half a loaf (postscript)

 In my last post, I asked " why Democratic elites haven't made more effort to appeal to moderate voters on the issue [of abortion]"? I should have said something like "why Democratic elites haven't made more effort to appeal to moderate voters by adopting more moderate positions"?  As I suggested in a post a few years ago, another way to appeal to moderate voters is by focusing on the negative--fears of what the extremists on the other side might do.  That's what the Democrats have done, and it's worked pretty well because many prominent Republicans have taken extreme positions.  Also, there is an asymmetry on the abortion issue--it's easier to find shocking examples of women who were denied abortions that most people will agree should have been allowed (e. g., the case that came up shortly after the Dobbs decision, a 10-year-old rape victim who had to travel out of Ohio to get an abortion) than shocking examples of women who had abortions that most people agree shouldn't have been allowed.  So if it comes down to a contest of extreme positions, the side favoring legal abortion is likely to win.  

Half a loaf

 It's often said that "social issues" are more divisive than economic ones, and that increased political polarization in the United States reflects a shift from economic to social issues as the main focus of politics.  A good summary of this view is provided by William Galston, as quoted in a recent column by Thomas Edsall:  first, “The economic axis that defined our politics from the beginning of New Deal liberalism to the end of Reagan conservatism has been displaced," and then  "When the core political issues are matters of right and wrong rather than more and less, compromise becomes much more difficult, and disagreement becomes more intense. If I think we should spend X on farm programs and you think it should be 2X, neither of us thinks the other is immoral or evil. But if you think I’m murdering babies and I think you’re oppressing women, it’s hard for each of us not to characterize the other in morally negative terms."

I've criticized this analysis in a previous post, but since it keeps coming up, I'll elaborate here.  One problem is that economic issues can be seen as matters of right and wrong:  people often talk about fair or unfair pay, prices, and treatment of employees.  With his example of farm programs, part of the reason we have them is that many people think of the "family farm" as a good thing that deserves to be protected.  Another is implicit in his example of a moral issue, which is obviously abortion.  He implies that there's a binary choice between two ways of seeing it, but to a large extent opinions fall on a scale:  it should be legal up to some number of weeks, and banned or allowed only in limited circumstances after that time.   Only a minority take the extreme positions:   that it should never be allowed or that it should be allowed at any time.  In a June 2023 survey, 73% said abortion should be legal at 6 weeks into the pregnancy, 51% at 15 weeks, and 27% at 24 weeks.   This illustrates the more general point that "matters of right and wrong" can also be matters of "more or less."

Of course, abortion is a divisive issue and has been for a long time.  A major reason for this is that the parties have taken extreme positions.  The New York Times has a feature summarizing abortion laws in the states.  The distribution of gestational limits is shown in the figure (I show the laws that were passed, some of which have been overruled by state courts).  

Twenty states have complete bans or six-week limits, 24 have 24 weeks or beyond, and only 7 are in the range where median public opinion seems to fall.*  

So why have the parties taken extreme positions?  One possibility is that people with extreme views put more weight on the issue.  A 2015 Pew survey asked whether abortion should be legal in all cases, legal in most cases, illegal in most cases, or illegal in all cases and also asked how important the issue would be to you in deciding how to vote in the 2016 election.  The mean importance (1-4, higher means more important) by opinions on abortion:

legal in all     2.82
legal most     2.81
illegal most   3.18
illegal all       3.68

This is a big difference:  about 80% of the people who thought it should be illegal in all cases said the issue would be very important to them, versus about 40 percent in the other categories.  That is, it wasn't people with extreme positions in general who put weight on the issue, but just people with extreme anti-abortion positions.  Of course, this is just one survey, and it just just involves self-assessed importance, not volunteering, contributing money, and other forms of activism.  Still, it suggests that Republican politicians are more influenced by extreme views from "the base" than Democrats.  That leaves the question of why Democratic elites haven't made more effort to appeal to moderate voters on the issue.  I think that's because they're currently benefitting from the issue--they can appeal to moderate voters by pointing to what Republicans are doing or are trying to do.  If the Republicans moderate their position, the Democrats may have more incentive to moderate theirs.

