The other popular vote

Some observers say that the Republicans remain competitive only because they benefit from features of the American political system such as the Electoral College, equal representation of states in the Senate, and gerrymandering.   For example, this article in the New York Times notes the Democrats have won the popular vote in seven out of the last eight presidential elections and calls it "an unprecedented run of popular-vote success in U.S. history."   However, that's just presidential elections--during the same period, the Republicans have had majorities in the House of Representatives more than two-thirds of the time.  Is because Republicans have done well among voters or because of gerrymandering or clustering of Democratic voters in urban areas?  Nationwide vote totals for congressional elections are not routinely reported, but figures for 1946-2018 can be found in a report by the Brookings Institution. 

 It turns out that the Democratic share of seats in the House has exceeded their share of the votes in House races in 22 of the 37 congressional elections, but the advantage has shifted.  The figure shows share of seats vs. share of votes in two periods:

1946-1992 elections are in blue, 1994-2018 are in red.  The diagonal line is y=x, that is, share of the seats matches share of the vote.  Most of the points in the first period are above the line, meaning that the Democrats did better in seats than in votes, and most of those in the second period are below.  The Democratic advantage in seats in the first period may have been a result of the "solid South," which involved almost complete suppression of the black vote and low turnout among whites.  That is, the Democrats won a lot of Southern seats with low numbers of votes (even though they had high shares of the vote).  The current Democratic disadvantage probably reflects a tendency for votes to be "wasted" in non-competitive urban districts.  But whatever the reason, Democrats now are usually at a disadvantage in turning votes into House seats.  

The other thing to notice is the red vertical line, which marks equal vote shares.  In the first period, the points are almost all to the right of the line:  that is, Democrats got more votes.  Since 1994, this has changed--Republicans have gotten more votes in most elections.  The next figure shows the ratio of Democratic to Republican votes over time:

The Democratic share generally increased until the mid-1970s, then declined, before levelling off around 2000.  Although the swings in presidential vote shares from one election to the next have been small in the 21st century, swings in vote shares for the House of Representative have been fairly large--the 2010 swing was the largest since 1948.

I don't have any particular conclusion from all this--I just think it's data that deserves more attention.  

Self-interest, economics, and partisanship

 My last post didn't include any data.  That's because it involves a general framework for interpreting events rather than a specific proposition.  However, when looking at potentially relevant data I found an interesting pattern.  Since the 1970s, the GSS has included the question "Do you consider the amount of federal income tax which you have to pay as too high, about right, or too low?"  About 60% say that it's too high and hardly anyone (about 1%) says that it's too low.  You could say that this shows the importance of self-interest:  .  However, opinions on this issue didn't have much connection to partisanship or other political opinions.    The figure shows the average opinions about tax by party and income groups (the first three are roughly quartiles, and the fourth and fifth are roughly eighths.  There's no connection to partisanship except maybe in the highest income group.  

But that figure only includes data up to 2006.  The relationship has changed, and although I haven't examined it systematically, the change seems to have happened pretty quickly.  

Since 2008, Republicans have been more likely to say that they pay too much tax, and the gap grows with income.  High-income Republicans are the most likely to think that they pay too much (71% say too much, 0.2% say too little).  High income Democrats are the least likely:  37% too much, 10% too little (up from less than 3% in 1976-2006).  So this is an economic issue that has grown in importance.  Another interesting point:  that the averages are lower (more people say that they pay too little or about right) in 2008-21.   So you could say that there's been a move away from self-interest, but not away from economic issues--that people's ideas about fairness make more difference than they used to.  Of course, it's not definitive evidence of anything, but it's consistent with my interpretation from last time.

Or do they?

 Thomas Edsall recently had a piece that began by asking "Why do millions of Americans on both the right and the left ignore their own economic self-interest when they choose which political party to support?"  His answer was that "Partisan prioritization of cultural and racial issues has, to a notable extent, superseded the economic conflicts that once characterized the nation’s politics..."  This led to a change in the social bases of the parties: "millions of working- and middle-class whites have shifted their focus away from the goal of income redistribution ...to support the Republican preference for traditional, even reactionary, sociocultural values. At the same time, college-educated white voters have come to support tax and spending initiatives that subordinate their own financial self-interest in favor of redistribution and liberal social values."  He went on to say that this shift was the result of economic growth:  as people become more affluent, they can afford the "luxury" of voting on the basis of values rather than self-interest.  

