion if it drives the news cycle such that the tenor of media coverage shifts away from documenting the loud voices in opposition to portraying some sort of consensus view that reform is necessary, certain reforms favored by Obama or other Democrats will be effective, etc. Only then would a new set of messages filter to less attentive citizens, and that would take some time. In any case, such a consensus doesn’t appear to exist and I suspect that conflict will continue to prove more newsworthy.

So don’t expect the speech to affect the polls much at all. Health care reform is going to be won (or lost) in the backrooms of Capitol Hill, not on network television.

(Hat tip to Matt Grossmann for suggesting a post on this topic.)

UPDATE: See also Gary Langer on the short-lived effects of Clinton’s speech on actual opinion about health care reform. Here again, however, it would be interesting to see more than just ABC’s polls, especially since their “post-speech” data is based on a single poll conducted “the night of his address to the nation.”

Posted by John Sides at 03:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Recently I posted some graphs showing that liberal Democrats have a similar income profile to the general population, while conservative Republicans are more concentrated in the higher half of the income range.

Some people conjectured that the patterns might depend on whether people are thinking of liberalism/conservative as representing social or economic issues. So Daniel and I redid the calculations, looking separately at three different measures of survey respondents’ ideology as derived from the 2000 Annenberg survey:

Continue reading "Who are the liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans, part 2" »

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 05:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In a series of experiments, psychologists Gary Sherman and Gerald Clore tested to see whether people associate desirable or undesirable qualities — cleanliness or dirtiness, morality or immorality — with the colors black and white.

If you’re interested in the particulars of their study, check it out in the August issue of Psychological Science (gated) or in its pre-publication, working paper version. Here’s a very brief overview:

There exists a moral-purity metaphor that likens moral goodness to physical cleanliness. In three studies, we explored an unstudied, and under-appreciated, aspect of this metaphor – its grounding in the colors black and white. We documented …that people make immorality-blackness associations quickly and relatively automatically.

…Sin is not just dirty, it is black. And moral virtue is not just clean, but also white.

…These findings may have implications for understanding racial prejudice. …[T]he tendency to see the black-white spectrum in terms of purity and contamination extends to skin color. Given that both blackness and immorality are considered powerful contaminants to be avoided, and that the category labels “black” and “white” are often applied to race, dark skin might also be easily associated with immorality and impurity. This may explain, in part, why stereotypes of darker-skinned people often allude to immorality and poor hygiene, and why the typical criminal is seen as both dark-skinned and physically dirty.

Sherman and Clore aren’t attributing unfavorable racial stereotypes solely, or even primarily, to the tendency to associate goodness with the color white and badness with the color black. But it’s a connection worth bearing in mind as we ponder the roots of prejudice

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 06:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

My colleague Pat Egan has produced some very interesting new research on the effect of court decisions on public opinion towards gay marriage along with Nathaniel Persily for Polling Report.com. For the work, they put together a dataset of over 50,000+ respondents from surveys from a variety of polling organizations over the past 20 years. Pat sent along the following highlights from their findings:

Although the Lawrence v. Texas decision — and the controversy over marriage that followed it — depressed public approval of same-sex marriage, the rate of increase in approval is virtually the same now is it was before the ruling. Support for same-sex marriage (we estimate it at about 42%) is now at its highest level ever. (Figure 1)

State court decisions in favor of same-sex marriage do not appear to cause any long-term backlash in state-level opinion:

• All states, regardless of whether they’ve had high court rulings in favor or against gay couples, have shown significant increases in support for gay marriage over the past 20 years.

• States in which same-sex marriage cases have reached high courts (regardless of the outcome of the ruling) have consistently been more supportive of same-sex marriage than those with no rulings. (Figure 2)

• If anything, the three states in which pro-gay court decisions have been in place the longest - MA, and NJ, VT - have exhibited steeper rises in approval of same-sex marriage than the national trend. (Figure 3)

For another good example of political scientists’ analysis of state-level public opinion data on gay rights, Egan and Persily suggest that MC readers see Jeff Lax and Justin Phillips’ forthcoming APSR article (ungated).

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 08:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sorry, this one isn’t baseball-related at all . . . I just wanted to point you to some cool graphs that Daniel Lee and I made from the Annenberg poll data:

See here for discussion and more data.

P.S. The statistical analysis is brute force. Sample size is big enough we can just plot the raw data, our only concession to sample size being to pool all the age categories over 90.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 10:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

If journalism is the first draft of history, and blogging is the first draft of journalism, then this is way way way out of date. . . . Nonetheless, I wanted to share a couple thoughts I hadn’t heard elsewhere regarding the Henry Louis Gates arrest of a few weeks ago.

My impression is that the story was discussed mostly in terms of race (white police officer arrests black citizen) or class (middle-class police officer dissed by Harvard professor). I think there are two other factors that didn’t get so much mention.

1. The cop factor. Nobody likes being hassled by the cops. We all value police protection, but nobody wants the cops around when we’re making an illegal U-turn or scoring some weed or downloading music or [name your own crime here].

2. The left/right factor. Gates is a prominent liberal, so we heard a lot from liberals about how he was being hassled for no good reason and a lot from conservatives about how he didn’t behave well with Sgt. Crowley. I think if a prominent conservative had been arrested in similar circumstances, we would’ve heard from liberals about how rich people think they’re above the law and a lot from conservatives about how a man’s home is his castle and how this all represented a dangerous expansion of government power in the Obama era.

This is not any attempt by me to resolve Gates-gate but just to suggest that people’s reactions weren’t all about race or class.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 09:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Scholars of the Supreme Court confront a puzzle: why do conservatives in the public like Supreme Court less than liberals, even though the contemporary Court leans conservative? One answer is that attitudes toward the Court are “lagging” behind these changes in the Court’s composition. In short, people still have the well-known decisions of the more liberal Warren Court in mind when they think about the contemporary Court. See this piece by Marc Hetherington and Joseph Smith.

My colleague Brandon Bartels and his co-author Christopher Johnson have a different answer. They find that although the Court’s decisions under, say, Rehnquist, were more conservative than its decisions under Warren, that’s not reflected in the cases that get lots of media coverage.

A simple way to show this is to ask whether a particular Court decision was on the front page of the New York Times the day after the decision was announced. Call these “salient” cases, knowing that they were likely covered in many other media as well.

When Bartels and Johnson looked at civil liberties and civil rights cases and then broke them down by salience, they found that the “salient” cases were more liberal than the “non-salient cases.” Here is the graph:

This helps explain why conservatives like the Court less than liberals, but in a different way. It’s not that the public hasn’t “caught up” with the Court, it’s that they are hearing and learning more about the Court’s liberal decisions than its conservative decisions.

Posted by John Sides at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

That is the title of a great 1985 article by Herbert McClosky and Dennis Chong (JSTOR). Two things brought it to mind. One is the comments thread on my post on birthers vs. truthers, in which a few people take issue with this comparison because the two things are different and my conspiracy theory is better than your conspiracy theory and so on. Whatever. I’m not interested in this argument. The second thing is this comment by Ezra Klein about the town hall protests:

What we’re seeing here is not merely distrust in the House health-care reform bill. It’s distrust in the political system.

I think Klein is right about these protesters, but it’s also relevant to point out that a similar sentiment may exist among people on the opposite end of the ideological spectrum. Noting the similarities between “radicals” on either side also draws our attention to how much left- or right-wing conspiracy theories are really motivated by the same underlying beliefs and cognitive styles.

Now to McClosky and Chong.

Continue reading ""Similarities between Left Wing and Right Wing Radicals"" »

Posted by John Sides at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

Alan Reifman writes:

I [Reifman] have created a new website to compile poll results on specific provisions of the health care reform debate. Today, I review the polling on universality, personal/individual mandates, and employer mandates. I discuss in the Welcome Statement on my page how I aim to go beyond what is currently available on sites such as Pollster.com and Polling Report.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 08:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Brendan Nyhan has a great post comparing the prevalence of conspiracy theories about Obama’s birthplace and 9/11. Here is the money graph, with responses broken down by party:

He concludes:

…both party’s bases are disturbingly receptive to wild conspiracy theories.

Posted by John Sides at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (14)

Paul Krugman asks about locating Michelle Malkin on the ideological spectrum:

When I saw that Michelle Malkin will be on the Stephanopoulos panel this week, my first thought was that nobody as far to the left as she is to the right would ever appear on such a panel. But then I started to wonder (a) what I mean by that (b) if it’s true. I don’t want to be like Bill O’Reilly, who considers anyone he disagrees with a “far-left” activist. So we need some objective metric. The most natural would seem to be voter opinion: what fraction of the American public is to Malkin’s right? … What I’d like to have is a Guttman scale of positions on political matters … we might find that only 19 percent of Americans are to the right of Michelle Malkin, while 23 percent are to the left of Michael Moore. … if there are any such data available, I don’t know about them.

