A hypothesis about conspiracy theories

 I'm interested in the relationship between political views and belief in conspiracy theories, and have had several posts on the issue.  In the cases I've looked at, there wasn't much connection, but Matthew Yglesias suggests one is emerging:  "Democrats are much more buttoned-up, and the GOP is much more accepting of cranks and know-nothings." (I was reminded by Andrew Gelman's post).  It turns out that there is some relevant data:  there have been a number of questions about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, first in 1966 and most recently in 2023.  The basic form is "do you think that one man was responsible for the assassination of President Kennedy, or do you think that others were involved?"  (Some added "in a conspiracy," but that didn't make any clear difference).   I'm not saying that believing that others were involved is a "crank" view--I would answer "don't know" to the question about whether more than one person was involved--but the inclination to think that things were or were not the result of a conspiracy is important.

The figure shows the balance of opinion for Democrats and Republicans (I'll get to independents later)--percent choosing "one man" minus percent choosing "others were involved."  From 1966 through 2013, Democrats were a little more likely to think that others were involved, but in 2023 they were substantially less likely.  Another way to look at it is that between 2013 and 2023, Democrats moved towards thinking that only one person was involved, while Republicans moved towards thinking that more than one was involved.  Until then, Democratic and Republican opinions had generally moved in the same direction.

Did partisanship affect the recent change in Democratic opinions, Republican opinions, or both?  With things like economic conditions or crime, there are objective measures that you can use as a benchmark.  That isn't the case here--the truth is whatever it's been all along--and as far as I know no major new evidence emerged between 2013 and 2023.  Between 2003 and 2013, both Democrats and Republicans moved towards thinking that one person was responsible, which may be because as time passes fewer people feel strongly enough to reject the official account.  That would suggest that the trend would continue, which it did for Democrats, so that Republicans were the ones affected by partisanship.  Another approach would be to take the change among independents as the standard.  It's shown here:

Like Republicans, they moved back in the direction of "others involved."  That suggests that Democrats were more affected by partisanship.  So you could argue it either way.  

I think that the changes were mostly a matter of people following their party, rather than people shifting between parties because of their general feelings about conspiracy theories.  Even though the JFK assassination was not a partisan issue, as Republicans said that the authorities were hiding the truth about the 2020 election and Covid vaccines, Republicans would be more likely to think that they were hiding the truth about other things; on the other side, Democrats would be more likely to think that that challenges to the official account were attacks on expertise.  But regardless of whether the shifts were between parties or between parties, a partisan gap has emerged.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

The winters of our discontent

 Back in 2011, I wrote about a question first asked by Gallup in 1952:  "As you look to the future, do you think life for people generally will get better, or will it get worse?"  I've also  had several posts on a question first asked in 1983:  "In America, each generation has tried to have a better life than their parents, with a better living standard, better homes, a better education, etc. How likely do you think it is that today's youth will have a better life than their parents--very likely, somewhat likely, somewhat unlikely, or very unlikely?"  Then I recently ran across two questions on how much confidence you have in the future of the United States:  one gives a choice of quite a lot, some, very little, or none; the other gives a great deal, quite a lot, some, or very little.  The figure gives the results, summarized as positive minus negative answers, for all four questions:*  

  I fit a model in which answers are a combination of question plus year effects: the next figure shows the year effects, which can be regarded as representing the general view of the future in that year.  The zero point on the y scale is arbitrary, but the ups and downs are meaningful.

There is clearly a downward trend, but also a lot of year-to-year variation.  It dropped substantially in 2017, then bounced back in 2018 and 2019, before dropping to new lows after 2021.  

However, although all of the questions involve the future, the first two are about individual standards of living, while the last two are about the "United States."  Asking about the United States may make people think about institutions, particularly governmental institutions, so the trends might be different than for the questions about conditions of life.  Unfortunately, because of gaps in when the questions were asked, it's hard to be sure. But looking over the period since the 1970s, the downward trend seems to be stronger for the future of the United States than for the future of standards of living.  In 2016, net opinion on the "today's youth" question was +10, about the same as it was in 1995-96.  That is, views about the future of the economy were similar in  the year when incumbent Bill Clinton won easily and the year when Hillary Clinton was upset by Donald Trump.  I've said before that discontent with politics and political institutions is not primarily a symptom of discontent with the economy or everyday life, and I think that this is further evidence for that position.  

