Left, right, and elite

 Ross Douthat writes "the political right has plenty of popular support but considerably less influence inside the managerial systems through which elected officials actually exercise their power," while progressivism has  "an extraordinary advantage in the meritocratic institutions, private as well as public, that actually staff and shape the power structure."  As a result, "activists and elites effect dramatic change outside the democratic process and then try to survive or sidestep backlash from the voters."  He offers several examples, including "a new regime of euthanasia in Canada."  

Back in 1947, the Gallup Poll asked, "when a person has a disease that cannot be cured, do you think doctors should be allowed by law to end the patient's life by some painless means if the patient and his family request it?"  This question was asked again in 1950 and has been included in the General Social Survey since 1977.  The percent who say that doctors should be allowed to end the patient's life:

Support passed 50% in the 1970s, and has been over 60% since the 1980s, but assisted death is allowed in only eleven states plus Washington, DC.  Oregon was the first to legalize it, by a referendum--it wasn't until 2013 that it was enacted through a state legislature.

I don't have as much data for Canada, but in 2000 Gallup Canada asked "When a person has an incurable disease that is immediately life-threatening and causes that person to experience great suffering, do you, or do you not think that competent doctors should be allowed by law to end the patient's life through mercy killing, if the patient has made a formal request in writing?"  and 72% said yes.  It also asked about a disease that "is not immediately life-threatening but causes that person to experience great suffering" and 54% said yes.  This was 15 years before laws allowing that were passed.

So assisted dying is not something that was imposed by elites on an unwilling public.  In fact, the question is why political elites have been reluctant to do something that has strong support among the public.  Political forces are probably part of the answer--opponents are more likely to participate in organized religion, so they are better organized and more committed than supporters.  On the other hand, more educated people are more likely to support assisted dying, and political elites have more education than the general public.  So it seems that there is something that keeps them from following the usual inclinations of their class.  One thing that separates political elites from educated people in general is that they think about legislation for a living, and I suspect that they were concerned about the possibility of a "slippery slope" (which has happened to some extent in Canada):  it's hard to write rules that draw a clear line saying exactly when it will be allowed, so they are reluctant to change the status quo.  

The general point is that Douthat, like many other people, implicitly uses a broad definition of elite--"institutions that staff and shape the power structures."  But the people who make and interpret the laws are a much smaller group, and they may have a distinct outlook that doesn't fit into the standard left/right spectrum.  I've had a few posts on this topic, and I'll return to it soon (probably in my next post).

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

When after all it was you, not me, part 2

 Following up on some of the points in my last post:

1.  The Pew Research Center did some experiments with opt-in vs. probability-based online surveys.  As I suggested, it seems that many opt-in respondents aren't paying attention (or aren't taking the survey seriously)--they're just rushing through in order to get paid. But the Pew results were even worse than I expected, with the opt-in surveys producing some clearly nonsensical distributions of answers.  

2.  I said that general questions about whether violence is ever acceptable to achieve political goals weren't very informative--questions about how you felt about particular examples of violence would be better, but there aren't many of them.  I found one interesting example, from a 1968 Harris survey done for the National Commission the the Causes and Prevention of Violence.  They asked about how people felt after a number of (then) recent assassinations of political figures.  One of the sets of questions asked if they felt sad, leaning towards sad, in between, leaning towards relieved, or relieved on hearing of the event.  The distributions (for those who said they had heard about the assassination in question):

                                          Sad         in between     Relieved
JFK                                      88%            4%                    1%
RFK                                     84%            7%                    1%
King                                     60%          24%                    7%
Evers                                    52%          35%                    4%
Malcolm X                           24%          52%                  15%
George Lincoln Rockwell*  18%          54%                  17%

None of those people are really comparable to Charlie Kirk, but the results show that we shouldn't be surprised when some people have mixed or even positive feelings after the assassination of a controversial public figure.  Of course, we didn't have social media back in 1968, so those sentiments were less visible.

3.  The Harris survey also asked about a hypothetical case in which "Your Senator has blocked legislation which you believe is essential to protect the rights of every citizen. The Senator has come to your town and is making a speech in a public auditorium to gain support for his point of view," and whether you think that some kinds of protest would be "all right to take."  It also asked if "some of your friends" would think they were all right:

                                                                         You             Friends
Carry signs expressing disapproval                   74%           71%
Boo during pauses                                             29%            38%
Boo and stamp feet until he has to stop            13%             24%
Throw rotten tomatoes                                        4%             10%
Throw bottles**                                                  1%              6%
Use a gun or other weapon to inflict harm          1%              2%

4.  It occurred to me that there is another question that is relevant to political violence.  The General Social Survey has regularly asked "would you approve of a policeman striking a citizen who has said vulgar and obscene things to the policeman?"  Approval among self-described liberals and conservatives:

Approval is higher among conservatives, but the size of the gap changes:  it declined, but has increased in recent years.  The ratio of conservative to liberal approval:

It's not possible to put a precise date on when the ratio began to rise, but it has been consistently high in the Trump years:  2016 set a new high, which was broken in 2018 and again in 2024.  Although the question is not explicitly about political violence, it is relevant because one kind of political violence involves defending "law and order," even if that involves violating the law.  It's easy to imagine applications, like unofficial efforts to ensure "election integrity" or enforce immigration laws.  