This is a difficult question, but here are three possible strategies for answering it:

Continue reading "How Conservative is Michelle Malkin?" »

Posted by John Sides at 09:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In one of my posts on the value of polls, I quoted from Howard Schuman’s 2008 book, Method and Meaning in Polls and Surveys (Amazon). Having now finished the book, I highly recommend it.

Continue reading "Book Review: Method and Meaning in Polls and Surveys" »

Posted by John Sides at 04:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Once again, Conor Clarke has kindly responded to my defense of polls (here and here), as well as those of Mark Blumenthal and Ed Kilgore. At the risk of belaboring this subject, I’ll offer a few more comments on some of Clarke’s points.

Continue reading "Why Should We Have Polls? Part II" »

Posted by John Sides at 09:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

(Apropos of Josh’s post…)

LBJ approval in July 1965, on the eve of Medicare: 66%

Obama approval now: 57%.

Posted by John Sides at 02:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The news is apparently a flutter this morning over declining approval numbers for the President Obama, the Democratic Party, and many of Obama’s policy reforms, including health care and the stimulus package (see for example here, here, and here). As a political scientist, it does not seem particularly surprising to me that Obama’s support would go down (especially among Republicans and independents) as unemployment continues to climb and whatever “honeymoon effect” he had with the American public continues to wear off. (Although it is interesting to note that the actual Gallup Report shows a pretty flat looking trend line - if gradually declining a bit - over the last couple months for Obama himself).

In line with the goals of the Monkey Cage, this seems like a perfect time for political scientists to weigh in on a contemporary political story and put some context on it. So I was wondering whether there was any definitive article/paper out there on “honeymoon effects” in the American politics literature and/or if anyone had current research on the topic. Is there a “normal” honeymoon drop off in public opinion? How might we know if a president was going through a “regular” drop off in public support, of if there was somehow a more serious erosion in popular support for a particular president? And what about the link between presidential approval and presidential policies? Do these two usually track closely in the early days of an administration, or is there often less of a honeymoon effect on policies than on the president?

As an aside, US Today actually has a pretty cool interactive graph looking a the approval ratings of all the post-WWII presidents that allows the user to select any combination of presidents and compare their approval ratings over the course of their terms in office.

****

UPDATED: For more on honeymoons, John had a post earlier this year that reviews some research on honeymoons in terms of legislative output (e.g., is there more of it? do presidents get more of what they want?).

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 08:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Although it is widely acknowledged that an understanding of mass attitudes about trade is crucial to the political economy of foreign commerce, only a handful of studies have addressed this topic. These studies have focused largely on testing two models, both of which emphasize that trade preferences are shaped by how trade affects an individual’s income. The factor endowments or Heckscher- Ohlin model posits that these preferences are affected primarily by a person’s skills. The specific factors or Ricardo-Viner model posits that trade preferences depend on the industry in which a person works. We find little support for either of these models using two representative national surveys of Americans. The only potential exception involves the effects of education. Initial tests indicate that educational attainment and support for open trade are directly related, which is often interpreted as support for the Heckscher-Ohlin model. However, further analysis reveals that education’s effects are less representative of skill than of individuals’ anxieties about involvement with out-groups in their own country and beyond. Furthermore, we find strong evidence that trade attitudes are guided less by material self-interest than by perceptions of how the U.S. economy as a whole is affected by trade.

That is from a new paper by Edward Mansfield and Diana Mutz (gated; ungated). I think these findings are worth attention, if only because the notion that interests drive attitudes about trade is so prevalent.

To restate the key findings: income doesn’t affect attitudes. Education appears to matter — people with higher levels of formal education are more likely to prefer free trade — but the effect is spurious. It disappears once Mansfield and Mutz control for isolationism and ethnocentrism. They argue:

Isolationism, a negative attitude toward out-groups, and antipathy toward open trade all reflect a sense of insularity and separatism. In short, trade preferences are driven less by economic considerations and more by an individual’s psychological worldview.

And, apropos of Bryan Kaplan’s book, comes this other interesting finding.

Nonetheless, economic knowledge has a small impact on trade attitudes: taking an economics class or understanding that economists argue that free trade is beneficial increases the predicted value of the KN dependent variable [support for free trade] by only 2 to 3 percent, holding constant the remaining variables in the model.

In short, it’s not the labor market position or skills of educated people that matter. Neither is it what they know about trade. It’s what they believe. Values trump interests. (Yet again.)

Posted by John Sides at 10:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Conor Clarke has kindly replied to my earlier rebuttal to his proposal to “get rid of polls”:

A few days ago John Sides published a reasonably snarky blog post about a piece I wrote last week: The case against polling. The basic argument of my piece was that polls are annoying because (1) we should want our democratic institutions to operate according to pre-established mechanisms, not random quasi-referenda; (2) Lots of polls are wrong or misleading (duh); and (3) Present opinion polls can affect future opinion polls, due to information cascades. My feeling is that one’s opinions should change after an exchange of reasons, not after he or she acquires the knowledge that one opinion is more popular than another.

Anyway, John gave me an exchange of reasons. Since he studies this stuff for a living, he’s certainly got the moral authority to get snarky. And I think he makes some good points, some of which I find convincing and some of which I need to think about a bit more. But what I think is missing from John’s post is the affirmative case for polls. (And I mean political polls — how many people support Obama’s health care plan and so forth — not social science research polls.) Weakening the case against polling strikes me as a necessary but insufficient defense. What good reason do we have (besides morbid curiosity) to consume polls we see in the morning’s paper? What value is there in letting the public know what the public already thinks?

I thought my post was not really that snarky. Okay, maybe the opening paragraph. Nevertheless, Clarke poses a good question and I want to respond.

Continue reading "Why Should We Have Polls?" »

Posted by John Sides at 09:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

In graduate school, one of my advisors gave a presentation that included analysis of a survey. In the question-and-answer, a person asked something along the lines of “But are surveys really well-suited for getting at this question and aren’t there problems with surveys anyway etc.” My advisor paused and sighed and then said, “Let’s see, which answer to I want to give to this question today?”

That’s how I feel reading Conor Clarke’s proposal to “get rid of polls” in The Atlantic Monthly. I want to believe his proposal has a certain Swiftian spirit, but he really seems sincere.

Continue reading "Should We Get Rid of Polls?" »

Posted by John Sides at 09:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Pew survey from June 10-14, 2009:

45% - favorable view of Palin
44% - unfavorable view
12% - no opinion

PPP survey from July 6-7, 2009:

46% - favorable view
45% - unfavorable view
9% - no opinion (not reported, but presumed)

In addition, there doesn’t appear to be much change in perceptions of whether Palin is qualified to be president. Click the PPP link and compare to this figure by Charles Franklin. All this confirms Mark Blumenthal’s assessment, which predates the PPP results:

…on first blush, it looks as those Palin’s resignation announcement made less of an impression on Americans than the punditry of the last few days might lead you to believe.

By now, Sarah Palin is a well-known national figure, and people’s opinions of her have become mostly crystallized. It would be surprising for opinions to change dramatically, barring some truly incendiary scandal or her sudden ascension to heaven. Sarah Palin’s resignation, however unexpected, is neither.

Posted by John Sides at 11:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

In comments to my earlier post, Monkey Cage reader Jim notes that his analysis of the 2008 American National Election Studies finds a significant relationship between education and feelings toward Palin, controlling for party identification. He sent me his models via email, and they look interesting. Especially noteworthy is that the model of attitudes toward Palin looks much different than a similar model of attitudes toward McCain. I wanted to dive in, especially because Jim’s analysis is in tension with the Pew data I analyzed in the post and seems to support Ross Douthat’s contention that Palin’s appeal is class-based. Here is some more analysis.

Like Jim, I measure attitudes toward Palin and McCain with the “feeling thermometer,” a 0-100 scale where 0 signifies very negative attitudes, 100 signifies very positive attitudes, and 50 signifies a neutral attitude. Below are graphs that plot the mean thermometer rating for each candidate across educational categories, with separate lines for each partisan group. (Independents who lean toward a party are counted as partisans. For this group, I combine those with college and graduate degrees because there are few respondents in the latter category.) By plotting each partisan group separately, I am allowing for the effects of education and party identification to “interact.”

Above is the graph for Palin. Obviously, Republicans have much more positive feelings toward her than do Democrats. But the key question is, does education matter?

The short answer is: yes, but only for Democrats, and then only somewhat. Republicans of every educational background tend to like her. Independents are pretty neutral, no matter their level of education. Simply put, among this large fraction of the population, Palin’s appeal (or lack thereof) has nothing to do with class, at least as captured by formal education.