*For the questions with four options, I count the first two as positive and the last two as negative.  As a result, "some" is counted as positive for the first future of the US question but negative for the second.  An alternative approach would be to count a great deal and quite a lot as positive--ie, one out of four for the first question and two out of four for the second.  I chose to do it the way I did because people don't seem to pay much attention to the exact wording of the answers for questions of this type.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Whisky, you're the devil?

 In 2001, Gallup asked "Do you personally, think drinking in moderation--that is, one or two drinks a day--is good for your health, makes no difference, or is bad for your health?"  22% said good, 46% no difference, and 27% bad.  They have asked the question a number of times since then, most recently in 2024.  The figure shows the balance of opinion (percent good minus percent bad) over time:

It's a clear downward trend--that is, a shift towards seeing moderate drinking as bad for health.  More exactly, it seems like a small downward trend until 2018, followed by a larger downward trend.  Since the number of observations is small, it's not possible to be sure about the exact timing, but it is clear that there's been a stronger downward trend in "recent" years.  

A lot of people say that we no longer have a shared social reality, that people no longer trust authorities but instead just believe what they want to believe.  This is an issue on which the desire to come to particular conclusions is strong:  people who enjoy the gift of Bacchus will want to believe that moderate drinking is good for you, or at least harmless, while people who have religious objections to drinking will want to believe that it is harmful as well as sinful.  Yet there's been a large shift in opinion in a fairly short period of time.  There hasn't been a definitive study that's settled the issue, but my impression is that the tone of media coverage has changed:  there have been a lot of articles like this one that appeared in the New York Times yesterday, which has the online headline "Evidence Against Drinking has Grown."  

Demographic breakdowns aren't available for most of the surveys, but I have them for 2011 and 2024.

                         2011         2024           change

White                +4              -27           -31
NonWhite          -8              -53           -45

No Coll            -13               -41           -28
Some Coll         -9               -38            -29
Coll grad           +9              -32            -41

Men                   +8               -27            -35
Women              -13              -44            -31

Dem                    -2                -46            -44
Rep                     -6                -29            -23
Ind                        0               -36            -36

There has been substantial move in all groups towards saying that moderate drinking is bad for health.   The shift is smaller among Republicans than among Democrats:  the party difference in 2024 is statistically significant, although not overwhelmingly so (t of about 3).  This might reflect lower Republican trust in the media or scientific authorities.  But the basic picture is that all kinds of people become more likely to say that moderate drinking is bad for health.    Of course, people have more respect for medicine than for other institutions, but with rare exceptions, they only learn about the views of medical experts through the media.   That is, even though many people say that they don't trust the media (especially the "corporate media" or "legacy media"), they still generally follow it on issues that aren't the subject of political contestation.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

A tale of two columns, part 3

 My last post noted that although confidence in the military had increased since the 1970s, it had declined in the last few years.  I wondered if this drop had been across the board or differed by party, so I got partisan breakdowns for 2019-2024 and added a few earlier years for comparison (the surveys on confidence have been taken almost every year since the 1980s, but I didn't have time to enter data for all of them).  Average confidence in the military by party:

Republican confidence rose dramatically between 1999 and 2004, and then stayed high during the Obama and Trump administrations, before dropping during the Biden administration.  Democratic confidence hasn't changed much, except for an unusually high level in 2011.  The partisan gap was much smaller during the Biden administration than during the Trump administration.  As it happened, Kristen Soltis Anderson talked about this issue in a column in the New York Times today.  She treated it as a new development--"something important is unfolding in America that hasn’t happened in many years: We’re more united in our outlook about our country’s institutions"--which she suggested was related to an ideological realignment of the parties.  However, from another point of view there's a consistent pattern:  partisan differences were smaller in the Obama and Clinton administrations than in both the Bush and Trump administrations.  A pattern like this could be explained as a combination of two things:  Republicans tend to have more confidence in the military and people have more confidence in when the president is from their own party (which makes some sense, the President is commander-in-chief).