*Of course, public opinion differs among the states, but not by enough to account for the differences in laws.  See the survey report here.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

The turning point? Part 2

 Many accounts of the rise and fall of Senator Joe McCarthy say that his popularity collapsed after a dramatic exchange in a Senate hearing ("have you no sense of decency?").  A few years ago, I had a post that looked at Gallup data on views of McCarthy and found no change after the incident.  But there was a drop in approval between March 2, 1954 and March 24, 1954, which I said might have been the result of a critical TV documentary by Edward R. Murrow that ran on March 9.  

Since that time, I've found more data--Gallup sometimes asked for ratings on a scale of +5 (like very much) to -5 (dislike very much), so you can collapse those into favorable (positive) and unfavorable (negative).  This makes it possible to extend the range of the analysis, looking at approval during and after the Senate investigation and censure vote against McCarthy (December 1954).  I also looked at news stories in the New York Times in March and in the June hearings. 

 It turns out that there was more going on in early March than the Murrow show.  On Sunday the "Week in Review" section had a long story which began "With startling suddenness, there arose in the U. S. last week the question:  has the tide turned against McCarthy?"  It went through events of the week, which started with an broadcast speech by Adlai Stevenson saying that the Republican party was "half Eisenhower and half McCarthy," and in addition to Murrow's program included a Senate speech by (Republican) Senator Ralph Flanders attacking McCarthy, a press conference by Eisenhower in which he made approving comments about Flanders's speech and dismissed Stevenson's claim, and an address by Vice-President Richard Nixon (McCarthy had demanded a chance to respond to Stevenson, but the party chose Nixon for the job) in which he was critical of McCarthy.  The exchange in June got a front-page story, which noted that the spectators burst into applause after Joseph Welch confronted McCarthy.  I was struck by this passage: "Senator Mundt has daily cautioned the audience to refrain from 'audible expressions of approval or disapproval' . . . under pain of being expelled from the room.  But he made no effort to control or admonish the crowd that applauded Mr. Welch's retort to Senator McCarthy."  Mundt, a Republican, was the acting chair of the committee [McCarthy had temporarily stepped aside].  

Now for the survey data:

Vertical lines indicate the "turn of the tide" week, the day of the McCarthy-Welch exchange, and the Senate censure vote against McCarthy. The figures on the vertical axis are percent favorable minus percent unfavorable ratings.   Blue dots represent the collapsed ten-point scale, red are approve/disapprove--there don't seem to be any systematic differences between them, so I'll treat them as equivalent.  

There was a clear drop in March, but nothing that happened after that point seems to have made much difference.  If anything, McCarthy's popularity might have recovered a little after the summer of 1954.  Before the "turn of the tide" his approval rating was generally around +10, and afterwards it was about -10.     

Putting this together, a sustained bipartisan effort had only a moderate impact on McCarthy's popularity.  Moreover, all of the impact came at the beginning--that is, he seemed to have a substantial core of support that stuck with him through everything.  

What does this episode suggest about contemporary support for Donald Trump?  One interpretation would be that even if most Republican elites had turned against him, it wouldn't have made much difference:  public confidence in political leaders and the media was much higher in 1954 then it is today, so any loss of support today would be much smaller than McCarthy's.  Moreover, Trump now seems to have a larger core of enthusiastic supporters than McCarthy did (only about 10% gave him a +5, a number that didn't change much).  However, I think it might have had more impact on the sense of viability:  that is, many of the people who approve of Trump and intend to support him for president in 2024 would approve of him and think he had been treated unfairly by "the elites," but figure he didn't have much chance anymore and look for someone else to vote for.  I don't have any solid evidence, but there are some hints in the surveys on McCarthy.  In December 1953, there was a question on who you would support for the Republican nomination in 1956 if the candidates were Eisenhower and McCarthy--9% said McCarthy and 12% weren't sure.  In March 1955 there were a couple of questions about who should get the nomination if Eisenhower didn't run for re-election:  McCarthy got 2% in one and 6% in the other.  That is, he got more support against a very popular incumbent in 1953 than he got against a collection of less prominent and less popular people in 1955.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Correction

