Friday, July 27, 2018

The s-word

There has been a lot of talk about socialism since the upset win of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (a member of the Democratic Socialists of America) in a New York congressional primary.  After the 2008 and 2012 elections, there were brief flurries of attention to socialism, with some people saying that support was on the rise.  There's some of that now, but most of the attention now seems to come from Republicans thinking that it's something that they can use against the Democrats.  In general, the public does have a negative view of socialism:  in the most recent question I could find, a 2016 Gallup poll, 35% said they had a positive image and 58% said they had a negative one.  That leads to a question of whether it's just a label, unconnected to other political views, or part of a pattern. 

I addressed this question using a 2011 Pew survey that asked people if they had a positive or negative reaction to socialism and five other political terms:  liberal, conservative, libertarian, progressive, and capitalism.  I computed correlations between each pair.  Views of "socialism" had a positive correlation with views of "liberal" and "progressive," and negative correlations with views of "conservative," and "capitalism."  More surprisingly, they had a positive correlation with views of "libertarian"--it was the second largest correlation, behind "liberal."  Since familiarity with ideological terms increases with education, I then did the correlations separately for college graduates and everyone else.  Of course, you can expect the correlations to be larger for college graduates, but there's a question of whether they are just stronger and weaker versions of the same underlying pattern, or two distinct patterns.  Among college graduates, there are positive correlations with "liberal" and "progressive," and negative ones with "conservative" and "capitalism."  The correlation with "libertarian" is essentially zero (.03), which you might regard as strange, but I'll leave that aside for the moment.  Among non-graduates, there are positive correlations with liberal, progressive, libertarian, and conservative.  The only negative correlation is with "capitalism" and that's not significantly different from zero.  There's a striking difference between liberal, where the correlation is .38 for educated people and .33 for less educated, and conservative, where the correlations are -.29 and +.085. 

I'm not sure exactly what to make of this, but it seems that less educated people have a different understanding of "socialism" than more educated people, and that it's not just a matter of being less familiar with ideological terms. 

Another interesting point is that the term "libertarian" apparently hasn't made much impression on the public--the three strongest correlations are with liberal, progressive, and socialist among non-graduates.  All of those are in what would conventionally be regarded as the wrong direction (positive).  The correlations with "capitalism" are small in both non-graduates and graduates (.07 and .08).

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

1 comment:

  1. David J. LittleboyJuly 28, 2018 at 9:12 AM

    My guess here is that very few people have the slightest idea as to what "libertarianism" is. I'm old enough that I remember Ayn Rand from the college lecture circuit back in the day. It's funny: her books are the worst schlock writing I've ever read and I can't imagine anyone reading them and not seeing how ridiculous libertarianism is. But Paul Ryan and the like think everyone should read them. Go figure.

    Inversely, I have sympathy for the Republicans screaming "Obamacare is socialism" and getting ignored. It was a humongous transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor and working poor, and really is socialism.

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