Democrats with no college degree tend to be unfavorable, with averages in the 40s. Democrats with at least a college degree are even less favorable, with averages in the high 20s. Overall, there is about 12-point gap between Democrats with and without a college degree. This direction of this relationship confirms Douthat’s account, but the magnitude of the relationship is modest at best. And this relationship shouldn’t conceal this basic fact: Democrats tend not to like Palin, no matter what. This is confirmed in the more recent Pew data, which found that only 24% of Democrats had a favorable opinion of her.

But, as Jim’s analysis also found, education has even less to do with evaluations of McCain. The graph above shows this pretty clearly.

So Palin’s “appeal” is different than McCain’s. But is it linked to class? I remain unconvinced.

(For more, see Mark Blumenthal and Jennifer Agiesta.)

Posted by John Sides at 09:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Debates continue in the political science journals, and even here at “The Monkey Cage,” about the role of information in political decisionmaking, from the political elite level down through the masses, and especially about the biases that can intrude between new information and attitude development and behavior change.

That’s all well and good, but every now and then we need to take a step back a step and recognize that in many instances the problem isn’t bias — it’s just good, plain old-fashioned ignorance: the difference between an open (unbiased) mind and an empty head.

This thought recurred to me today when a friend sent me this “greatest hits” clip from a segment Jay Leno apparently used to do on the “Tonight Show.” Never having watched that program, even once, this came as news to me. It’s a grand and depressing clip, highly suitable for classroom use. Enjoy. Or something.

[Hat tip to Marc Stern]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 07:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From a Gallup poll conducted Dec. 31, 1965 - January 5, 1966 (N=1,545):

What kind of rating would you give him (Robert McNamara) for the job he had done in running the Defense Department - A, B, C, D, or flunk?

18% A
14 B
11 C
3 D
6 Flunk
6 Don’t know
42 Don’t know who McNamara is

From a Harris Survey conducted Nov. 20-27, 1967 (N=1,600):

How would you rate the job Secretary of Defense (Robert) McNamara has done on the Vietnam War — excellent, pretty good, only fair or poor?

42% Excellent/Pretty good
45 Only fair/Poor
13 Don’t know

There’s not much else in the Roper Center’s iPoll database, and nothing that allows one to track opinion over time.

UPDATE: Here’s Harris poll from Sept. 8-11, 20082006, that asked a similar question about Rumsfeld, albeit without a prompt about the Iraq War:

How would you rate the job…Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is doing—excellent, pretty good, only fair, or poor?

10% Excellent
28 Pretty good
25 Only fair
32 Poor
4 No sure

Posted by John Sides at 02:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

David Frum writes:

Last week’s grim unemployment news again confirms the current downtown’s miserable status as the worst recession since the Great Depression itself.

This “great recession” has harshly reshaped the lives of tens of millions of Americans and hundreds of million of people around the world. And yet in one way, it has had surprisingly little impact: We have not seen the kind of upsurge of anti-system political radicalism that might have been expected to follow so painful a shock. . . . The public by and large has been trusting and accepting of established institutions and traditional leaders.

Why?

Frum’s answer:

Barack Obama. Elected just weeks after the crash, he switched the public mood. Discredited leaders were replaced, a flurry of new initiatives launched - and poll measures of public optimism surged. With so many Americans expecting a rapid turn-around and restoration of fortunes, why waste energy being angry?

He illustrates with this time series:

and then discusses implications for the future.

I have a couple thoughts of my own.

1. The 1982 recession was pretty bad, and at the time, President Reagan was pretty unpopular, and my impression at the time was that he was being slammed in the evening news five days a week. In addition, the Democrats’ economic policy was viewed as discredited: again, in my recollection, the Democratic plan seemed to revolve around Tip O’Neill making sure that Social Security wouldn’t be cut. But I don’t recall a lot of anti-system political radicalism then. Maybe part of the problem was that there were no obvious bad guys. I mean, what were people supposed to do? Egg Paul Volcker’s house?

2. The path from anti-system activism to results isn’t so clear. Using campaign funds to target members of Congress in marginal seats—that might work—but do street demonstrations (from the Million Mom March to Tea Parties) have much effect?

3. I do wonder why left-wing congressional Democrats aren’t more actively pursuing populist measures. If anything, I’d think this would benefit Obama. Then he’d be able to more effectively position himself as the voice of moderation, no?

There’s a lot to think about here, and this isn’t a topic I know much about. Maybe John, Lee, and the others know more about research in this area.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 10:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In a recent Pew poll, 44 percent of Americans regarded Palin unfavorably. But slightly more had a favorable impression of her. That number included 46 percent of independents, and 48 percent of Americans without a college education.

That last statistic is a crucial one. Palin’s popularity has as much to do with class as it does with ideology. In this sense, she really is the perfect foil for Barack Obama. Our president represents the meritocratic ideal — that anyone, from any background, can grow up to attend Columbia and Harvard Law School and become a great American success story. But Sarah Palin represents the democratic ideal — that anyone can grow up to be a great success story without graduating from Columbia and Harvard.

So says Ross Douthat in the NY Times. I have no idea whether Sarah Palin is a “great success story.” I guess getting elected governor and being nominated for the vice-presidency counts as success, although some might say it’s how you do those jobs rather than whether you simply hold them. And I’ll leave it to political theorists to parse Douthat’s contrast between meritocracy and democracy, and whether or how Obama and Palin somehow embody those ideals. (A lot of Obama’s story seems to me a “democratic” story, but that’s a separate post.)

Instead, I’ll just do the boring old social science thing and note how badly Douthat misuses polling data. Douthat wants to claim that Palin’s appeal is class-based. To back that up, he cites how favorably she is viewed among Americans without a college education. His view of that figure (48%) is a little opaque. I read him as saying something like, “It’s noteworthy that slightly more Americans have a positive impression of Palin than have a negative impression, and those positive impressions seem even more prevalent among Americans without a college degree.”

So here’s my point. If you want to make the argument that Palin’s support is based on class, and that “lower class” people have a more favorable view of her, it really really helps if people of different class backgrounds have different opinions of her.

And they really really don’t. Douthat cites these Pew data, but fails to tell you how people with some college or a college degree view her. It turns out that there are extraordinarily small differences based on education background. Here’s a graph:

That 7-point gap between the views of the college educated and the high school-educated implies a tiny class cleavage at best. Douthat’s rendering of Palin is not reflected in how the public sees her.

Posted by John Sides at 09:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Tom Schaller says no:

Is Sanford a cad for bolting his family on Father’s Day weekend? Of course, but that is a private, moral failing, rather than a failure of public duty. . . .

I [Schaller] oppose most of what Mr. Sanford stands for politically. His showy rejection of federal stimulus money targeted for his state was a crass publicity stunt designed to garner national attention for Mr. Sanford at the expense of his constituents, many of whom are struggling economically. . . . Should Mr. Sanford’s ambitions founder on the shoals of a personal scandal, however, yet another opportunity will be lost to establish the long-overdue separation between private comportment and public service. So here’s hoping he doesn’t resign or, if he does, it is a matter of personal choice rather than him bowing to political pressure.

I see where Schaller is coming from. Lots of people have complicated personal lives, and it’s not clear at all that these difficulties have much if anything to do with governing. But I don’t know if I agree with him on the wall of separation between private comportment and public service.

Consider the Sanford case. Schaller’s a Democrat, so he can evaluate Sanford on his policies. But if Schaller were a Republican, he might very well want Sanford out of there because he tarnishes the brand, makes the party a laughingstock, etc. Also makes it harder for Sanford to convincingly follow a “family values” agenda which Schaller (if he were a Republican) might want. These are legitimate concerns for a Republican to have. Even if you don’t think Sanford’s personal indiscretions are important, you might want him gone and replaced by a more effective Republican. Just as, from the other direction, a Democrat would’ve preferred a zipped-fly version of Bill Clinton.

Continue reading "Should Mark Sanford resign?" »

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 11:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Drawing from more than 25 hours of oral history interviews, Dr. Glenda Balas of the University of New Mexico has written and produced “The Long Road to Decatur: A History of Personal Influence.”

The video documentary chronicles the development of the classic (and controversial) book Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications, first published in 1955.

The webpage of the documentary, with a video file to download, is here. I haven’t yet watched the video. The book is still in print. Here is a critique of how the book’s findings have been interpreted.

[Hat tip to Doug Hess.]

UPDATE: Here is a summary of a 2008 lecture by Katz. Thanks to Francisco Pérez.

Posted by John Sides at 08:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The once widespread view that homosexuality is caused by heredity, or by some derangement of hormones, has been generally discarded. The consensus is that it is caused psychically, through a disabling fear of the opposite sex. The origins of this fear lie in the homosexual’s parents. The mother—either domineering and contemptuous of the father, or feeling rejected by him—makes her son a substitute for her husband, with a close-binding, overprotective relationship. Thus, she unconsciously demasculinizes him. If at the same time the father is weakly submissive to his wife or aloof and unconsciously competitive with his son, he reinforces the process. To attain normal sexual development, according to current psychoanalytic theory, a boy should be able to identify with his father’s masculine role.

