An improbable event

 My last post was about a question on whether "the government is trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses" or "the government should do more to solve our country’s problems."  In recent surveys, opinions on that question were farther to the left (government should do more) than they ever had been since the question was first asked in the mid-1980s.  I said that the GSS had asked essentially the same question in 1975 and 1983, and that a NORC survey had asked it in 1974, making it possible to take the history back farther, and that I would do that in a future post, although probably not the next one.  But improbable things happen sometimes, so I will do it in this post.  

The questions I wrote about last time all involved a choice between two statements.  The NORC questions asked people to place themselves on scales ranging from full agreement with one statement to full agreement with the other.  The GSS used a 5-point scale, and the earlier NORC survey used a seven-point scale, so there was a point that was midway in between the two.  In order to make the values comparable, I calculated the ratio of people who placed themselves closer to the "government should do more" end to those who placed themselves closer to the "doing to many things" end, omitting those who took the middle option, and took the logarithm of that ratio.  The results:

There is a lot of short-term variation and no clear trend.  In 2014, opinions were the most conservative ever--by 2018, they were the most liberal since 1990.  In the question I considered last time, opinions became more conservative in the early 1990s, and then more liberal--in the GSS, they became more conservative throughout the 1990s.  

What if we look at them all together?

 

Here they are, with the NORC/GSS results in red.  There's a lot of variation among surveys taken at approximately the same time, which seems reasonable to me--I think that answers to this question might be more affected by context than most (e. g., more conservative if preceded by questions about taxes than if preceded by questions about education and health care).  Some of the GSS results are a bit out of line with those in most contemporary surveys, but none are real outliers.  So it seems reasonable to take them all together.  In order to show the trend more clearly, I use a smoothed estimate.*

In my last post, I said that the current leftward movement started in the "early 2010s and has been pretty steady."  On closer examination, I don't think that's true, or at least not clear.  There wasn't much change through 2014, and then there was a gap until the GSS in the first part of 2016.  There were only two other questions in 2016, and they were November and December.  So it's hard to say what was happening in the last few years of the Obama administration, but opinions definitely became more liberal under Trump, and are now to the left of where they were in the mid-1970s and early 1990s.  There is some tendency for opinions to go left under Republicans and to the right under Democrats, however, so that may not last.  As I've mentioned before, the early 1990s really stand out for a strong rightward movement.  People tend to ascribe Republican success in the 1994 elections to Newt Gingrich's strategy, but I think there was definitely more going on, although I'm not sure what it was.  

*There are lots of methods of smoothing, and things are complicated because these observations aren't equally spaced.  I tried several and picked the one that had the best match to my own impressions.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

To the left?

 Last week the Washington Post had a story saying that public opinion was moving in favor of a more activist government.  It relied on the following survey question: "some people think the government is trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses. Others think that government should do more to solve our country’s problems. Which comes closer to your view?”  Although the story just gave a few comparisons, this question has been asked frequently since the 1980s, so I wanted to look at the whole series.  Here is a plot of the logarithm of the ratio of "do more" to "too many things": 

  There are two major shifts in a conservative (government doing too much) direction:  the early 1990s and around 2009-10.  The first one corresponds to the first couple of years of the Clinton administration, the second to the first couple of years of the Obama administration.  You could explain them as a reaction against what people perceived as governmental overreach, but this raises a question of why Biden hasn't met with the same kind of reaction.  Also, it's interesting that the shift in the 1990s was bigger than the shift in 2009-10, although Clinton's administration was less ambitious than Obama's (its most prominent policy achievement was NAFTA, which wasn't really a big government vs. small government issue).  As I've remarked a number of times, the public just seemed to have a negative feeling about government in the early 1990s.  The move in favor of an active government doesn't seem to be just a reaction against Trump--it appears to have started in the early 2010s and been pretty steady since that time.  

The General Social Survey asked the same question in 1975, and regularly since 1983, and a NORC survey asked it in 1973, but rather than asking people to choose one statement, they asked them to place themselves on a five-point scale.   I show the means for the GSS item in this post:  they don't seem to show a leftward movement in recent years.   In a future post (probably not my next one, but pretty soon), I'll have a more detailed comparison.    

Note:  there were some questions in which the first option was "solve problems and help meet the needs of people."  These seemed to get a consistently more pro-government response than the usual form, so I didn't include them. 

[data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Lived experiences

In the Washington Post, Jonathan Capehart says "There is no one way to be Black in America, but there is one way we live while Black in America. No matter our gender, age or socioeconomic status, we are viewed as threats. . . Every Black person you know goes through some form of mental calculus before they start their day. . . . My mother taught me the first few pieces of this calculus when I was a kid. Don’t run in public. Don’t run in public with anything in your hands. Don’t talk back to the police."  