But confidence in the military obviously can be influenced by other things as well:  presumably the initial success in the Iraq war helps to explain the rise between 1999 and 2004.  What about the decline under Biden?  There was one notable negative event:  the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which did not go well and was followed by a substantial decline in Biden't approval ratings.  But that was in August 2021, and the surveys are taken in June.  Republican confidence dropped sharply between 2020 and 2021--that is, before the withdrawal--and actually rose a little between 2021 and 2022.  So the drop seems to have been simply a response to the change in administrations, not to military failure.  But that raises the question of why there wasn't a similar drop in Republican confidence under Obama.  One possibility is a general halo effect--a sense of optimism under Obama that colored views of all institutions (at least in the early years).   In any case, I think I'm justified in closing with the cliche that more research is needed.

A tale of two columns, part 2

As I mentioned last time, there are some exceptions to the general pattern of declining confidence in institutions.  One is small business:

Levels of confidence are high--the average is just below 3, or "quite a lot" of confidence--and there's not much year-to-year variation.*  I think the reason that small business is an exception to the declining trend is that there's no partisan dispute--both parties talk about their fondness for small business.  

Another is the criminal justice system:

There seems to be a pattern:  a rise until the early 2000s, and then a fall, leaving confidence about the same at the end as at the beginning (1993).  The rise could reflect "performance"--the decline in the crime rate during the 1990s and early 2000s.  Crime hasn't changed consistently in the past couple of decades, so it's followed the general decline in institutional confidence.  

Confidence in the police has declined, but the decline has been slower than for most institutions:

The pattern is similar to criminal justice:  steady or a slight increase until the early 21st century, and then a decline.  Again, the decline in crime during the 1990s could help to explain the pattern.

Finally, two institutions for which data goes back to the 1970s:  organized labor and the military.

Confidence is labor has generally increased since about 2015, although it is still lower than it was in the 1970s.  

Confidence in the military hit a low in 1981, then increased until the second half of the 2010s.  Although it's declined over the last few years, it's still higher than it was in the 1970s.  

I think the reason that labor and the military are exceptions to the general pattern is that partisan controversy involving them has declined.  With organized labor, that's mostly because it's become less powerful--strikes are rare and contract negotiations are no longer big news stories--so there are fewer occasions for controversy.  With the military, Democratic politicians have become less critical--e. g., allegations of wasteful military spending used to be a prominent issue.  It seems like there was a shift from both sides:  Democrats didn't want to be seen as anti-military, and the military wanted to have bipartisan support.  However, confidence in the military has declined substantially since about 2019--I will try to get a partisan breakdown to see if that sheds any light.

*The y-axes have the same range for all institutions (0.9 between the high and low) so the amount of variation can be compared visually.  

A tale of two columns, part 1

 In his final column for the New York Times, Paul Krugman talks about a change from when he started writing it in January 2000:    "What strikes me, looking back, is how optimistic many people . . .  were back then and the extent to which that optimism has been replaced by anger and resentment."  He observes that this isn't just dissatisfaction with politics:  "It’s astonishing to look back and see how much more favorably banks were viewed before the financial crisis."  This statement includes a link to Gallup data on confidence in institutions; I've written about them before, but time has passed and more data have accumulated, so this seems like a good occasion to revisit them.

Has there been a general decline in confidence over the 21st century?  The figure shows the average adjusted for changes in the list of institutions they asked about*:

Opinions in 2000 were more favorable than opinions today, but less positive than they'd been in the 1970s.  On the other hand, they were more favorable than they'd been in the early 1990s, so someone looking back in 2000 might have said that there had been a decline, but we've turned things around and are on the way up.  Now it looks like the increase in the 1990s was a temporary interruption in a long decline.  

What could account for the changes?  One possibility is changes in general outlook:  people may have become less "deferential"--less likely to give institutions the benefit of the doubt and assume that their leaders are competent and well-meaning.   You would expect this to be a gradual change depending mostly on generational replacement:  it couldn't account for the upward movement in the 1990s or the rapid decline in the last few years.  What relevant factors might change over a shorter time period?  One possibility is the performance of institutions:  for example, in a column  that appeared a few days after Krugman's, Bret Stephens said "So many things in American life feel broken. Our public schools, which keep getting more money even as they produce worse outcomes."   Another is partisan politics:  political figures influence public opinion because they get a lot of media coverage and because people know whether they are generally aligned with their point of view.  So if prominent politicians criticize an institution, opinion will become more negative.  In principle, there could be equal and opposite effects:  if Republican politicians say negative things about an institution, Republicans will become more negative but Democrats will become more positive.  However, I think the negative effects will generally be stronger:  people who aren't that interested in politics (that is, most people) will just notice that there's a lot of criticism and figure that where there's smoke, there's fire.  