*Rockwell was the leader of the American Nazi Party.  
**The question said "empty bottles or other objects which could not do serious or permanent harm."  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

When after all it was you, not me

 Since the murder of Charlie Kirk, people have been reposting one of his tweets from earlier this year, in which he said "assassination culture is spreading on the left.  Forty-eight percent of liberals say it would be at least somewhat justified to murder Elon Musk.  Fifty-five percent said the same about Donald Trump."  The source of these numbers is a report from the Network Contagion Research Institute published in April.  He didn't mention another figure from the report that I find even more remarkable--20% of conservatives said that it would be at least somewhat justified to murder Donald Trump.  Who were the people answering these questions?  A footnote says "using Prime Panels, we collected 2651 respondents.  Based on attention checks and those who took the survey in an unreasonable amount of time, we cleaned the dataset down to a final dataset of 1264 responses."  It's standard practice for online surveys to discard some cases (e. g., those that pick the first answer for every question), but more than half?  I didn't know anything about Prime Panels, but it's described here.  The key point is that it's a collection of "opt-in" panels--that is, people who sign up to do surveys in return for compensation.  That is, there's no effort to get a representative sample in the first place, and the extremely high rate of discarded answers suggests that respondents are not taking the survey very seriously (I wonder if some of the responses were generated by AI).  So we can continue the cleaning process by dropping the remaining 1264 cases and moving on.  

JD Vance also cited some survey data when he hosted the Charlie Kirk show.  He said that 24% of people who call themselves very liberal say it is acceptable to be happy at the death of  a political opponent, against only 3% of people who call themselves very conservative.  Also, 26%  of young liberals and only 7% of young conservatives say that political violence is sometimes justified.  These data  are from a legitimate survey organization, YouGov.  However, they are from surveys taken on September 10 and 11th, so they represent some combination of feelings about general principles and the particular case of violence that had just happened.  As far as I can tell, the question about whether it is acceptable to feel happy has never been asked before; there are a few general questions about whether political violence is ever justified, but they are all at least 20 years old.  There's also a problem of interpretation.  It's easy to think of examples of "violence in order to achieve political goals" that most people would regard as justified and even admirable--e. g., the American Revolution.  So I don't think that we can learn much from questions of this kind--questions about reactions to particular assassinations or assassination attempts would be more informative, but fortunately we haven't had many cases to ask about.    Moreover, there have been only few questions about those cases and they aren't comparable.

So far, my conclusions have all been negative, but there is one interesting additional piece of information in the YouGov report.  After the attack on Paul Pelosi in October 2022, they asked " How big of a problem do you think political violence is in the U.S. today?"  They repeated the question after the two attempts on Donald Trump, the attempt on Josh Shapiro, and the assassinations of Melissa Hortman and Charlie Kirk.  The figure shows the percent saying "a very big problem" broken down by party:  

Among Democrats. the level doesn't change much; among Republicans, it's substantially higher when the victim is a Republican.  Of course, with just five cases you can't draw strong conclusions, but I've found a similar pattern before--Republican views about the future of the next generation are more affected by the party of the president than Democratic views.  I think this has happened because Republican leaders have taken a catastrophist approach--saying that the Democrats, the universities, the media, etc.  are dominated by the radical Left, which is evil, vicious, and even demonic (all words used by Trump or Vance).  

The data I needed

 A new paper by Craig Volden, Jonathan Wai, and Alan E. Wiseman looks at the educational background of members of Congress over a 50-year period (1973-2021).  Their major conclusion is given in the title:  "On the Decline of Elite-Educated Republicans in Congress."  Over the years, Congressional Republicans have become less likely to have degrees from elite universities, while Democrats have become a little more likely.  As a result, a "diploma divide" has appeared, with Democrats more likely to have elite degrees.  The figure shows the percent of Democratic and Republican members of the House of Representatives who have elite degrees (see this Washington Post story for more figures).

  

Volden, Wai, and Wiseman also report that members with elite degrees have more liberal voting records than those without them.  The difference is larger for Republicans, suggesting that the declining representation of elite universities is related to the rightward move of Congressional Republicans over the period.