Fear of the opposite sex is also believed to be the cause of Lesbianism, which is far less visible but, according to many experts, no less widespread than male homosexuality—and far more readily tolerated. Both forms are essentially a case of arrested development, a failure of learning, a refusal to accept the full responsibilities of life.

From a 1966 article in Time. I’ll pair this with a graph from the General Social Survey. The question wording is “What about sexual relations between two adults of the same sex—do you think it is always wrong, almost always wrong, wrong only sometimes, or not wrong at all?”

Posted by John Sides at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)

Charles Blow revisits familiar findings: “red” states have higher divorce rates as well as higher rates of teen pregnancy and higher rates of on-line pornography consumption. He writes:

While conservatives fight to “defend” marriage from gays, they can’t keep theirs together. According to the Census Bureau’s Statistical Abstract, states that went Republican in November accounted for eight of the 10 states with the highest divorce rates in 2006.

Welcome to another episode of “The Ecological Fallacy”! Once again: you cannot infer the behavior of individuals — Democrats and Republicans — from data at an aggregate level, such as states.

What happens when we look at individual-level data? Blow’s story falls apart. Using the General Social Survey, I first created a relevant measure of marital status: whether the respondent was divorced or separated at the time of the interview, or had ever been divorced or separated. So you are coded 1 in those cases, and 0 otherwise (i.e., if you had never been married or if you were married or widowed but never divorced or separated). The GSS included marital status in 27 surveys between 1972-2008. These surveys contain about 50,000 respondents.

I also created a measure of whether the respondent admitted to having an affair (leaving aside the issue of how many survey respondents answer this question honestly). For this measure you are coded 1 if you admitted to having an extramarital affair and 0 if you had not. I excluded respondents who had never been married. So this measure includes only those who are married or were married at some point. The GSS included the affair question (charmingly labeled “evstray” in the dataset) in 10 surveys between 1991-2008. These surveys contain about 16,000 respondents.

What do we find? Simple descriptive statistics suggest only small differences between Democrats, Republicans, and independents (here, independents who “lean” toward a party are counted as partisans):

About 29% of Democrats, 30% of independents, and 26% of Republicans are or have been divorced or separated.

About 19% of Democrats, 19% of independents, and 15% of Republicans admit to having an extramarital affair.

If anything, Republicans are slightly less likely than both Democrats and independents to get divorced or mess around. This is the opposite of what Blow suggests — which, yet again, reveals the problems of using aggregate data to make individual-level inferences.

To see if additional factors could explain even these small differences among groups of partisans, I then estimated two logit models. Here, the probability of being divorced or having had an affair is a function of a binary measure of partisanship (coded 1 if Republican and 0 otherwise, since there appears to be little difference between Democrats and independents), as well as controls for these factors: age, sex, race, educational attainment, and year of survey.

There are statistically significant, but small, differences between Republicans and Democrats/independents: other things equal, Republicans are 2 percentage points less likely to be or have been divorced. They are 4 points less likely to admit to an extramarital affair. To put that latter effect in some context, men are about 9 points more likely than women to admit to an extramarital affair.

These effects are slightly larger if we focus only on the 2008 data: Republicans are 4 points less likely than Democrats or independents to be or have been divorced, and 5 points less likely to admit to an extramarital affair.

This is a very simple analysis. Perhaps there are other factors one should control for, and perhaps there are interactions between party identification and the partisanship of states — a la Andy et al.’s research.

But I think the basic finding is likely robust: partisanship has a very weak relationship with either divorce or infidelity, and the relationships that do exist suggest that Republicans are less, not more, likely to get divorced or be unfaithful. Those, like Blow, who want to decry Republican “hypocrisy” on issues of family and sexuality may want to focus their ire on Sanford, Ensign, et al., and not on Republicans in the mass public.

Posted by John Sides at 05:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Millions of young Americans pay little attention to politics. They don’t follow the news, they lack even the most basic knowledge about political institutions, they don’t vote, and they don’t care. Identifying these behaviors as problems for the future of American democracy and recognizing that many of them are products of early-life socialization processes, numerous organizations are now pushing “civic education” efforts of various sorts, many of them targeted at elementary, middle school, high school, and college students.

In a new study, Timothy Vercellotti and Elizabeth Matto probe the impact of political participation in the school and at home on knowledge about politics and the sense of political efficacy. The design of the study is unusual – more innovative and ambitious than appears to be the norm in this research area. The participants were 361 high school students from four high schools who were assigned to either a treatment group that read newsmagazine articles weekly for eight weeks and discussed them in class, a treatment group that read the same articles and discussed them in class and with their parents, and a no-treatment control group. Each group was surveyed three times – first at the very start of the study, again after the eight-week treatment period, and once more six weeks later.

Political knowledge, as gauged by familiarity with various public figures, increased in all three groups, presumably because the study was conducted during the presidential caucus and primary period. Even so, the greatest increase occurred for the second treatment group – the one that discussed the articles both in class and at home. And knowledge remained at its second survey level six weeks later.

Internal efficacy, as measured by the National Election Study items that will be familiar to many “Monkey Cage” readers. Once again, the largest effects were for the second treatment group.

I have some methodological qualms. For one thing, intact classes, not individual students, were randomly assigned to the treatment groups, a feature that introduces uncertainty about what the treatment really is (the treatment itself, or something about the class, e.g., the quality of the instructor). Moreover, as Vercellotti and Matto recognize, using the same knowledge items in all three surveys could have produced a wave-to-wave learning effect. The timing of the survey, coming as it did in the middle of a high-visibility campaign, is also unfortunate. And I wish the design could have been expanded to include more groups: another control group that was surveyed only during the third wave; yet another control group that received a placebo of some sort like reading stories from, say, Sports Illustrated; and a third treatment group that discussed the articles at home but not at school.

Notwithstanding these qualms, there’s a lot to like about this study. Its subject matter is important; its application of a large-scale field experiment to address these issues is a definite step forward; and its findings, while hardly the last word on the subject, strike me as warranting greater confidence than those reported in many previous political socialization studies by political scientists and others.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

About a month ago, I posted a query on the Monkey Cage about whether we had systematic evidence that Supreme Court nomination battles affected the public opinion of presidents and parties. William Wilkerson sent in this response to the post:

One of the commenters noted that they figured that nominations were an elite game. This made sense at the time. A small piece of evidence in support is the NYTimes poll out today which showed that 58% had no opinion or were undecided on her nomination and 56% had no opinion on what the Senate should do. (Those that did have an opinion were 3.5 to 1 in favor of her.) An idea for a post: is this notably high undecided segment typical of supreme court nominations? Is there another area of political life where so much coverage produces this level of undecideds?

I asked both Adam Berinsky and Pat Egan this question. Adam responded that you can get similar responses when asking people about particular programs and giving them a don’t know options, and also speculated that the respondents in the NY Times poll probably didn’t push people to give an answer (e.g., accepted their initial don’t know response). Pat didn’t recall any examples of such high non-response rates on big public opinion questions, but also suggested paying attention to exactly how the questions were phrased. So I’m throwing the question out to the readers of the Monkey Cage: any other examples of such high non-response rates in US public opinion on issues on which the media is intensely focused? How about in other countries?

I was moved to post this today in particular while watching Gov. Sanford explain his recent decision to hike the Appalachian Trail, and was wondering whether this would lead to big shifts in popular support for the Governor. A quick look on Google Scholar didn’t seem to reveal much systematic political science research on the effect of extra-marital affairs on public support for politicians beyond some papers on the Lewinsky saga. Anyone out there working on this topic?

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 04:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Gallup has released data showing that partisan evaluations of the Supreme Court “flip flop” after a presidential election. Essentially, partisans like the Court better when their president is in control. Now, in 2000-2001, one might attribute these trends to the Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore. But the same is true in 2008-2009, and no such event has happened. I don’t think that the Sotomayor nomination matters much.

This is reminiscent of how Democrats and Republicans changed their evaluations of Bernanke after the November election.

Posted by John Sides at 02:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In his NY Times column today, Paul Krugman writes:

America’s political scene has changed immensely since the last time a Democratic president tried to reform health care. So has the health care picture: with costs soaring and insurance dwindling, nobody can now say with a straight face that the U.S. health care system is O.K. And if surveys like the New York Times/CBS News poll released last weekend are any indication, voters are ready for major change.

The poll to which he refers reports that, among other statistics, 72 percent of Americans would support a publicly run health plan that would compete with private insurers, as opposed to only 20 percent who would oppose such a plan.