Of course, all of these factors are hard to measure, so it's hard to judge their relative influence, but a look at confidence in particular institutions may provide some hints.  Here is confidence in "big business."  

I'd regard partisan division as pretty much a constant for big business:  Democrats are always more critical and Republicans more favorable, and it's consistently a leading issue.  So the trend can be taken to represent the gradual shift in general outlook.  The ups and downs seem to correspond pretty well to economic conditions (or at least to perceived economic conditions).  

Next, confidence in the public schools and higher education.  For the public schools, there's steady decline, with little short-term variation.  Also, it's a stronger downward trend than for big business (-.011 vs. -.006).  Is that because the performance of schools has been declining steadily?  National Assessment of Education Progress scores improved from the 1970s to 2012--they've declined since then (Stephens links to a report of decline between 2019 and 2023), but are still above the 1970s level.  What about partisan politics?  Although I don't have a measure, I think that partisan divisions have increased.  Schools used to be financed and run primarily at the local level, and both parties were generally favorable to public education.  Over time, Republicans have become more favorable to school choice, local controversies over curricula and libraries have gotten national attention, and the role of federal funding (and regulation) has increased.  So I would attribute the larger decline for schools, compared to big business, to an increased role for partisan politics.  There are only a few years of data for higher education, but the rate of decline is even larger than for the public schools.  Universities are very slow-moving institutions, so it's safe to say that their performance didn't change much between 2015 and 2024.  But I think that partisan controversy over universities has definitely increased.

Gallup asks about a lot of institutions, so I won't consider them all individually.  But there are some exceptions to the general pattern of decline--I'll turn to them in my next post.  

*That is, the year effects from a model in which confidence in a particular institution in a particular year is the sum of a year effect and an institution effect.

Mood indigo

It's now pretty widely agreed that schools were too slow to return to in-person instruction during the Covid epidemic: "remote learning" usually meant less learning and students suffered from the loss of normal social interaction.   So why didn't the schools go back faster? Some observers hold that cautious  policies were imposed by what Nate Silver calls the "Indigo Blob":  "the merger between formerly nonpartisan institutions like the media, academia and public health . . . and instruments of the Democratic party and progressive advocacy groups."  

There are a couple of problems with this analysis.  One is that general public opinion was not in favor of faster reopening.  In April 2021 an NBC News poll asked people who had children in school "do you believe that your child's school system has been too slow in re-opening, too fast in re-opening, or struck the right balance?"  14% said too slow, 14% too fast, and 70% struck the right balance.   That's an impressively high level of public agreement with policy, which may be because policies responded to local opinion or because people generally have a positive view of their local schools and trusted them to do the right thing.  The second is that opinions on the issue were not closely related to education.  In January 2022, a Fox News survey asked "thinking about the winter school term, do you think your local public schools should reopen fully in-person as usual, open in-person with social distancing and masks, combine in-person and remote learning, or be fully remote":  Compared to white college graduates, white people who didn't have a college degree were more likely to favor full in-person reopening (38% vs. 24%), but also more likely to favor fully remote education (12% to 10%).   So education was a factor, but the differences weren't large compared to race (32% of whites favored fully reopening,  11% favored fully remote; only 6% of blacks favored fully reopening in-person and 30% favored fully remote, and Hispanics were about midway in between).  Age also made a substantial difference:  among people under 35, 18% favored reopening as usual and 21% favored going completely online; among people over 65, 34% favored reopening as usual and only 6% completely online.  Two factors that might have been expected to make a difference but didn't were parent/non-parent status and gender.  

Returning to the question of why schools didn't go back to in-person instruction more quickly, I'd say that it was because decision-makers were generally aligned with public opinion--the idea that children need special protection has a lot of intuitive appeal, so in the presence of uncertainty they were inclined to play it safe.  Of course, there were also large partisan differences (see this post), but I don't think that these appeared because Democrats followed the "Indigo Blob"--it was because they reacted against Trump.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]