As Edsall noted, this general analysis has been around for a long time.  In 1960, Seymour Martin Lipset said that the working class tended to support parties of the left because of "simple economic self-interest.   The leftist parties represent themselves as instruments of social change in the direction of equality; the lower-income groups support them in order to become economically better off, while the higher-income groups oppose them in order to maintain their economic advantages."  But Lipset also observed that working-class people tended to be more conservative on what we would now call "social issues" like civil liberties and ethnic tolerance.  So the relationship between class and party support would shift depending on the relative importance of economic and social issues.  The overall support for left and right would also change:  the left had an advantage on economic issues because there are more relatively poor people than right ones; the right had an advantage on social issues because it was associated with patriotism and "traditional values."  In the 1970s, Ronald Inglehart added the idea that as their standard of living increased, people would give lower priority to material interests and higher priority to values. Putting those together, you get a model of political change that seems to explain a number of important developments--the gradual shift in the class bases of left and right parties, the rise of a new "woke" left and "populist" right, and the decline of the traditional class-based left.  Edsall suggests that it also helps to explain the growth of inequality (less pressure from the working class to do something about it) and the rise of political polarization--"the displacement of economically based partisan conflict by racial and cultural issue-based conflict has escalated political and social animosity."

I've discussed aspects of this account in some of my academic work and some previous posts.  In this post, I will discuss the its general logic.  Although it certainly contains an element of truth, it goes wrong in treating four things as roughly equivalent:  self-interest, redistribution, economic issues, and class (income) politics.   First, there is a straightforward connection between redistribution and self-interest in the short term, but in the long term, self-interest also involves economic growth, and redistribution may affect growth. The poor person who opposes redistribution and the rich person who favors it can both make a case that they are following their self-interest.  Moreover, those cases don't depend on sophisticated economic analysis--you can put either one in common-sense terms.  Also, the long term doesn't have to be that long--a few years of recession versus strong economic growth can make a big difference.    Second, views of economic issues aren't just a matter of self-interest--they also involve values.  Of course, there is some tendency for ideas of fairness to align with self-interest, but they do matter, both in support for redistribution ("we can't just let people starve") and opposition ("I don't want a handout").  Third, redistribution can occur along many different lines, not just rich to poor.   Redistribution from rich to poor is the most efficient, in the sense that it raises the most revenue while antagonizing the smallest number of people, and that will give it some appeal to vote-seeking politicians.  But other kinds of redistribution are more likely to coincide with existing identities (e. g., ethnicity) or beliefs about fairness (e. g., helping veterans or old people).  So voting in favor of redistribution to yourself may not mean voting on class lines.  

I agree that increasing affluence means that self-interested redistribution becomes less important.  But that doesn't mean that economic issues or the general issue of inequality become less important, and doesn't directly imply anything about class alignments.  What it does mean is that the old style of patronage politics (get something for my constituents) declines at the expense of ideological politics (act on the basis of some principle or theory).  

Lipset's idea that the left does better when economic issues are primary remains popular today.  Moderate Democrats say that the party would do better if it stepped back the "culture wars" and emphasized "kitchen table" issues.  Progressives say that the party would benefit from taking a stand for the working class against the rich and corporations.  I don't think that this is true either--some parts of the traditional program of the left are popular (e. g., minimum wage laws), some are unpopular (e. g. aid to working-age people who aren't working), and some are mixed (e. g., support for unions).  So I don't think that a focus on economics has clear advantages or disadvantages for either side.  

I don't care if I never get back, part 2

In my last post, I discussed a question about whether you would like to work from home after the coronavirus pandemic was over.  Blacks were more interested in working from home and more educated people were less interested.   The survey also contained some questions about how different aspects of your job had changed since the beginning of the pandemic, so I compared racial and educational groups on these.  An alternative approach would be to look for group differences in the difference between people who reported working from home more than they had before the pandemic vs. those reporting working from home the same (or less, in few cases).  I looked and didn't see much of anything, but given the sample size, there's very little power to detect interactions, especially for race.  However, I think that the simple comparison is meaningful because even people who were not currently working from home had experienced it and in most cases were still affected by it because of having co-workers who were working from home.  That is, the great majority of people in jobs where it was possible to work from home were experiencing a workplace in which people weren't all in the same place at the same time.

 All of the questions had a more/less/the same format, so I summarized them as percent more minus percent less.  