Nolan McCarty has a very thought provoking response on his blog, which I encourage people to read in its entirety. The gist of his argument, however, is that as eye-catching as these numbers might be, they really aren’t any different than they were in 1994, the last time health care reform was proposed. His bottom line:

There are many reasons why health care reform may be more successful now that it was sixteen years ago. But it does not appear that a sea change in public opinion is one of them.

I think Nolan’s final point is well stated, but I wouldn’t underestimate the importance of Obama having a reservoir of public support behind him. As Krugman points out, the number of Senators that Obama is going to have to sway to bring about health care reform that includes a public option is probably not that large, and ultimately the bully pulpit is going to be a large part of his arsenal for doing so. As veterans of attempts to reform Social Security under the last administration would probably report, attempting to get law makers to change their minds on reform of this magnitude without a strong groundswell of public support is probably a much, much more difficult task.

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 02:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here’s a familiar research scenario: A research team conducts an experiment designed to assess, say, the effects of viewing a certain type of TV program. They round up some participants (maybe college students, maybe not), assign them to treatment and control groups, ask them some questions, expose them to some stimulus materials, ask them some more questions, and bid them goodbye.

Does any of this matter? Well, it could help the researchers get tenure, but in the sense of contributing much to our ability to answer the research question, what’s been learned? In a typical study, the researchers will have designed a very strong set of stimulus materials – strong in the sense of exposing the participants to clear-cut experimental manipulations – and will have assessed the implications of these manipulations immediately after exposing the participants to them. In the real world, though, many (most?) political stimuli that people react to are likely to be a bit more mixed than that, and, more importantly, the real issue is whether such exposure will have any long-term effects.

Bethany Albertson and Adria Lawrence are interested in both of these issues. In an article published in the March 2009 issue of American Politics Research, they analyze viewers’ reactions to two television programs: a five-part, Bill Moyers-hosted PBS series on drug abuse treatment, relapse, and recovery, and a fair and balanced Fox News special on California’s Proposition 209. Albertson and Lawrence’s analysis of data from a field experiment that NORC conducted in conjunction with the PBS series indicates that watching it did not increase knowledge about addiction a month later, despite viewers’ claims that they did learn from it. Watching did, however, increase the support that viewers expressed a month later for increasing the availability of treatment centers. Albertson and Lawrence put an “online-processing” spin on this pair of results: people evaluate new information as they encounter it and put it to use in developing attitudes; then, with the passage of time, they forget the information that they learned but retain the attitude. The Fox program was shorter (half an hour) and rather than presenting factual information showed a heated debate between two opponents and two proponents of Proposition 209. As with the PBS series, NORC conducted a field experiment to assess the effects of the show. Again, watching made viewers feel more knowledgeable several days after the program aired, but this time there was no effect on support for the policy issue or on polarization concerning Proposition 209.

How to account for the difference in the effects of the two experimental stimuli? The PBS series conveyed unequivocal arguments in support of funding and treatment, and it had marked effects on viewers’ attitudes. The Fox News special, by contrast, didn’t take a stand, but presented both sides of an issue – so unsurprisingly, it didn’t affect where viewers stood on the issue. The PBS series was also much longer, and it’s a well established principle that repeated exposure to a message can enhance its impact.

Albertson and Lawrence conclude that educational broadcasts “can have persistent effects on attitudes.” The results for the Fox News program, though, lead them to caution that “only particular kinds of program can induce attitude change over the long term.”

Of course, there is long-term and there is long-term. One might legitimately ask whether results from surveys conducted a few days or even a few weeks after the experimental stimulus really speak to the issue of long-term effects. But I’m encouraged by an emerging emphasis among researchers in gauging effects after the dust has at least begun to clear.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 09:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As part of our Red State, Blue State research, we developed statistical tools for estimating public opinion among subsets of the population. Recently Yu-Sung Su, Yair Ghitza, and I applied these methods to see where school vouchers are more or less popular.

We started with the 2000 National Annenberg Election Survey, which had responses from about 50,000 randomly-sampled Americans to the question: “Give tax credits or vouchers to help parents send their children to private schools—should the federal government do this or not?” 45% of those who expressed an opinion on this question said yes, but the percentage varied a lot by state, income level, and religious/ethnic group; These maps show our estimates:

Vouchers are most popular among high-income white Catholics and Evangelicals and low-income Hispanics. In general, among white groups, the higher the income, the more popular are school vouchers. But among nonwhites, it goes the other way, with vouchers being popular in the lower income categories but then becoming less popular among the middle class.

You can also see that support for vouchers roughly matches Republican voting, but not completely. Vouchers are popular in the heavily Catholic Northeast and California, less so in many of the mostly Protestant states in the Southeast. We also see a regional pattern among African Americans, where vouchers are most popular outside the South.

See here for more, including maps from 2004.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 08:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Discussion here.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 09:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Fancy statistical analysis can indeed lead to better understanding.

Jeff Lax and Justin Phillips used the method of multilevel regression and poststratification (“Mister P”; see here and here) to estimate attitudes toward gay rights in the states. They put together a dataset using national opinion polls from 1994 through 2009 and analyzed several different opinion questions on gay rights.

Policy on gay rights in the U.S. is mostly set at the state level, and Lax and Phillips’s main substantive finding is that state policies are strongly responsive to public opinion. However, in some areas, policies are lagging behind opinion somewhat.

A fascinating trend

Here I’ll focus on the coolest thing Lax and Phillips found, which is a graph of state-by-state trends in public support for gay marriage. In the past fifteen years, gay marriage has increased in popularity in all fifty states. No news there, but what was a surprise to me is where the largest changes have occurred. The popularity of gay marriage has increased fastest in the states where gay rights were already relatively popular in the 1990s.

In 1995, support for gay marriage exceeded 30% in only six states: New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, California, and Vermont. In these states, support for gay marriage has increased by an average of almost 20 percentage points. In contrast, support has increased by less than 10 percentage points in the six states that in 1995 were most anti-gay-marriage—Utah, Oklahoma, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Idaho.

Here’s the picture showing all 50 states:

I was stunned when I saw this picture. I generally expect to see uniform swing, or maybe even some “regression to the mean,” with the lowest values increasing the most and the highest values declining, relative to the average. But that’s not what’s happening at all. What’s going on?

Some possible explanations:

Continue reading "Gay marriage: a tipping point?" »

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 10:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

So Gallup asked this topical question about who speaks for the parties. The graphs above plot the responses of Democrats and Republicans. Obviously, the graphs show more uncertainty about who speaks for the GOP than who speaks for the Democrats. But my favorite finding is that partisans of both stripes, when asked about the opposite party, are more likely to name what we could call “bogeymen” (or women). Democrats are more likely than Republicans to name Cheney and Limbaugh as speaking for the GOP. Republicans are more likely than Democrats to name Pelosi as speaking for the Democratic Party.

Posted by John Sides at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

(In case you’re not sure, those are maggots.)

Disgust is a peculiar emotion, readily elicited by a simple smell, sound, sight,or even word. …[I]t’s difficult to even talk about disgust without becoming disgusted. The mere thought of disgust elicitors such as maggots, pus, or putrid meat can turn one’s stomach. …Rather than arising solely as a reaction to noxious stimuli, disgust is also intimately involved in shaping moral perceptions of specific groups and acts.

That’s Yoel Inbar, David Pizarro, and Paul Bloom, writing in the current issue of Cognition & Emotion (pay-gated; pre-publication copy here).*

How does disgust shape “moral perceptions of specific groups and acts”? And for whom?

According to many liberal, educated Westerners, … whether a practice or behaviour is considered morally palatable or reprehensible should depend on whether that behaviour harms or infringes on the rights of another individual; disgusting but harmless behaviours do not deserve moral condemnation. According to this view, consuming faecal matter, engaging in sexual intercourse with animals, or masturbating to pornography is not immoral, as long as no other people are harmed by one’s behaviour.

However, this view of disgusting acts as morally innocuous is a fairly recent invention. The vast majority of cultures, past and present, have recognised purity as an important moral dimension. Behaviours that are seen as degrading, defiling, or unnatural reduce purity and are thus immoral even if they do not harm oneself or others. Therefore, disgust — the emotion most often elicited by breaches of purity — is seen as morally relevant and informative.

So if you witness disgusting behavior, you judge the person performing that behavior to be morally deficient — unless you’re a liberal, educated westerner, in which case you may suspend moral judgment if the behavior in question is having harmful effects on others.

With these thoughts in mind, Inbar, Pizarro, and Bloom set out to determine whether “a heightened general proclivity to feel disgust might be associated with more conservative views.” To find out, they asked participants in an opt-in internet survey to respond to a set of disgust-related statements (e.g., ‘‘I try to avoid letting any part of my body touch the toilet seat in a public restroom, even when it appears clean’’) and to rate a set of events ((e.g., ‘‘You take a sip of soda and then realise that you picked up the wrong can, which a stranger had been drinking out of’’) in terms of how disgusting they would be. Thus measured, and with the effects of other pertinent factors taken into account, disgust sensitivity proved to be a significant predictor of self-identified political conservatism.

