When after all it was you, not me, part 2

 Following up on some of the points in my last post:

1.  The Pew Research Center did some experiments with opt-in vs. probability-based online surveys.  As I suggested, it seems that many opt-in respondents aren't paying attention (or aren't taking the survey seriously)--they're just rushing through in order to get paid. But the Pew results were even worse than I expected, with the opt-in surveys producing some clearly nonsensical distributions of answers.  

2.  I said that general questions about whether violence is ever acceptable to achieve political goals weren't very informative--questions about how you felt about particular examples of violence would be better, but there aren't many of them.  I found one interesting example, from a 1968 Harris survey done for the National Commission the the Causes and Prevention of Violence.  They asked about how people felt after a number of (then) recent assassinations of political figures.  One of the sets of questions asked if they felt sad, leaning towards sad, in between, leaning towards relieved, or relieved on hearing of the event.  The distributions (for those who said they had heard about the assassination in question):

                                          Sad         in between     Relieved
JFK                                      88%            4%                    1%
RFK                                     84%            7%                    1%
King                                     60%          24%                    7%
Evers                                    52%          35%                    4%
Malcolm X                           24%          52%                  15%
George Lincoln Rockwell*  18%          54%                  17%

None of those people are really comparable to Charlie Kirk, but the results show that we shouldn't be surprised when some people have mixed or even positive feelings after the assassination of a controversial public figure.  Of course, we didn't have social media back in 1968, so those sentiments were less visible.

3.  The Harris survey also asked about a hypothetical case in which "Your Senator has blocked legislation which you believe is essential to protect the rights of every citizen. The Senator has come to your town and is making a speech in a public auditorium to gain support for his point of view," and whether you think that some kinds of protest would be "all right to take."  It also asked if "some of your friends" would think they were all right:

                                                                         You             Friends
Carry signs expressing disapproval                   74%           71%
Boo during pauses                                             29%            38%
Boo and stamp feet until he has to stop            13%             24%
Throw rotten tomatoes                                        4%             10%
Throw bottles**                                                  1%              6%
Use a gun or other weapon to inflict harm          1%              2%

4.  It occurred to me that there is another question that is relevant to political violence.  The General Social Survey has regularly asked "would you approve of a policeman striking a citizen who has said vulgar and obscene things to the policeman?"  Approval among self-described liberals and conservatives:

Approval is higher among conservatives, but the size of the gap changes:  it declined, but has increased in recent years.  The ratio of conservative to liberal approval:

It's not possible to put a precise date on when the ratio began to rise, but it has been consistently high in the Trump years:  2016 set a new high, which was broken in 2018 and again in 2024.  Although the question is not explicitly about political violence, it is relevant because one kind of political violence involves defending "law and order," even if that involves violating the law.  It's easy to imagine applications, like unofficial efforts to ensure "election integrity" or enforce immigration laws.  

*Rockwell was the leader of the American Nazi Party.  
**The question said "empty bottles or other objects which could not do serious or permanent harm."  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

When after all it was you, not me

 Since the murder of Charlie Kirk, people have been reposting one of his tweets from earlier this year, in which he said "assassination culture is spreading on the left.  Forty-eight percent of liberals say it would be at least somewhat justified to murder Elon Musk.  Fifty-five percent said the same about Donald Trump."  The source of these numbers is a report from the Network Contagion Research Institute published in April.  He didn't mention another figure from the report that I find even more remarkable--20% of conservatives said that it would be at least somewhat justified to murder Donald Trump.  Who were the people answering these questions?  A footnote says "using Prime Panels, we collected 2651 respondents.  Based on attention checks and those who took the survey in an unreasonable amount of time, we cleaned the dataset down to a final dataset of 1264 responses."  It's standard practice for online surveys to discard some cases (e. g., those that pick the first answer for every question), but more than half?  I didn't know anything about Prime Panels, but it's described here.  The key point is that it's a collection of "opt-in" panels--that is, people who sign up to do surveys in return for compensation.  That is, there's no effort to get a representative sample in the first place, and the extremely high rate of discarded answers suggests that respondents are not taking the survey very seriously (I wonder if some of the responses were generated by AI).  So we can continue the cleaning process by dropping the remaining 1264 cases and moving on.  

JD Vance also cited some survey data when he hosted the Charlie Kirk show.  He said that 24% of people who call themselves very liberal say it is acceptable to be happy at the death of  a political opponent, against only 3% of people who call themselves very conservative.  Also, 26%  of young liberals and only 7% of young conservatives say that political violence is sometimes justified.  These data  are from a legitimate survey organization, YouGov.  However, they are from surveys taken on September 10 and 11th, so they represent some combination of feelings about general principles and the particular case of violence that had just happened.  As far as I can tell, the question about whether it is acceptable to feel happy has never been asked before; there are a few general questions about whether political violence is ever justified, but they are all at least 20 years old.  There's also a problem of interpretation.  It's easy to think of examples of "violence in order to achieve political goals" that most people would regard as justified and even admirable--e. g., the American Revolution.  So I don't think that we can learn much from questions of this kind--questions about reactions to particular assassinations or assassination attempts would be more informative, but fortunately we haven't had many cases to ask about.    Moreover, there have been only few questions about those cases and they aren't comparable.