Taking both parties together, representation of elite degrees in the House has declined (it's been roughly constant in the Senate).  

I had done similar research on a smaller scale, comparing two Congresses (1953-5 and 2017-9).  I had expected to find a substantial increase in the percent with elite degrees, but that wasn't the case.  By my definition of elite, it only went from 17% to 18%.  I noticed that the share of elite degrees  declined among Republicans and increased among Democrats.  

Considering both studies together, it seems that the share from elite universities is about the same in recent years as it was in the early 1950s, but lower that in the 1970s:  that is, it peaked in the 1970s.  The Republican share of those with elite degrees was higher in the 1950s than the 1970s--that is, the changes since the 1970s continue a longer trend.  (Of course, our definitions of elite universities weren't identical, but they were similar enough so I'm pretty confident in these claims).  

In another post, I suggested that there has been a change in the relationship between elite university background and political orientation.  " At one time, elite colleges played an important part in creating an 'establishment'.... that's no longer the case, at least on the conservative side."  That is, I thought that Republicans with an elite educational background used to be more moderate, but that this was no longer the case.  The Volden, Wai, and Wiseman data lets me test that idea.  I divided it into four periods and compared the DW-Nominate scores of elite graduates and others (controlling for race, sex, and Hispanic status).  Negative numbers mean members with elite degrees have more liberal voting records.

                            House                        Senate
                            R            D            R            D
1973-80         -.045      -.052          -.201    -.043
1981-94        -.083       -.056           -.180    -.035
1995-2008    -.049       -.023            -.085    -.048
2009-21          .007      -.002               .021    -.070

Since 2009, Republicans with elite degrees have been just about the same as those without.  With Democrats, the difference has disappeared in the House, but stayed the same or maybe even grown in the Senate. So my hypothesis is supported:  among Republicans, having an elite degree is no longer associated with more more moderate views.  The reasoning behind the hypothesis was that as the political climate at elite universities has moved left, conservatives increasingly feel like an embattled minority, and consciously reject prevailing views rather than being influenced by them.  That suggests that the change should be mostly a generational one.  An alternative explanation is that party-line voting has become more common in recent years, especially among Republicans, so party is coming to dominate all other differences.  

What do you know?

 I've had several posts about the connection between tastes in reading and political views.  The basic conclusion is that people with more "sophisticated" tastes tend to be more liberal.  I recently ran across another relevant survey (from 1999) which asked people if they could name the authors of the following books:  The Cat in the Hat, Huckleberry Finn, The Shining, The Old Man and the Sea, The Firm, A Tale of Two Cities, A Farewell to Arms, The Great Gatsby, Moby Dick, and Crossings (I list them in order of the percent who gave the correct answer).  The mean was about three correct answers (it was open-ended, not multiple choice).   

The few political questions in the survey were not of much general interest, so I'll just look at ideological self-rating (very liberal to very conservative).  Among people who got 0-2 right (about 30% of the sample), 45% said they were conservative, 37% moderate, and 17% liberal; among people who got 6-10 right (about 20%), it was 27%, 48%, 25%.  If you regress ideology on age, sex, race, Hispanic status, education, and "knowledge" (number of correct answers), the estimate for knowledge was positive and statistically significant (.054 with a standard error of .014).  The estimate for education (1=no HS diploma... 4=college graduate) was .01 and not significantly different from zero.  

Why would knowledge of the names of authors be associated with ideological self-rating?  One possibility is that some people understood the terms in a non-political sense, e. g., "liberal" as meaning something like broad-minded.  Incorrect (or unconventional) understandings are more common among less educated people, so this would suggest that the relation between knowledge and ideology would be stronger among the less educated, but if anything it was stronger among more educated people.  So I think that there really is a connection between knowledge and political views (people who knew more authors were also more likely to say they were Democrats, although the connection was weaker).  This doesn't mean that this knowledge affects political views; rather the general curiosity that makes people learn and remember the names could also make them more critical of tradition. 

PS:  This is the 15th anniversary of my first post.   I didn't really plan to keep the blog running this long, but coming up with new material has been easier than I expected.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

 

Long term, short term, part 2

 My last post showed that conservative confidence in science, education, and medicine dropped over the last several years.  What about other institutions?  Between 2016 and 2024, conservative confidence declined for 11 out of the 13 institutions that the GSS asks about, and one of the increases (banks and financial institutions) was very small.  The only substantial increase was for the Supreme Court.  Among liberals, confidence increased for six institutions and declined for seven.  The figure shows average liberal and conservative confidence across all institutions*:

Until 2008, conservative and liberal confidence was about the same.  Since then, liberal confidence has consistently been higher, but the size of the gap increased substantially in the 2020s.  