In a follow-up study, college students were asked to state their positions on a wide array of policy issues (gay marriage, abortion, gun control, labour unions, bombing Iran, welfare, Iraq war, affirmative action, tax cuts, and the death penalty), with the researchers’ expectation being that disgust sensitivity would strongly predict responses to the “purity”-related issues (gay marriage and abortion), but that this effect would be weaker for the other items. That expectation was borne out, except that more disgust-sensitive respondents also expressed expressed greater support for tax cuts; apparently, then, taxes were no less disgusting to these respondents than were gay marriage and abortion.

What are we to make of all this? Although Inbar, Pizarro, and Bloom are appropriately cautious about overstating their case, they leave little question about what they perceive to be the underlying causal dynamic:

Does disgust sensitivity cause conservatism?. The current data cannot speak to the causal relationship between political attitudes and disgust sensitivity. It might be that no simple relationship is there to be found,
though it does seem unlikely that political attitudes would shift a person’s general emotional dispositions, particularly when it comes to disgust, a basic emotion that emerges long before individuals form political attitudes.

As I think about this study, I find myself questioning Inbar, Pizarro,and Bloom’s contention that fundamental emotional dispositions are formed long before fundamental political dispositions like receptivity to change and openness toward unconventional acts. That is, I tend to view such fundamental dispositions as parts of the same package rather than in cause-and-effect terms, and I’m therefore much more conservative even than Inbar, Pizarro, and Bloom (though I’m not disgusted by them) about whether their results do anything at all to clarify the sources of political dispositions.

*I was alerted to this article by an item in the Washington Post’s “Science Digest” column today.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Lee’s post on militant extremism speaks directly to Scott Roeder, the alleged murderer of George Tiller. If we assume that Roeder is indeed the killer, can social science tell us anything about why he did this (or, conversely, why people who feel similarly didn’t do this)? The point of social science is obviously not to explain every individual occurrence of a phenomenon. But it can direct inquiry toward more or less fruitful avenues. Here is a non-exhaustive set of ideas.

Continue reading "Scott Roeder" »

Posted by John Sides at 02:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

From Gallup.

Posted by John Sides at 09:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A fascinating new study of militant extremism contains a useful model of the major components of the military-extremist mind-set and suggests an unsettling answer to the question posed above.

The study, by Gerard Saucier, Laura Geuy Akers, Sepaphine Shen-Miller, Goran Knezevic, and Lazar Stankov, appears in the May 2009 issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science. Access to the article is gated, but here is a pre-publication version.

Militant extremism, as Saucier and his colleagues define it, involves “zealous adherence to a set of beliefs and values that combine advocacy of measures beyond the norm and intention and willingness to resort to violence.” From their study of a diverse array of militant-extremists around the world (e.g., the Baader-Meinhof Gang , the IRA, Shining Path, Theodore Kaczynski, and Tmothy McVeigh), a profile of 16 prominent themes emerged. These themes are summarized in the following composite narrative:

“We have a glorious past, but modernity has been disastrous, bringing on a great catastrophe in which we are tragically obstructed from reaching our rightful place, obstructed by an illegitimate civil government and/or by an enemy so evil that it does not even deserved to be called human. This intolerable situation calls for vengeance. Extreme measures are required … We must think in military terms to annihilate this evil and purify the world of it, and we cannot be blamed for carrying out this violence. Those who sacrifice themselves in our cause will attain glory, and supernatural powers should come to our aid in this struggle. In the end, we will bring our people to a new world that is a paradise.”

The authors map the distribution of these 16 themes across the militant groups and individuals they study. No two groups or individuals fit the same profile in terms of their acceptance of these themes, indicating that “militant extremist represents not just one, but an orchestra of responses working in concert.”

“This prototype composite storyline,” the authors concede, “may seem like a dramatic comic-book plot … But … for psychological reasons, the plot sells. Such a plot is highly attention-engaging and may be profoundly motivating to many individuals.”

That last observation provides a springboard for broadening the analysis from militant extremists to the general population:

“If militant extremism caters to what many people find psychologically attractive, then aspects of militant-extremist thinking should be at least modestly manifest even in normal-range populations. This hypothesis runs against the common-sense assumption that militant extremists are completely different from other citizens and that they hold bizarre and incomprehensible views.”

To test this hypothesis, the authors administered questionnaires to college students in the U.S. and advanced high school students in Serbia. Each of the 16 militant-extremist themes was represented in the questionnaires by two items. The basic finding?

“When presented with statements that are in fact extracts of militant-extremist thinking, the typical response was somewhere in the range between ‘moderately disagree’ and ‘not sure.’ No one responded in a fashion one would expect from the most prototypical militant extremist: strongly agreeing with all indicator items. But respondents generally failed to strongly disassociate themselves from the sentiments found in these items. Thus the base rate of fanatical thinking patterns in the population does not appear to be low.”

And among the implications?

“Although militant-extremist leaders no doubt play a key role, it is probably not necessary for participants in militant-extremist movements to be brainwashed or severely indoctrinated. All that may be required is an intensification and an orchestration of sentiments and of ‘framings’ that many people are already or at least moderately sympathetic toward.”

All of which puts me in mind of that legendary Ernest Hemingway-Scott Fitzgerald exchange: “You know, the rich are different from you and me”/”They have more money.” Militant extremists may not be so different from the rest of us as we would like to think.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 02:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

…if the public is given accurate information about what is currently being spent on public schools, their support for increased spending and confidence that more spending will improve student learning both decline. And they find that knowing how much the average teacher earns lowers support among the general public for salary increases.

That’s from research by William Howell and Martin West, digested here.

Some details:

…The average per-pupil spending estimate from respondents to the 2008 Education Next/PEPG survey was $4,231, and the median response was just $2,000; but for these respondents, local average spending per pupil at the time exceeded $10,000. When told how much the local schools were spending, support for increased spending dropped by 10 percentage points, from 61 percent to a bare majority of 51 percent…

…As with per-pupil expenditures, the public significantly underestimates how much their states pay public school teachers. On average, Education Next/PEPG survey respondents underestimated average teacher salaries in their state by more than $14,000, nearly one-third of the actual average salaries of $47,000. When asked directly, 69 percent of the public supported increasing teacher salaries. African Americans and teachers appeared most enthusiastic about increasing teacher salaries, with roughly 9 out of 10 endorsing the idea. When provided with the facts, support among the general public decreased by 14 percent.

Even more interesting: teachers responded similarly to the correct information.

[Hat tip to Eric Lawrence.]

Posted by John Sides at 09:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Simon Jackman has some useful thoughts on the future of internet polling and why some of its critics don’t know what they’re talking about.

I’d also like to add that, as much as I rely on telephone sampling in my own research, I hate most of it in practice. Just yesterday, the phone rang and it was one of those robo-polls. I hung up, but I hated to even have to waste 5 seconds on the intrusion. I’m bothered by the asymmetry, that the survey wastes the time of the person who is being called while imposing a nearly zero cost on the pollster. Information pollution is what it is.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 04:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of our goals here at the Monkey Cage is to inject political science research into public discussion of contemporary political issues. With Obama’s announcement of the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court, the airwaves are filled with news of the great political machines on both sides of the aisle gearing up for a big fight. I think I even heard a commentator on the radio this morning say that the base on both sides lives for this sort of thing.

So I thought it would be interesting to see what political scientists have to say about the long term effects of Supreme Court nomination battles on the popularity of (a) presidents or (b) political parties? In other words, does the fight matter for anything more than just whether or not the individual in question gets confirmed, or are there other lasting repercussions? If you’ve written on this topic, please add a comment to this post with a link to your research and a paper abstract. If I get enough responses, I’ll put up another post here with a summary.

And as as an aside on the subject of whether or not she gets confirmed is concerned, Intrade has got her trading at about $.95 on the dollar to be the next Supreme Court justice (in a contract that expires only upon confirmation) and Larry Sabato is predicting that Sonia Sotomayor is a slam dunk to be confirmed.

Posted by Joshua Tucker at 04:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Via Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media, this sounds like a pretty interesting project.

Friend Sense, built by Yahoo! Researchers Duncan Watts, Sharad Goel and Winter Mason, addresses two empirical paradoxes that have puzzled political scientists for years. The first paradox is the widespread perception among Americans that the US is a politically polarized country, when in fact numerous surveys indicate that Americans are surprisingly difficult to classify into simple categories. Many people, for example, see the country as divided into “red” states and “blue” states, but research shows that most Americans are neither consistently “liberal” nor “conservative.” In fact, among self-declared Republicans, 85% take a non-conservative stance on abortion, affirmative action, or government support for health insurance. Similar counter-intuitive results can be found among self-declared Democrats.

