We're going wrong

 Andrew Gelman had a post on "the last time that it seemed that the United States was coming apart, in the late 1960s."  He says that there was there was "the same feeling of things spinning out of control and the idea that conventional politics was failing."  I was going to leave a comment, but it expanded into this post: 

The most important difference is that in the late 1960s there was a lot more confidence in political and institutional leaders.  The Gallup poll sometimes asks people to rate public figures on a scale of +5 to -5.  In October 1968, 79% gave Richard Nixon a positive rating, with 23% giving him a +5, and only 6% giving a -5.   Hubert Humphrey got 72% positive, with 16% giving a +5 and 8 a -5.   In October 2024, 51% gave Donald Trump a positive rating, with 21% at +5 and 35% at -5.  Kamala Harris got 48% positive, with 16% at +5 and 29% at -5.   That is, in 1968 many people thought that both candidates were pretty good, and few people thought that the one they were voting against was terrible; now it's the reverse.  We also have data for confidence in "the people running" various institutions, from the Harris Poll in 1967 and the General Social Survey in 2024.  In 2024, confidence was lower for 12 of the 13 institutions, and about the same for the remaining one (organized labor.

But I think that the sense that things were spinning out of control continued through the 1970s and early 1980s.  Although there were ups and downs, there was a constant background of economic problems ("stagflation"), rising crime and social disorder, and international setbacks.  Confidence in all thirteen institutions fell between 1967 and 1980, although the 1980 levels are higher than today's, with the exception of the military and organized labor.  As far as political leaders:

Both Carter and Reagan got low ratings compared to most previous candidates, but both were favorable on balance:  Carter had 68% positive and Reagan 64%, and both had more +5 than -5 ratings.  Independent candidate John Anderson also had over 60% positive.  

Turning to the general mood, I have to rely on impressions rather than data.  I was born in 1959 and wasn't paying attention to politics and public affairs in the late 1960s, but my sense that most people thought that the country had serious problems, but that its leaders could solve them.  By the late 1970s, there was a feeling that maybe our problems were too big for anyone to solve.  Now there's a feeling that the leaders aren't even trying to solve problems, but are causing them.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

One way or the other

 Megan McArdle writes "Public trust in universities has plummeted over the past decade, among independents as well as conservatives, which is why Republicans now feel so free to attack them."  McArdle says that the major reason that trust has declined is that the prevailing political climate in universities has moved to the left:  they developed "a left-wing culture that appeared increasingly hostile to the society paying its bills."  It is true that the political climate at universities is well to the left of the nation as a whole, but that isn't a recent development:  the culture at leading universities has been moving to the left for a long time.  So if that's the cause, we should see a gradual decline of confidence over a long period of time.  Between the 1970s and the early 2010s, the Harris Poll regularly asked how much confidence you had in the "people in charge of running major educational institutions, such as colleges and universities."  There wasn't much trend--it declined from the 1970s to the 1990s and then bounced back (see this post).  Gallup started asking a similar question in 2015, and confidence declined substantially between 2015 and 2024.   Since the decline in confidence is limited to the last decade or so, the cause must also be a relatively recent development.  McArdle offers another possibility:  "the value of a college degree is stagnant and might fall as AI takes over much knowledge work."  The timing on this is a better fit:  payoff to a college degree rose until about 2010 and has stayed about the same, or maybe declined a little, since then.  However, the claim that stability in the college wage premium leads to a decline in confidence doesn't make sense:  it amounts to saying that people want to see college graduates continue to pull away from everyone else.

What if she has it backwards:  Republicans have attacked universities over the past decade, so public trust (especially among Republicans) has plummeted?  I don't have any measure of Republican rhetoric about universities, but my impression is that it has become increasingly negative in the past ten years or so.  There also seems to have been an increase in media coverage of campus "activism":  two prominent examples, at Yale and the University of Missouri, happened in 2015, and there have been many more since then.   Since 2023, there have been many protests about the conflict in Gaza.  The rate of very little or no confidence answers rose from 23% in 2023 to 32% in 2024, and then fell back to 23% in 2025.  That suggests that changes in public opinion are partly a reaction to actual events; although there were a lot of protests in 2024-5, they were less disruptive and administrations handled them more effectively (the surveys are taken in June).  There's also probably also a self-reinforcing process of more coverage creating more interest and more interest creating more coverage.  

