That's great

 In May, the Guardian published a list of the 100 best novels "as voted for by authors, critics and academics worldwide."  They just gave ranks, but I was interested in total scores--how much difference is there between first and 10th place, or 10th and 100th?  I also wondered if there were novelists whose votes were scattered among a number of different works, so they would do better in a ranking by authors.  This article by Jarrett Kobek  has a link to a spreadsheet with the choices of individual voters.  I calculated scores as 10 points for a first choice, 9 for second, .... 1 for 10th.*  

There were 172 voters, who selected 670 different novels.  The distribution was highly skewed--the leader was Middlemarch, with 446 points, and at the other end there were 67 novels that got a single point (ie, one voter placed them tenth).  To make the top 100 required only 18 points--twelve novels had exactly that total.  Turning to authors, 474 received votes.  The top 25:

                                        N    points Guardian

George Eliot                 60    469 83.45
Virginia Woolf                64    407 84.35
Jane Austen                    63 390 82.50
Leo Tolstoy                    47     379 65.95
Toni Morrison                 57    361 75.05

James Joyce                 39 295 53
Charles Dickens         44 269 57.45
Marcel Proust                 27 201 37.05
Gustave Flaubert         22 159 29.95
Vladimir Nabokov         27 157 34.85

Henry James                 29 151 36.55
Gabriel García Márquez 23 126 29.30
Charlotte Brontë         21 121 27.05
F Scott Fitzgerald         21 120 27.00
Herman Melville         18 116 23.80

Emily Brontë                 15 114 20.70
Fyodor Dostoevsky         17 110 22.50
Laurence Sterne         18 109 23.45
Franz Kafka                 18 107 23.35
George Orwell          20 104 25.20

Kazuo Ishiguro         19 97 23.85
Chinua Achebe         15 94 19.70
Salman Rushdie         15 86 19.30
Miguel de Cervantes 11 84 15.20
Muriel Spark                 16 83 20.15

On the other side, here are some well-known novelists who didn't get much support:

                                points
Balzac                        7
Stephen Crane            9
Richard Wright          10
Zola                            13

In 1998,  the Modern Library offered a list of the top 100 novels published in English in the 20th century.  Novels from that list that got no support in the Guardian survey include Brave New World (#5), Darkness at Noon (8),  An American Tragedy (16), Native Son (20--Wright's points in the Guardian poll were for Black Boy), Henderson the Rain King (21), Sister Carrie (33), All the King's Men (36), The Heart of the Matter (40), and Lord of the Flies (41).  

One pattern that seems clear is that realist novels of the 19th and early 20th century don't get much support from the Guardian voters.  Why not?  The basic realist plot is that an outsider tries to get somewhere but is defeated, partly by social injustice but partly by his/her flaws and bad decisions.  I think that accounts for their poor showing in the Guardian survey:  educated middle class people are increasingly uncomfortable with anything that seems to express a critical view of disadvantaged people.  Another pattern is that novels by Americans and Europeans which are set in the rest of the world don't do well in the Guardian survey.  In addition to the examples of Henderson the Rain King and The Heart of the Matter, Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano ranked 11th in the Modern Library list and got only 9 points from the Guardian, which puts it about 250th.  There's one big exception:  Heart of Darkness gets 42 points, for a rank of 40.  I think there's a reason for that:  it's about the damage done by colonialism.  Conrad gets only 9 points for all of his other novels (Modern Library had The Secret Agent ranked 46th, Nostromo 47th, and Heart of Darkness at 67th).  Finally, two novels with political themes do well in the Guardian ranking:  1984 at 16th and The Handmaid's Tale at 36th. But that's about it--several of the Modern Library picks that got no support in the Guardian survey seem at least equally relevant to contemporary politics.  Overall, the Guardian list seems to reflect the view that writers should "stay in their lanes."  

*The Guardian used a different formula:  1 point for being chosen and then a bonus of 0.5 for first, 0.45 for second, .... 0.05 for tenth.  That doesn't make sense to me--it makes the difference between 11th and 10th more important than the difference between 10th and first.   

Highly respected, part 2

 In a recent post, I found that people who believed that they were treated with "less courtesy or respect than other people" were more likely to vote for Trump in 2016 (and probably 2020).  This post will look at it from another direction:  who is more likely to think that they are treated with less respect?*  I considered race, sex, age, and education.  My expectations were that black people, younger people, men, and less educated people would be more likely to perceive disrespect.  Age turned out to be the most important factor, followed by race, with no clear differences by education and sex.  But although the overall average is about the same for men and women, there is an interaction with age:

Young men perceive more disrespect than young women, but middle-aged women perceive more disrespect than middle-aged men.  Or looking at it in terms of the relation with age, perceived disrespect declines steadily with age for men, but stays about the same or even increases until about age 40 or 50 for women and then declines.  There's also an interaction between education and sex:  education makes a difference among men (less educated men perceive more disrespect), but not as much (maybe not at all) among women.  There are also interactions involving race:  black men perceive more disrespect than black women.  In fact, the means for white men, white women, and black women are very close, and are consistent with the hypothesis that race doesn't make any difference among women.  Finally, there's an interaction between race and education:  among whites, people with college degrees perceive less disrespect; among blacks, there's no clear difference.  I looked at possible interactions between race and age, and education and age, but found no evidence of them.  I also looked at the possibility of a three-way interaction between race, sex, and education, but the numbers are too small to say anything definite.  