                                       non-black            black

Flexibility in hours             +28                        +18
Job security                          -11                       -5
Balance work/family             -1                        -13
*Connected co-workers        -45                       -22
Opportunities to advance    -16                        -12
Know what's expected         -15                       -9
Productive                             +0                         +3
More hours                          +14                        +16

Satisfied with job                  -6                          +2

The biggest difference (and the only one that is statistically significant) is in feeling connected to your co-workers.  Both blacks and non-blacks say that they are less connected, but the drop among blacks is only about half as large.  One possible explanation is that they felt less connected before the pandemic, so they had less to lose.  But more blacks reported an increase in feeling connected (16% compared to 8%).   It seems likely that remote work led to an increase in the importance of formal relative to informal communications.  That could mean that people who hadn't been near the center of things now felt like they were being consulted more or hearing sooner than they had been.  Blacks also did relatively better in knowing what your supervisor expected, opportunities to advance, and feeling productive, although none of the differences were statistically significant.  So these differences give some support to the account in the New York Times story that I criticized last time--the idea was that remote work meant that blacks could focus on doing the job rather than on trying to break into the "old boys' club."

                                        high school            some college     BA+

*Flexibility in hours             +8                        +18                     +30
*Job security                          -1                       -2                      -15
Balance work/family             -36                       -25                  -50
*Connected co-workers        -36                      -25                   -50
Opportunities to advance    -11                        -14                   -17
*Know what's expected         -3                       -10                    -19
Productive                             +3                         +4                 -1
*More hours                          +4                        +8                   +19

Satisfied with job                  -9                         -0                    -6

For education, there are several statistically significant differences:  more education workers report more increase in flexibility, but more drop in connectedness, knowing what's expected, and job security.  There's little or no difference in reported productivity, but more educated workers report more increase in hours worked.  I would say that the differences in connectedness and knowing what's expected are because interaction at work isn't just a matter of socializing or team-building, as the Times articles suggest, but also sometimes involve exchanging complex information, which is harder to do effectively in remote work.  Exchanging complex information is likely to be a bigger part of the jobs done by more educated workers, which accounts for the differences.  The combination of increased flexibility and increased hours also seems likely to be due to a difference in the kind of jobs:  more educated workers are more likely to have open-ended jobs.  It's also interesting that the relative increase in work hours is almost exactly balanced by a relative decline in job security--if workers are putting in more hours, employers may think they don't need as many.  

Common sense suggests that remote work will have different effects for different people, depending on personality, type of work, family situation, and lots of other things.  Moreover, it's not hard to think of ways in which it could enhance workers' power against employers and other ways in which it could reduce it.  So I'm not sure why the Times has become so attached to an interpretation in which remote work is an unambiguous good.  (Since I wrote my first post, it ran another story about the alleged benefits of remote work, this one saying that people were more productive outside the office).

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research] 

I don't care if I never get back

Most claims of media bias involve partisan politics or left/right issues.  However, with those everyone is aware that there are differences of opinion and there are people and organizations who are recognized as representatives of major tendencies.  This puts some limits on bias--a journalist will try to have some balance between Democrats and Republicans, or experts from right-leaning and left-leaning think tanks.  With issues that don't fall into classic partisan or ideological terms, there won't be the same tendency to seek balance between different points of view, or even to realize that there are different points of view.   So bias may be more likely to occur on issues that aren't closely linked to traditional political divisions.

These thoughts are inspired by the coverage of remote vs. in-person work in the New York Times.  The prevailing tone is that remote work is obviously better.    Peter Coy says that "bosses are dragging white-collar workers back to the office despite evidence that they’re happier and often more productive when working from home," without linking to any evidence.   This  piece by Emma Goldberg cites a survey sponsored by "Future Forum, a research group backed by Slack," and then quotes a vice president of "Future Forum, Slack's research consortium."*  It offers several accounts of people who strongly favor remote work; it only briefly mentions that there are people who don't, and suggests that their reasons don't deserve to be taken very seriously:  "some people wrote to The Times to mourn their bonding conversations with teammates over Dungeons & Dragons, Nintendo and Marvel."