One of the institutions is "the executive branch of the federal government."  That is closely related to approval of the current president, so also calculated the average for all institutions except the executive:

This was close until diverging since 2018.  

So liberalism is now associated with more confidence in institutions in general.  Is this related to the growth of educational divisions in politics?  Sometimes people say that education is associated with more positive views of institutions--they'll be more likely to think that the people in charge ("the elites") know what they're doing.  There are several possible reasons, but the most obvious one is that educated people are in charge of most institutions.  Of course, the average educated person doesn't have much influence, but they'll have more shared understanding and chance of personal connections with the people who do.  On the other side, there is the argument that education makes people more critical.  I computed correlations of confidence in different institutions with degree (no high school diploma.....graduate education).

Science               .184
Supreme Court   .109
Business             .088
Medicine            .047
Executive           .031
Press                   .002

Banks                -.017
Congress           -.026
Religion            -.027
Education         -.042
Labor                -.095
Military             -.098

But these are averages over the whole time from the 1970s to 2020s.  In several cases, the correlation shifts over time.  The biggest changes:

The correlation was near zero in the early years, but is now negative.  That is, educated people have lost confidence faster than less educated people.

It started out negative and is now near zero--educated people have gained relative to less educated people.  

More and less educated people were about equally confident in the 1970s; now more educated people are more confident. This is different that the pattern for science, where more educated people have been more confident all along.

More educated people were less confident in the military in the early years,  but the difference has pretty much disappeared.  

With organized labor, you could say it reflects changes in composition--blue collar unions have declined and white collar unions (mostly in the public sector) have held steady or even grown.   But as many people have observed, the educational divide in military service has grown.  That is, educated people have become less likely to have military experience, but more likely to have confidence.  I think the changes are evidence of a point I've made in a number of posts:    that there's been a growth of social egalitarianism among more educated people.    Of course, it's possible that more educated people have less knowledge or understanding of less educated people than they used to.  But, contrary to what is often said, they have become less likely to express negative views of less educated people, or the institutions associated with less educated people.

*Except "banking and financial institutions"--that question didn't start until later.

Long term, short term

 The General Social Survey has a series of questions about confidence in "the people running" various institutions that has been asked since the early 1970s.  But the GSS was not the first to ask these questions--they were originally from the Harris Poll.  The very first time was in the 1965 survey of college students that I wrote about recently, but they were also asked of a national sample in 1967.  The figure shows average confidence in institutions in 1967 and 2024 (the most recent round of the GSS):

The line indicates equal confidence in both years.  With one exception, they are below the line, meaning average confidence was lower in 2024 than in 1967.  The exception is organized labor, where average confidence was almost exactly the same.  I think that is because organized labor has become less prominent:  there are fewer strikes or the threat of strikes, or large wage increases that might lead to inflation or tax increases.  In 1967, 23% said they had a great deal of confidence and 33% said that they had very little confidence:  in 2024, "great deal" had fallen to 18%, but "very little" had also fallen, to 24%.  So you could say that there's been a move towards indifference.

The other institutions all have substantial declines, but several stand out:

Congress has had the largest decline (-0.82; changes for the executive branch and the Supreme Court are about -0.6).  Science, military, and television have had relatively small declines (-.25 to -.33).  I've discussed confidence in the military before.  For TV, I think it's because people entertainment programming as well as news (questions specifically about TV news show a large decline).  The relatively small decline for "the scientific community" is interesting, since a lot of people have talked about the growth of anti-science attitudes in recent years.  The GSS also asks about medicine, and the decline is considerably larger than the decline for science (-.52 to -.24).  

I looked at confidence in science, medicine, and education in an earlier post, and noted that there was a growing split between liberals and conservatives in the last few years, presumably because of the reaction to Covid.  That was before the 2024 GSS came out, so here are the updated figures:

Very little change from 2022 to 2024.

A drop from 2022 to 2024 among both liberals and conservatives, but larger among conservatives.  Also, liberal confidence increased in 2018 and 2021, so the decline leaves them about where they were in 2016.  With conservatives, confidence is at its lowest level ever.  

Finally, education:

A slight increase from 2022 to 2024 among both liberals and conservatives.  

The liberal/conservative gap for confidence in education and science grew between 2016/8 and 2022, but stayed about the same between 2022 and 2024.  In contrast, the gap for confidence in medicine kept growing.  Why?  My thought is that more people are interested in medicine and feel like they have some basis for offering opinions--they can talk about what happened when they got a vaccine, or someone they know got a vaccine.  As a result, there's more momentum in public opinion when doubts start to grow.  Another possibility is that it was driven by the prominent role of RFK, Jr. in the presidential race.

[Data from the GSS and Odum Institute Data Archive]