A belief that you are treated with less respect than other people could reflect experience--you really are treated with less respect--or greater sensitivity--you are more likely to interpret the same treatment as disrespect.  The group differences probably reflect a mix of both, but there's no way to distinguish them in these data.

*In my previous post, I asked "whether the association involves support for conservatism in general, or a specific kind of populist conservatism... I'll try to shed light on that by looking at the association with various political views."  I did that analysis, and found that among people with college degrees, feeling that you are treated with less respect is generally associated with more conservative views, but it's not possible to be more specific, partly because the number of cases isn't that large and partly because the GSS questions on politics aren't very well suited to identifying populist conservatism.

A distinction without (much) difference

Last year I had a post about the claim that men don't have as many friends as they used to.   I noted that the 2021 survey cited as evidence of a large decline in friendship among men showed a similarly large decline among women.   That survey used different procedures from previous ones, so it's not clear that we should accept it as evidence of a real decline in friendship, but if we do, it shows a decline among people generally rather than men specifically.  

A few days ago, I read an interview of Laurie Santos, a professor of Psychology at Yale, by Derek Thompson.  Santos said there was a decline in friendship, and "that decrease is much worse for men. One study found that if you look at what’s standardly considered a good level of friendship -- do you have six close friends you could talk to? -- men have shown a decrease in that number by about half in the last couple of decades. And if you ask how many men say they have no close friendships at all, you see around 15% of American guys in midlife saying exactly that. That’s a fivefold decrease since folks have been running this survey."  Then there was this figure, summarizing the same 2021 survey I wrote about:

The share of men who reported six or more close friends indeed declined by more than half, from 55% to 27%.  The share of women who reported six or more friends declined from 41% to 24%.  That's a decline of 51% among men and only 41% among women, but it's just one possible comparison:  the share who report 10 or more declined by 62% among men and 61% among women, and the share who report five or more declined by 40% among men and 38% among women.  And the share of women reporting no close friends rose from 2% to 10%:  the same ratio of 5 as among men.  That is, the table doesn't support the general claim that any decline has been much worse among men.*  

That raises the question of why this misinterpretation is so prevalent (Santos followed this report, which is the source of the table).  The obvious factor is that people just like to talk about differences between men and women.  A second possibility is the influence of political ideology:  the idea of an especially large decline among men appeals to both liberals and conservatives, for different reasons.  Liberals are inclined to think that the traditional model of masculinity is unsuited to modern society, and we're seeing a symptom of that; conservatives are inclined to think that we've paid so much attention to the problems of women that we're neglecting the problems of men.  And moderates think that if both liberals and conservatives agree that there's a problem, we have a welcome opportunity for cooperation across ideological lines.  

*Even if you think that the comparison between six or more vs. five or fewer is especially important, you need to consider sampling error.  The 2021 survey had about 2000 people, and the 1990 survey had about 1200, so the figures for men and women are based on samples of 1000 and 600.  Then you have ratios, and differences between ratios, increasing the margin of error.  I estimate that the standard error of the difference between the ratios is about 5.5% assuming simple random sampling, but even without doing calculations it's clearly substantial.  

Highly Respected?

 It's often said that a large part of Donald Trump's support represents a reaction to the disdain that ordinary people receive from the educated middle classes.   For example, in a recent opinion piece in the New York Times, Dylan Gottlieb writes "yuppies and their arrogance bred new resentments. In the 2010s, a brand of populist conservatism opposed nearly every tenet of the yuppie dream, from racial and gender diversity to educational meritocracy to frictionless finance and globalization to gourmet culture and the very idea of urban living itself."  I don't think this works as a historical account:  rather than growing arrogance in the educated middle classes, there's been a growth of social egalitarianism.  But there's still a question about the individual-level relationship between resentment and politics:  are people who feel like they are looked down upon more likely to support "populist conservatism"?  There aren't many survey questions on the subject, but since 2018 the General Social Survey has had one on how often you are "you are treated with less courtesy and respect than other people" (six categories, from "almost every day" to "never").  A few years ago I looked at it and found "no clear connection to choices in the 2016 election or to opinions on a variety of political issues," but more data has accumulated since then, so I thought it was time for a new look.

The average (never=1.....almost every day=6) is 2.98 among people who say they voted for Trump in 2016 and 2.92 among people who say they voted for Clinton, for a difference of .06, but the standard error of the difference is about .08:  that is, no evidence that it's anything more than sampling error.  But feelings that you are treated with less respect differ by race and gender (higher among black people, especially black men), education (higher among less educated people), and age (higher among young people), and these factors also make a difference to voting choices.  In a logistic regression of Trump vs. Clinton voting with controls for age in years, college degree, black race, sex, and an interaction of race and sex, the estimate for feeling you are treated with less respect is .092 with a standard error of .023.  That is, people who think they are treated with less respect are more likely to vote for Trump.  It's not a huge difference, but it's large enough to be of interest (e. g., an increase of 4 points on the scale is about equivalent to the gender gap among whites).

