My last post involved a question asked in the GSS: agreement or disagreement with the statement: "people like me don't have any say about what the government does." The same question has appeared regularly in the American National Election Studies starting in 1952, but with only two or three options (agree or disagree, plus "neither agree nor disagree" starting in 1988) rather than the five offered by the GSS (strongly agree....strongly disagree). This post is about the ANES question.
I used the logarithm of the ratio of disagree to agree responses (in the early years, over 90% of people with a college degree disagreed, so ceiling effects are an issue). Here are the trends among college graduates and everyone else:
A pretty steady decline in "efficacy" (rejection of the statement that you have no say) among both groups, although if you look more closely there are deviations in the 1990s and 2000s). But the decline seems faster among college graduates. Here is the difference in the logs of the odds ratios:
The first two (1952 and 1956) are much higher, then a long period without much trend, and then apparently a decline in the gap in 2012 and 2016. The GSS and ANES series have only four dates in common, but they match up well in those years. Both agree in showing a decline in relative feelings of efficacy among college graduates in recent years. Many accounts of contemporary society hold that there's a growing gap between classes, in which the educated middle classes remain pretty satisfied while the working classes sink into despair. I've had some posts questioning that claim, and this is another point against it.
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