So far, my conclusions have all been negative, but there is one interesting additional piece of information in the YouGov report.  After the attack on Paul Pelosi in October 2022, they asked " How big of a problem do you think political violence is in the U.S. today?"  They repeated the question after the two attempts on Donald Trump, the attempt on Josh Shapiro, and the assassinations of Melissa Hortman and Charlie Kirk.  The figure shows the percent saying "a very big problem" broken down by party:  

Among Democrats. the level doesn't change much; among Republicans, it's substantially higher when the victim is a Republican.  Of course, with just five cases you can't draw strong conclusions, but I've found a similar pattern before--Republican views about the future of the next generation are more affected by the party of the president than Democratic views.  I think this has happened because Republican leaders have taken a catastrophist approach--saying that the Democrats, the universities, the media, etc.  are dominated by the radical Left, which is evil, vicious, and even demonic (all words used by Trump or Vance).  

The data I needed

 A new paper by Craig Volden, Jonathan Wai, and Alan E. Wiseman looks at the educational background of members of Congress over a 50-year period (1973-2021).  Their major conclusion is given in the title:  "On the Decline of Elite-Educated Republicans in Congress."  Over the years, Congressional Republicans have become less likely to have degrees from elite universities, while Democrats have become a little more likely.  As a result, a "diploma divide" has appeared, with Democrats more likely to have elite degrees.  The figure shows the percent of Democratic and Republican members of the House of Representatives who have elite degrees (see this Washington Post story for more figures).

  

Volden, Wai, and Wiseman also report that members with elite degrees have more liberal voting records than those without them.  The difference is larger for Republicans, suggesting that the declining representation of elite universities is related to the rightward move of Congressional Republicans over the period.

Taking both parties together, representation of elite degrees in the House has declined (it's been roughly constant in the Senate).  

I had done similar research on a smaller scale, comparing two Congresses (1953-5 and 2017-9).  I had expected to find a substantial increase in the percent with elite degrees, but that wasn't the case.  By my definition of elite, it only went from 17% to 18%.  I noticed that the share of elite degrees  declined among Republicans and increased among Democrats.  

Considering both studies together, it seems that the share from elite universities is about the same in recent years as it was in the early 1950s, but lower that in the 1970s:  that is, it peaked in the 1970s.  The Republican share of those with elite degrees was higher in the 1950s than the 1970s--that is, the changes since the 1970s continue a longer trend.  (Of course, our definitions of elite universities weren't identical, but they were similar enough so I'm pretty confident in these claims).  

In another post, I suggested that there has been a change in the relationship between elite university background and political orientation.  " At one time, elite colleges played an important part in creating an 'establishment'.... that's no longer the case, at least on the conservative side."  That is, I thought that Republicans with an elite educational background used to be more moderate, but that this was no longer the case.  The Volden, Wai, and Wiseman data lets me test that idea.  I divided it into four periods and compared the DW-Nominate scores of elite graduates and others (controlling for race, sex, and Hispanic status).  Negative numbers mean members with elite degrees have more liberal voting records.

                            House                        Senate
                            R            D            R            D
1973-80         -.045      -.052          -.201    -.043
1981-94        -.083       -.056           -.180    -.035
1995-2008    -.049       -.023            -.085    -.048
2009-21          .007      -.002               .021    -.070

Since 2009, Republicans with elite degrees have been just about the same as those without.  With Democrats, the difference has disappeared in the House, but stayed the same or maybe even grown in the Senate. So my hypothesis is supported:  among Republicans, having an elite degree is no longer associated with more more moderate views.  The reasoning behind the hypothesis was that as the political climate at elite universities has moved left, conservatives increasingly feel like an embattled minority, and consciously reject prevailing views rather than being influenced by them.  That suggests that the change should be mostly a generational one.  An alternative explanation is that party-line voting has become more common in recent years, especially among Republicans, so party is coming to dominate all other differences.  

What do you know?

 I've had several posts about the connection between tastes in reading and political views.  The basic conclusion is that people with more "sophisticated" tastes tend to be more liberal.  I recently ran across another relevant survey (from 1999) which asked people if they could name the authors of the following books:  The Cat in the Hat, Huckleberry Finn, The Shining, The Old Man and the Sea, The Firm, A Tale of Two Cities, A Farewell to Arms, The Great Gatsby, Moby Dick, and Crossings (I list them in order of the percent who gave the correct answer).  The mean was about three correct answers (it was open-ended, not multiple choice).   

The few political questions in the survey were not of much general interest, so I'll just look at ideological self-rating (very liberal to very conservative).  Among people who got 0-2 right (about 30% of the sample), 45% said they were conservative, 37% moderate, and 17% liberal; among people who got 6-10 right (about 20%), it was 27%, 48%, 25%.  If you regress ideology on age, sex, race, Hispanic status, education, and "knowledge" (number of correct answers), the estimate for knowledge was positive and statistically significant (.054 with a standard error of .014).  The estimate for education (1=no HS diploma... 4=college graduate) was .01 and not significantly different from zero.  

Why would knowledge of the names of authors be associated with ideological self-rating?  One possibility is that some people understood the terms in a non-political sense, e. g., "liberal" as meaning something like broad-minded.  Incorrect (or unconventional) understandings are more common among less educated people, so this would suggest that the relation between knowledge and ideology would be stronger among the less educated, but if anything it was stronger among more educated people.  So I think that there really is a connection between knowledge and political views (people who knew more authors were also more likely to say they were Democrats, although the connection was weaker).  This doesn't mean that this knowledge affects political views; rather the general curiosity that makes people learn and remember the names could also make them more critical of tradition. 

PS:  This is the 15th anniversary of my first post.   I didn't really plan to keep the blog running this long, but coming up with new material has been easier than I expected.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]