If they aren't going to look for data from established survey organizations that don't have an obvious financial stake in the issue, I'll have to do it myself.   Pew surveys in October 2020 and January 2022 asked "would you say that, for the most part, the responsibilities of your job can be done from home, or cannot be done from home?"  For those who said that they could (38% in 2020 and 39% in 2021) they asked "Looking ahead to when the coronavirus outbreak is over, if you had a choice, would you want to work from home all of the time, most of the time, some of the time, rarely, or never?"  The results:

                All      Most    Some  Rarely   Never

2020         27%    27%      33%      8%       3%
2022         35%    25%      28%      6%      3%

The 2020 survey also asked questions about how much people worked at home before the coronavirus outbreak and how much they worked at home now--about 70% were working at home more than they had been before--and about how some conditions at work had changed since the beginning of the outbreak.  By comparing the people who were working at home more than they had been to those who were not, we can get a sense of how remote work affected specific aspects of work.  I'll summarize the results by the difference between positive and negative responses.  For example, 21% of those who were working at home more said that they were more satisfied with their job than they had been and 23% were less satisfied (55% said no change), for a balance of -2.

                                    WFH more         WFH same/less

Satisfied with job                  -2                        -11
Flexibility in hours             +37                         +2
Job security                          -8                         -11
Balance work/family            +4                        -16
Connected co-workers        -53                        -15
Opportunities to advance    -17                        -12
Know what supervisor        -16                          -9
                  expects 
Productive                             +3                         -5
More hours                          +19                        +5

Some of the differences are as expected--people who were working at home more had a gain in flexibility of work hours and work/family balance.  They reported a big drop in feeling connected to their co-workers, which isn't surprising, but is sometimes disputed by supporters of remote work.   There are also some that are less predictable.  One is that people who are working from home report working more hours than before.  Another is that they have a larger decline in knowing what the supervisor expects of you.  Advocates of remote work sometimes claim that it reduces the role of office politics and personal likes and dislikes (see the Goldberg article), which would suggest that people who were working at home would gain in this department.  

The survey also contained the standard demographic variables.  I compared the preferences for frequency of remote work (5=all.....1=none).  Women were more favorable than men (3.77 vs. 3.61).  Blacks were more favorable than non-Hispanic whites (3.9 vs. 3.66).  For other ethnic groups, the confidence intervals were large, but the means were closer to the white mean than the black mean (they ranged from 3.6 to 3.73).  More educated people were less favorable to remote work--for all categories below a 4-year degree, the means were over 3.8, for a 4-year degree 3.74, and for a graduate degree 3.47.  Age, region of country, and living in a metropolitan area didn't make much difference.   There were also a few political variables--since so many things have become partisan issues, I figured I should look at those.  There was no clear pattern--people who said they were "very conservative" were more favorable to working from home, but there was no association with opinions on the handful of political questions in the survey.  

The obvious explanation for the differences in preference by gender is that women are expected to do more in taking care of the home and family, so they value flexibility more.  Explanation of the black/white and educational differences is as straightforward--I'll discuss those in my next post.  

*If the sampling procedures for the survey were clearly described, I wouldn't discount it just on the basis of its sponsorship.  But the description is vague and doesn't suggest that it was conducted by an organization with experience in survey research.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Generation to generation

 A couple of things following up on my last post:

1.  A comment asked about the possibility of changes in the dispersion of responses (people saying they are a lot better or worse off than their parents).  If we combine years into three groups:

                          much   somewhat    same    somewhat    much   
                         better     better                       worse          worse

1994-2000         33%     32%           22%      10%          3%

2002-2008         34%      32%          21%      10%          3%

2010-2021         28%      30%          25%      13%          5%

The distribution is almost the same in the first two periods.  Assessments are less favorable in the third, with little or no change in dispersion.

2.  In 1981, a Washington Post survey asked "Think of your parents when they were your age. Would you say you are better off financially than they were or not?"  Similar questions have been asked by the Post and other surveys, some offering just the two options, some offering three (better, worse, or the same).  It appeared to me that proportion saying better didn't change depending on whether there were two or three options--that is, people treated "not" as meaning "the same or worse."  The figure gives the percent saying "better off":      

There are some mysterious differences between surveys taken at about the same time, but there are also some clear trends.  As with the GSS, there is a decline in the 21st century.  The figure also shows that recent opinions are less positive than opinions in the early 1980s, when the economy was in recession.  However, a majority chose "better" at all times except the last one (2017).  That survey started off with four questions about finances before asking the one about comparison with parents.  Those questions included one about concerns about not saving enough for retirement, which is a point on which a lot of people are worried.  So I think the context pushed people in a negative direction.  But even on that survey, the balance was positive:  47% said they were better off and 29% said they were worse off. * Overall, I think this supports my conclusion from the GSS question:  assessments are not as favorable as they used to be, but are still favorable.  

*There was a question from 1980 that found 42% saying they were better off and 33% saying that they were worse off.  However, it didn't specify "at the same age" so I did not include it.