The second paradox is that people also tend to think that their friends’ beliefs are more similar to their own than they actually are—suggesting that people don’t know their friends as well as they think they do. Unlike the first paradox, however, this has yet to be tested directly, mostly because surveys that compare the responses of friends are extremely difficult to conduct in practice. Friend Sense solves this problem by running on top of a very large social network—Facebook. The application, which can be quickly downloaded for free, asks users to answer a series of yes or no questions about their beliefs and attitudes, and also asks them how their Facebook friends would answer the same questions.

Posted by Henry at 02:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The debate about closing Guantanamo, and especially this piece, entitled “Guantánamo Closing Hands Republicans a Wedge Issue,” got me interested in public opinion about the subject. What I found is sort of a mess. Recent polls don’t tell a clear story about even simple questions like whether to close Guantanamo. And there seems to be no polling that speaks to the nuances of the political debate.

Continue reading "Is Gitmo a "Wedge Issue"?" »

Posted by John Sides at 02:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The 2008 American National Election Studies asks respondents about sexual orientation. This is apparently a first for the ANES. The question was:

Do you consider yourself to be heterosexual or straight, homosexual or gay (or lesbian), or bisexual?

Although the ANES is administered face-to-face, this question was included in a section of the interview where respondents put on headphones, listened to questions via an audio tape, and answered them on a laptop — out of view of the interviewer.

Among all respondents: 94% identified as heterosexual, 3% as homosexual, and 3% as bisexual. About 1% did not answer the question.

The numbers among men and women are similar. Among men, 95% identified as heterosexual, 3% as homosexual, and 1% as bisexual. Among women, 93% identified as heterosexual, 3% as homosexual, and 3% as bisexual.

For those of you who are ANES users, the variable is v083209.

[Hat tip to Pat Egan, who has written extensively on the political opinions of gays and lesbians.]

Posted by John Sides at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

John Sides and I wrote an op-ed for the Daily News:

Continue reading "Why abortion consensus is unlikely" »

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 04:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So the raw pro-life/pro-choice question is misleading. Since most people’s abortion position is conditional on some circumstance or another — the who and why of the abortion — we should ask questions about those nuances. And of course we should.

But the question is not entirely misleading. The terms “pro-life” and “pro-choice” have about as much meaning as a lot of other survey items that we use routinely, such as the ideological and partisan self-identification questions. Those, too, depend on context. But trends in them are interesting, because those terms are political objects, about which voters make decisions.

And abortion is too. If more people are self-identifying as “pro-life,” what that means is that more people think that the level of compromise they subscribe to is closer to being “pro-life.” That might be because their position moved to the right, or it might be because pro-life activists have succeeded in characterizing the “pro-choice” label as meaning “abortion on demand.” So it is possible (although still not clear) that more people simply think they are “pro-life” with a little bit of compromise, rather than “pro-choice” witha little bit of compromise. As those people go to the polls, they may evaluate a candidate who self-identifies as “pro-choice” differently, even if they largely agree on the issue.

What’s more, the direction that most voters are coming from may actually be more important than their specific position on all the messiness. Ordinary voters are not charged with setting abortion policy. Even those who care intensely about the issue do not, in the end, get their way. The people who will have to work out the messy compromise need to know that, as John pointed out, most Americans favor some sort of middle ground. But the political impact of their positions may mostly be felt through the blunt instrument of voting, where the middle ground gives way. That’s especially true if most middle-ground voters feel their own conflictedness on the issue, and so don’t let it determine their vote.

In other words, the whole mess is very complicated, and we should make use of every question — including the potentially misleading ones. Trends in pro-life self-identity (even very tiny trends — because of course it is a tiny trend) are still worthy of attention.

The calls for more nuanced questions call to mind Obama’s speech at Notre Dame Sunday. Obama acknowledged both the complexity that survey questions obscure, but also that there are two poles, and that compromise is hard.

Because no matter how much we may want to fudge it — indeed, while we know that the views of most Americans on the subject are complex and even contradictory — the fact is that at some level, the views of the two camps are irreconcilable.

Exactly.

Posted by Hans at 02:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

These Gallup and Pew data are receiving a lot of attention. Both polls show a shift in opinion. In the Gallup data, the percentage of people who call themselves “pro-life” has increased and, for the first time in their polling, outnumbers the percentage who call themselves “pro-choice.” There is a similar shift in the percentages who favor abortion “under any circumstances” (now at 23%) and who believe it should be “illegal in all cases” (22%). In the Pew data, the proportion who believe that abortion should be legal in “all” or “most” cases has dropped (from 54% in August to 46%), and the proportion who say it should be illegal in all or most cases has increased (from 41% to 46%44%).

How should we understand these results? I’ll note three good points that others have made, and then analyze some data that no one has yet examined.

• The first point: a wider array of data do not appear to show notable trends. See Nate Silver’s post. He writes, “In fact, the remarkable thing about abortion is precisely how steady public opinion has been on it for many, many years.” Yes. See below.

• The second point: the movement appears to be among Republicans. See these graphs from Gallup (Rep, Dem). Why Republicans? Ed Kilgore offers a hypothesis: Republican leaders have stepped up their criticisms of Obama’s policies on abortion, and so Republicans in the public have shifted accordingly. That’s a familiar finding in political science scholarship. Ultimately, the political implications of aggregate shifts in public opinion depend on who is doing the shifting. The Gallup headline (“More Americans “Pro-Life” Than “Pro-Choice” for First Time”) could as easily have been (“More Republicans Declare They Are “Pro-Life”).

• The third point: these Gallup and Pew questions are hopelessly mushy. Marc Ambinder states it nicely: “The abortion debate in America is about policy, not about those words–they do not encapsulate, for instance, whether a majority want abortion to be legal for pregnant women whose lives is threatened by the pregnancy in the third trimester. Some people who call themselves ‘pro-life’ might say abortion should be legal in that case.”

Here are some data that are far less mushy and speak directly to another of Kilgore’s points: “the simple fact that Americans seem to care quite a bit why a woman seeks an abortion.”

The first set of data come from the National Election Studies. They have asked this question since 1980:

There has been some discussion about abortion during recent years. Please tell me which one of these opinions best agrees with your view:

1. By law, abortion should never be permitted.

2. The law should permit abortion only in case of rape, incest, or when the woman’s life is in danger.

3. The law should permit abortion for reasons other than rape, incest, or danger to the woman’s life, but only after the need for the abortion has been established.

4. By law, a woman should always be able to obtain an abortion as a matter of personal choice.

Here are the percentages of people who supported each opinion, including the 2008 data, which were collected in November and December, after the election.

Here are some key findings:

• The plurality of Americans (41%) believe abortion is a matter of personal choice. This is much larger than the percentage who believe abortion should never be permitted (15%). By that measure, pro-choice Americans outnumber pro-life Americans — despite how people use those labels in the Gallup item. This is why the Gallup item is pretty useless.

• There has been no notable change over time, including in 2008. In fact, if anything, there is a slight uptick of about 4 points in the percentage who favor abortion as a matter of personal choice. But I wouldn’t put much stock in that. Opinions are simply pretty stable, as Nate Silver noted.

• The “mushy middle” that Kilgore refers to is evident as well: 45% of people favor legal abortion only under some circumstances: when the pregnancy is the result of rape and/or incest, when it poses a danger to the mother’s life, and/or “when the need has been established.”

The second set of data specify even more clearly the circumstances under which people favor or oppose the right to a legal abortion. These data come from the General Social Survey. The GSS asks confronts respondents with a variety of circumstances and asks whether they support or oppose abortion under each circumstance:

Please tell me whether or not you think it should be possible for a pregnant woman to obtain a legal abortion:

- If there is a strong chance of serious defect in the baby?

- If she is married and does not want any more children?

- If the woman’s own health is seriously endangered by the pregnancy?

- If the family has a very low income and cannot afford any more children?

- If she became pregnant as a result of rape?

- If she is not married and does not want to marry the man?

- If the woman wants it for any reason?

Here are the percentages from 1977-2008.

Some key findings:

• The conditional nature of opinion is evident. Large majorities support the right to an abortion when it is the result of rape, when it endangers the woman’s health (not just life), and when there is a strong chance of a serious defect in the baby. Pluralities, but not majorities, support abortion under the other circumstances.

• In 2008, the percentage who said they favored abortion in any circumstance was 42% — nearly identical to the proportion who have a similarly unequivocal answer in the NES data. However, if you actually tabulate the percentage of people who supported the right to an abortion under all of these circumstances, it is 32%. At least some people who say they favor abortion under any circumstance really do not. But even this fraction is much larger than the percentage who did not favor abortion under any circumstance: 10%.

• There has been very little change in opinion in the last 10 years.