I've seen many similar statements, but this one inspired me to look for data on black and white views of the police--not general approval or disapproval, but one's own interactions or potential interactions with them.  I didn't find anything recent (although some related questions are mentioned in this article), but there were two from the 1990s (1992 and 1997) that asked "In everyday interactions with the police, do you ever feel that you are at risk of being treated unfairly?"  In the 1997 survey 38% said that they did feel that way.  Breaking it down by race and ethnicity:

                        Yes           No        DK   

White            34%            62%       4%

Black             60%            35%        5%

Hispanic        49%            44%        7%

Realistically, you can't expect to see 100% of a group offering the same answer to a survey question, but 60% is a long way from "every Black person"--a substantial number did not "ever feel that you are at risk of being treated unfairly" (and a substantial number of whites did). 

 Breaking it down by groups within race (black and all others), the percent who felt at risk:  

Black men                         67%

Black women                    55%

Non-black men                 42%

Non-black women            29%

 Among both blacks and non-blacks, men were more likely to expect unfair treatment.

 

Black, metro areas                61%

Black, non-metro                 57%

Non-black, metro                38%

Non-black, non-metro        27%  

 Among non-blacks, people in non-metro areas (ie not part of an MSA) are less likely to expect unfair treatment; among blacks, it's not clear if there's a difference.

 Age: among non-blacks, older people are less likely to expect unfair treatment (going from 44% among those under 30 to 20% among those over 65); among blacks, there's no evidence that age makes a difference.  I wonder if it's a matter of generation--that black people who grew up in earlier periods had more memories of mistreatment.  

Education and income:  neither one had any clear influence among either blacks or non-blacks.  Although it seems likely that people with less education and income get worse treatment, there may be an offsetting difference in standards of what people regard as unfair.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

 

 

Trump and the trend

Almost everyone who wrote about the 2016 and 2020 elections said that Donald Trump appealed to the "white working class."  In the Washington Post, Nicholas Carnes and Noam Lupu argue that almost everyone was wrong:  the headline is "Trump didn’t bring White working-class voters to the Republican Party. The data suggest he kept them away."  A smaller heading under that says "White working-class voters had been moving to the Republican Party for years. Trump stopped the trend."  Those headlines are a bit misleading (they were probably written by editors)--according to their figures, Trump's 2016 share of the white working class vote was the highest of any Republican in the period covered by their data (which in 1980), and his share in 2020 was the second highest.  But his strong performance was just a continuation of a long-term trend--2016 and 2020 don't stand out as unusual.  

I looked at this issue in a  couple of posts, and said that there was a long-term trend in the effects of college education on vote, but that 2016 was unusual--Trump's relative performance among less educated voters was much better than any previous Republican.  Why were my conclusions different?  One difference is that I looked at relative performance--Carnes and Lupu looked at actual share of the "white working class" vote.  Another is data sources--they used the American National Election Studies and I used exit polls.  The ANES data are generally regarded as of higher quality (they are a national probability sample and have a high response rate) but the samples are smaller, so they are more affected by sampling error.  Finally, Carnes and Lupu take account of both education and income:  they define the working class as people without a college degree who are below the median income.  Taking account of income is good, but cutting the size of the "working class" also means more sampling error.  The result is that there's a good deal of noise in their estimates, making it harder to see if any election deviates from the trend. 

An alternative way to take about of both income and education is to estimate the effects of both together.  I did this using the General Social Survey, partly because the samples are usually larger, but mostly because I'm more familiar with that data set.  I did logistic regressions of Democratic vs. Republican votes (omitting third parties) on a dummy variable for college graduates vs. all others and the logarithm of household income (adjusted for inflation).  The estimated effects of college degree:

Higher values mean that people with a college degree are relatively more likely to support the Democrats and people without are relatively more likely to support the Republicans.  There is an upward trend, but a clear jump in 2016--it's well above the predicted values from a time trend fitted to the 1968 to 2012 data.  

Now the effect of income:  all values are negative, meaning that higher income goes with support for the Republican candidate (controlling for education).   There is no apparent trend--the highest value (greatest Republican appeal to low-income voters) was in the 1968 election, but that was a small sample.  The 2016 value was not unusual.  

 

 So Trump had unusually strong relative appeal to voters with less education, but not to voters with lower incomes.  Rather than trying to translate that into a generalization about the working class, I'd just talk about education and income.  

    The "relative appeal" connects to my first point about the Carnes & Lupu analysis.  Trump got about the same share of the vote as Mitt Romney had in 2012, but he did better among people without a college degree and worse among college graduates.  Of course, that's not all because of the difference between Trump and Romney--they had different opponents and were running under different circumstances.  The comparison we really want is to an "ordinary" Republican running against Hillary Clinton in 2016, and of course we can't know that.  But still, it would seem reasonable to start by assuming that the difference was partly appeal to less educated voters and partly repelling more educated voters. Most of the commentary seemed to focus on the first part and ignore the second.  So although I disagree with Carnes and Lupu on one point--the distinctiveness of 2016--I think they made a contribution in raising questions about whether Trump had a special appeal to the "working class."

 

 Note:  if would be reasonable to focus on groups defined by a combination of income and education if there was some interaction between them--more exactly, a three-way interaction so that income/education groups shifted position from one election to the next.  There is some evidence of an interaction between income and education--income seems to have more effect among people without a college degree--but no evidence that the relationship changes from one election to the next.  That is, the effect of education changes, the effect of income changes, but there's no evidence that the effect of the combination changes.