Left, right, and elite, part 2

In my last post, I suggested that opinion differences between elites and the public didn't fall into the standard left/right pattern; this post will take a more systematic look.   The Chicago Council of Foreign Relations/Chicago Council on Global Affairs has a long-running series of surveys of foreign policy elites and the general public which include questions on the importance of different foreign policy goals.  The figure shows the importance that self-described liberals and conservatives in the general public put on these goals in 2016 (3 represents "very important," 2 "somewhat important" and 1 "not important at all").   

:

The correlation is -.37:  that is, the ones that are important to liberals tend to be less important to conservatives, and vice versa.  The figure suggests that they fall into two groups:  one which is strongly related to ideology (the ones that fall in a downward sloping line) and another on which there is a consensus that they are very important.  These are "preventing the spread of nuclear weapons," "combatting international terrorism," "protecting the jobs of American workers," and "attaining US energy independence."

There is a moderate positive correlation between elite and liberal ratings of importance (0.43), and essentially no correlation between elite and conservative ratings.  The figure shows elite and liberal ratings:

There are substantial differences for some of the items:  protecting jobs and attaining energy independence are very important to liberals in the public, but not that important to elites.  On the other side, "defending our allies' security" and "maintaining superior military power worldwide" are more important to elites than to liberals.  Going back to the first figure, you can see that military power is more of a conservative priority in the public, while defending allies is in the middle.  

The list of possible goals offered changes from time to time, so I will show the liberal/elite comparisons for a couple of other years.  

In 2014, they asked about "strengthening the United Nations"; liberals in the public regarded it as a lot more important than elites did.  As in 2016, elites rated protecting American jobs as less important and maintaining military power and defending allies security as more important then liberals did.  As in 2016, both rated "controlling and reducing illegal immigration" low, but it was substantially lower for elites than for liberals.  

The 2004 survey also included a question on protecting jobs, and again that was less important to elites than to liberals in the public.  Strengthening the UN was also included, and was rated higher by liberals, although the gap was smaller than in 2014.  Illegal immigration was also included:  liberals rated it as of moderate importance, while elites rated it low.  On the other side, elites rated "helping to improve the standard of living of less developed nations" as a lot more important than the public did.  

Finally, turning to changes in priorities, here are the ratings for liberals and conservatives on the six items that were included in both 2004 and 2016 (blue is 2004, red is 2016).  Movements on the horizontal axis represent change among conservatives, while movements on the vertical axis represent change among liberals.  Military power and illegal immigration became less important to liberals and more important to conservatives, while "combatting world hunger" become less important to conservatives and stayed about the same among liberals.  The other three stayed about the same for both.  

I won't show the figure for elites, just say that hunger become less important, maintaining military superiority more important, and the others stayed about the same.

So elite opinions are different from liberal opinions--and not in the sense of being farther to the left on all issues.  Elites have consistently rated protecting jobs and controlling and reducing illegal immigration as relatively unimportant.  Elite priorities also can't be characterized as straightforward internationalism:  they rate defending allies as important, but strengthening the UN as not very important.  

What's the source of the differences?  One possibility is demographic differences:  elites are more educated, and more likely to be white, male, and older.  But these factors don't account for much of the differences in opinion.   Another possibility is factual knowledge:  e. g., elites will know more about how close other nations are to getting nuclear weapons.  Then there are ideas about how things work--e. g., elites will be more aware of economists' view that protecting domestic jobs will have the cost of reducing our standard of living.  You could also add values, but these tend to go along with ideas about how things work:  e. g., that a higher standard of living will make less developed nations more stable and more peaceful, so helping them to achieve a higher standard of living is a matter of enlightened self-interest.  It's hard to measure "ideas about how things work" but it's safe to say that some combination of knowledge, experience, and interactions within elite groups may combine to produce a distinct viewpoint.  I offer more thoughts about the difference between elite and popular priorities on illegal immigration in this paper.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion]

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.