 In my book, Public Opinion, I wrote about the interpretation of historical survey data:   "Sometimes the absence of survey questions can be telling.  No survey organization seems to have asked about the internment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War, or about reactions to the 1944 Supreme Court decision that found the internment to be constitutional, and this absence suggests that the policy was not regarded as particularly controversial at that time."  I had searched the Roper Center's iPoll database for questions, and may have checked the historical compilation published by the Gallup Poll in the 1970s.  But apparently I hadn't looked in Public Opinion, 1935-46 (by Hadley Cantril and Mildred Strunk), which attempted to collect the results for every survey question asked in those years.  That reported a series of questions from an NORC survey from March 1942:

Do you think we are doing the right thing in moving Japanese aliens (those who are not citizens) away from the Pacific coast?  Yes:  93%   No:  6%  DK: 1%

How about the Japanese who were born in this country and are United States citizens, do you think they should be moved?  Yes:  59%   No:  25%  DK:  16%

....do you think they should be kept under strict guard as prisoners of war, or do you think they should be allowed to go about fairly freely in their new community?
Strict guard:  65%   Go about freely:  28%    DK:  7%

Should the government alone decide what sort of work they are going to do, or should the Japanese themselves have something to say about it?

Government alone:  66%
Japanese have say:  22%
DK:                          12%

Of course, my general point is still true, and I correctly guessed that the policy was not particularly controversial.  The 59% who thought that Japanese-American citizens should be moved was actually a bit lower than I would have guessed.  It would be interesting to know if opposition rose over time, but while there were a couple of later questions about whether the people who had been moved should be allowed to return to their homes after the war, Cantril and Strunk don't report any others about general support for the policy.  

A concluding thought:  if enough people buy my book, the publisher might publish a second edition, and then I'll be able to correct this misinformation.  

What’s the matter with college graduates?

 Traditionally, more educated people were more likely to vote for conservative parties, even if you adjusted for income, but this relationship has weakened or reversed in many nations, including the United States.  The usual explanation for this change is more educated people are more conservative on economic issues, but more liberal on “social issues," so changes in voting pattern reflect changes in the relative importance of economic and social issues.   To quote David Leonhardt, “people vote based less on their income and more on their cultural attitudes.”  

 But there’s another possible explanation of the shift that hasn’t gotten much attention:  maybe the relationship between education and economic opinions is changing.  I considered this possibility in a paper that I presented last week at the World Congress of Sociology using data from a large number of nations included in the World Values Survey.  I considered four questions—whether incomes should be made more equal, whether government ownership of business should be increased, whether the government should take more responsibility for caring for people, and whether competition is bad because it brings out the worst in people—and computed the difference between the opinions of university graduates and others, adjusting for income (and a few other variables).  The figure shows the association of higher education with the sum of opinions on the four questions:

The horizontal red line indicates no difference:  below that line means more educated people are more conservative than less educated people, above means they are to the left of less educated people.  The relationship seems to change with per-capita GDP:  in poorer nations, university graduates are to the right of other people on these issues, but in more affluent nations, they are generally to the left.   (This relationship does not hold in the formerly socialist nations). 

Of course, the affluent nations differ from the poorer nations in a number of ways:  most obviously, they are generally in Western Europe or were settled by people from Western Europe.  So a cross-sectional relationship between per-capita GDP and the direction of opinion could reflect enduring cultural differences rather than affluence.  Fortunately, the WVS has included these questions since 1990, so it’s possible to see if the relationship has changed over the last 30 years.  Here are the changes, adjusting for differences in the nations included in different waves.  The zero point is the differences in 1990–positive values mean more leftward (or less rightward) differences relative to 1990.

For three of the four questions, the “education gap” has moved to the left--for competition, there hasn't been any clear change.  The move is pretty steady, although there seems to be some short-term variation (between the first and second waves, there was no change, or maybe even a small rightward change).  

So it seems that there’s something about “modernization” or economic development that leads to a change in the relationship between education and economic views.  What might that be?  One possibility is that affluence does increase the importance of "values" relative to immediate self-interest, but that economic opinions reflect mix of self-interest and values rather than immediate self-interest.  That is, educated people become more willing to help the poor even if that might increase their taxes, and less educated people become more willing to refuse a "handout" even if they would benefit.   Robert Lane proposed that freedom and equality were core principles of modern society, and although almost everyone accepts them in a general way, more educated people are more likely to apply them consistently--as a result, people in "the professional class" were more likely to be consistent egalitarians than people in the working class.  I think he may have been on to something.