Simply put, the Pew and Gallup findings obscure far more than they reveal. They purport to show shifts in opinion that are not evident in other data. There is no consistent evidence for a “conservative turn,” as Pew puts it.

Moreover, both Pew and Gallup employ vague questions that do not easily map onto actual policy debates. Once more precise data are employed, it becomes clear that opinion strongly depends on the circumstances under which the abortion would occur. While people who are favor a legal abortion under any of the circumstances mentioned outnumber those who unequivocally oppose abortion by a factor of abut 3, most people are in the middle. In the GSS data, 58% favor a legal abortion under some circumstances, but not others.

UPDATE: Commenter Lawrence notes some new questions from the 2008 NES. I looked at those as well. Here is a quick summary of the percentage of people who favor (or lean toward favoring) abortion under each of the following conditions:

(Note: Sampling weights are employed and those who do not respond are included in these calculations.)

“Staying pregnant would hurt the woman’s health but is very unlikely to cause her to die”: 47%
“Staying pregnant could cause the woman to die”: 79%
“The pregnancy was caused by sex the woman chose to have with a blood relative”: 44%
“The pregnancy was caused by the woman being raped”: 73%
“The fetus will be born with a serious birth defect”: 57%
“Having the child would be extremely difficult for the woman financially”: 33%
“The child will not be the sex the woman wants it to be”: 10%

By my calculations, 12% of respondents oppose abortion under all of these circumstances, and 8% support it under all of these circumstances. If we eliminate the circumstance of sex selection, 22% support abortion under all of those circumstances.

Posted by John Sides at 03:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (17)

In order to assess explicit prejudice toward Jews, we directly asked respondents “How much to blame were the Jews for the financial crisis?” with responses falling under five categories: a great deal, a lot, a moderate amount, a little, not at all. Among non-Jewish respondents, a strikingly high 24.6 percent of Americans blamed “the Jews” a moderate amount or more, and 38.4 percent attributed at least some level of blame to the group.

Interestingly, Democrats were especially prone to blaming Jews: while 32 percent of Democrats accorded at least moderate blame, only 18.4 percent of Republicans did so (a statistically significant difference).

That is Neil Malhotra and Yotam Margalit writing in the Boston Review. See also their discussion of a survey experiment involving information about Judaism and Madoff.

I wonder if the differences between Democrats and Republicans hold up with additional control variables.

[Hat tip to Pollster.]

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

I am coding an open-ended survey question asking people why they support or oppose the estate tax.

Respondent #33256048:

that money has already been taxed when earned and when it is invested and a return on that investment is earned…. it is being double and triple taxed. John Locke, in his Two Treatises of Government, states that income tax is immoral…

John Locke:

It is true governments cannot be supported without great charge, and it is fit every one who enjoys his share of the protection should pay out of his estate his proportion for the maintenance of it. But still it must be with his own consent- i.e., the consent of the majority, giving it either by themselves or their representatives chosen by them; for if any one shall claim a power to lay and levy taxes on the people by his own authority, and without such consent of the people, he thereby invades the fundamental law of property, and subverts the end of government. For what property have I in that which another may by right take when he pleases to himself?

[Hat tip to Steven Kelts for the Locke passage.]

Posted by John Sides at 04:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

This is one of the coolest — I mean, hottest — findings I’ve seen in a while:

For each three degrees that local temperature rises above normal, Americans become one percentage point more likely to agree that there is “solid evidence” that the earth is getting warmer.

The paper is by Patrick Egan and Megan Mullin, and their money graph is above. They linked Pew survey data to the local temperatures in each respondent’s zip code in the week before the survey.

Of course, the weather isn’t the most important factor; party identification and ideology have a much larger effect on attitudes. But the effect of the weather is still noteworthy. Egan and Mullin argue that its effects are particularly noteworthy among those who pay less attention to politics.

Find the paper here.

Posted by John Sides at 10:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Nate has a useful discussion of “the apparently contradictory polling result from Gallup which suggests that, while most Americans think ‘harsh interrogation techniques’ against suspected terrorists are justified, a 51 percent majority also want a federal investigation into the use of these techniques.”

This is related to the graph that John posted showing that something like half of Americans thought that “the United States should consider torture against terrorism suspects.”

My first reaction when seeing John’s graph was surprise: Even among Democrats, only 65% said the United States should not use torture, with only 45% of independents ruling out the tactic. My impression was that torture was highly unpopular, with techniques such as waterboarding being semi-acceptable to the public only because they were defined as “not really” torture.

So how do I make sense of these polls? I guess I’ll have to step back and say that there are few absolutes in people’s opinions. In the abstract, torture is to be ruled out, but once you bring in “terrorism” (even “terrorism suspects,” which is really pretty vague), people start to change their minds.

I’m reminded of something I read recently—maybe from Mo Fiorina—that a big chunk of Americans support abortion under all circumstances, but when these people are asked whether it should be legal to do an abortion solely for reasons of sex selection, most of these abortion rights absolutists say No, abortion should not be allowed for sex selection. Similarly, people support freedom of speech but then support all sorts of restrictions in particular examples.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 11:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The question wording is: “Obama has said that under his administration the United States will not use torture as part of the U.S. campaign against terrorism, no matter what the circumstance. Do you support this position not to use torture, or do you think there are cases in which the United States should consider torture against terrorism suspects?”

Source: ABC News/Washington Post polls, via Behind the Numbers.

[UPDATE: The original version of this post had the trend reversed. This is because I am a moron. Thanks to Danny Hayes for the catch.]

Posted by John Sides at 11:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

For all the discussion of President Obama’s high approval ratings through the first 100 days, I began to wonder just what President G.W. Bush’s approval ratings looked like at about the same time in his first term, back in April 2001.

I compared two Pew Research Center polls, one from April 18-21, 2001 (N=1,202), and the other, just out, from April 15-20, 2009 (N=1,507).

The approval ratings were, to my surprise, very close: 66.9% for Bush; 70.7% for Obama (weighted estimates).

I guess it is easy to forget in light of more recent months just how popular the former president was during his first term, even coming off a controversial election. Maybe this also says something about approval ratings — most Americans are quite gracious during the initial months of nearly all presidencies. There is nothing especially remarkable about high approval ratings at this point, according to Gallup figures widely reported.

Having an interest in the geography of almost everything under the sun, I decided to simply crosstabulate approval by location of the survey respondent’s residence, resulting in the following crosstabulations:

Download file

Notably, these tables indicate that the former president’s April 2001 approval rating was far less uniform across urban, suburban and rural locations, with urban dwellers expressing considerable disapproval apparently from the start of his presidency. Nearly 20 points separate urban from rural areas in 2001, compared with just 7 points difference for President Obama.

Moreover, urban voters were far more disapproving of Bush than rural voters are presently of Obama. Notably, suburban respondents are expressing slightly more disapproval for Obama than they did for Bush 34.1% to 30.3%, though this would be within the margin of error for the subsample.

Discussion? Implications?

Posted by Jim Gimpel at 11:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It’s often interesting when people claim to have done something that they really didn’t do or deny having done something that they really did do. Many social scientists have built careers around trying to account for these very phenomena. Such “overreports” and “underreports” are, however, the bane of the existence of another group of researchers. I’m speaking here, of course, of survey researchers.

In political science the classic example is the overreport of voter turnout. Survey-based estimates of voter turnout routinely run several points above the “real” percentage and – just to make things worse – the tendency to overreport can vary from one part of the electorate to another. So it’s not only the dependent variable in survey-based models of voter turnout that’s likely to be “off”; the relationships between the dependent variable and various predictors of turnout may be off as well.

If survey respondents can’t be taken at their word, then researchers either have to toss survey-based findings out the window or, short of that, find some acceptable correctives or complicated work-arounds (e.g., triangulation with other measures or more complex model-fitting). There’s only so much that researchers can do about any of this. For a long time, the turnout overreport was sort of a dirty little secret. Now it’s so well known that researchers have simply got to deal with it one way or another.

But what if survey-based estimates of some phenomenon of considerable interest weren’t off by just a few percentage points, but were grossly off? On some “sensitive” topics like sexual preference, that could well be the case, and in such instances the development of innovative measurement approaches becomes all the more urgent. But gross inaccuracy isn’t necessarily confined to topics that wouldn’t strike most researchers as highly sensitive.

And that observation brings me to the point (finally!).

Continue reading "Survey-based Reports of News Viewership: Don't You Believe 'Em" »

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 02:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

[Source: Gallup, via NY Times Magazine]

Posted by John Sides at 11:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

This week, the political website Talking Points Memo is having a discussion of Red State, Blue State. There are discussions so far from political scientist Nolan McCarty, historian Eric Rauchway, and blogger/activist Aaron Swartz. Other discussions should be coming soon.

Posted by Andrew Gelman at 08:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)