A couple of short items:
1. I have recently written about a question on whether the United States is the greatest country in the world, one of a number of great countries, or is behind some other countries. As you might expect, opinions differ by education: more educated people are less likely to say "greatest in the world." But the relationship was considerably stronger in 1955 than in 2015:
1955 Greatest Great Others better
No college 71% 28% 1%
Some college 55% 43% 2%
College grad 32% 65% 3%
2015 Greatest Great Others better
No college 40% 48% 12%
Some college 35% 51% 13%
College grad 27% 60% 13%
The questions aren't exactly the same--the 1955 one said "better than all other countries in every possible way," while the 2015 said "stands above all other countries." The 1955 statement sounds stronger to me, so maybe the greater educational difference reflects a greater gap between the options. The 1955 version was also asked in 1991 and 1996, so I'll look at educational differences on those in a future post.
2. When did partisan polarization on vaccines begin? Ross Douthat says "the mainstream right clearly found it easier to be uncomplicatedly pro-vaccine when anti-vax sentiment was coded as something for crunchy 'Left Coast' parents, as opposed to conservatives skeptical of the public-health bureaucracy ..." Other people have noticed that in the months before the 2020 election some prominent Democrats expressed skepticism about a "Trump vaccine." So did the partisan division once go in the opposite direction? A survey from September 18-21, 2020 asked "How likely, if at all, are you to get the first generation COVID-19 (coronavirus) vaccine, as soon as it's available?" The results by party:
Very Somewhat Not very Not at all
Democrats 10% 34% 28% 28%
Independents 12% 33% 26% 40%
Republicans 9% 28% 28% 35%
The differences are small, but Democrats were somewhat more likely to say that they would take it right away. It's possible that this reflects a general difference in confidence in the scientific/medical authorities, or it may involve the politics of the coronavirus--from an early stage, Republican leaders (especially Trump) suggested that it just wasn't that big a deal and would go away by itself, so Republicans may have been less likely to think that they needed to do anything.
[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]
I wonder how respondents understood the word "likely" in the September survey. As it turned out, my chance of getting the vaccine was about zero until about 3 months after it became available, so the correct answer for me would have been"very unlikely," regardless of my intention.
ReplyDeleteMy assumption was that they just thought about what they wanted, not about the possibility of practical barriers to getting vaccinated. I didn't have any evidence for that--I just hadn't thought about the issue--but a Fox survey from about the same time which asked "do you plan to" also showed Democrats more likely to say yes. There were some other interesting group differences in the Fox survey--I may have a full post on it later.
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