In my previous post, I suggested that feelings of resentment might be particularly strong among more educated conservatives.  That is, conservatives are a minority at most colleges and and in many professional jobs, so they probably will encounter occasions when they are treated with less respect than their colleagues.  If you add an interaction between college degree and feelings of being treated with less respect:

                                           B       SE          T        P

disrspct	.057	.027		2.094	.037
black	-2.407	.202	.	-11.926	.000
female	-.402	.064		-6.301	.000
age	.009	.002		4.599	.000
black*female	-.761	.330		-2.306	.021
college	-.413	.206	.	-2.010	.045
college * disrspct	.106	.047		2.250	.025

That is, the estimated effect of perceived disrespect among people who didn't graduate from college is .057; among those who did, it's .163.  This is just the 2016 election:  the 2020 estimates are in the same direction and of similar size, but not statistically significant.  

Overall, it appears that feeling that you aren't treated with respect is associated with support for Trump, but that the association is stronger among more educated people:  that is, it's more relevant to middle-class support than to working-class support.  This raises the question of whether the association involves support for conservatism in general, or a specific kind of populist conservatism.  In a future post, I'll try to shed light on that by looking at the association with various political views.  

Why not?

 In January, I had a post about why Trump was renominated in 2024.  I argued that it wasn't because he of strong support among ordinary Republicans, but because of support from Republican elites.  Andrew Gelman recently discussed my post in his blog, which led me to some further thoughts.  My post concluded by saying "'the base' didn't impose Trump on Republican elites; Republican elites asked for him."  In retrospect, saying that they "asked for him" was going too far--it would be more accurate to say that they didn't put up much opposition even though Trump had shown that he was a drag on the party.  He underperformed in both 2016 and 2020, and he hurt Republican chances in Congress by promoting weak candidates like Herschel Walker and Dr. Oz.  So even if they liked some of Trump's policies, they had a good reason to turn to a new candidate in 2024.  

Why didn't Trump encounter significant resistance from Republican elites?  One possibility is that they they realized had so much support from ordinary Republican voters that resistance would be futile (and would expose them to retaliation).  In my earlier post, I looked at questions about whether people would like Trump to run for the 2024 nomination and compared them to earlier questions on whether they wanted Gore, Kerry, and Romney to run for re-nomination after their defeats.  Those questions are usually asked in the first couple of years after the election; once it gets closer to the next election, you get questions about who people would choose out of the declared or potential candidates.  The figure shows the percentages of Republicans favoring Trump and DeSantis in surveys between July 2022 and August 2023.

Trump was ahead in the first few surveys, but his support declined and DeSantis's rose until sometime in early 2023.  After that, Trump steadily gained, but he didn't consistently break 50% until late May 2023.  In the last few surveys, the average was 54% for Trump, 17% for DeSantis, and 29% for all others.

So there was a period when Trump seemed vulnerable and other candidates were starting their campaigns (Trump declared in November 2022, Haley in February 2023, and others in March-June 2023).   During this time, endorsements might have been helpful in getting opposition campaigns off the ground.  But only a few prominent Republicans offered them:  among Republican Senators and Governors, by the middle of May ten had endorsed Trump and no one had endorsed any of his opponents.  There were six for various opponents by the end of June, then one for Trump in July and one more in August.  After that Trump pulled ahead steadily.  That is, very few prominent Republicans endorsed other candidates when their endorsements might have made a difference.  To consider a few examples, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski both endorsed Nikki Haley, but not until early March 2024, when it was too late to matter.  A few days ago, the New York Times had a story on a new memoir by Lamar Alexander (who left the Senate in January 2021) in which he "says President Trump committed an impeachable offense on Jan. 6."   But Ballotpedia doesn't record an endorsement from Alexander in the 2024 campaign.  Mitch Daniels didn't offer one either.  

 Why did prominent Republicans who didn't support Trump and had no particular reason to fear him stay on the sidelines?  As I've mentioned before, the rise of partisanship means that the perception of party unity has a larger impact on the fortunes of the party--when a party is seen as divided, it does worse.   If a large number of prominent Republicans had come out against Trump, that might have stopped him from getting the nomination, but it would also have hurt Republican chances in 2024 (especially since Trump would not have been a gracious loser).  As an alternative, they hoped that he would fade away on his own, and by the time it became clear that wouldn't happen, it was too late,

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Time for a change?

 I wanted to write a post on opinion about redistricting, but there are only a few survey questions on the subject.  Two points are clear:  most people think it should be done by some body other than state legislatures and most people pay little attention to the issue (many don't know how it's actually done in their state).  In the course of looking for questions, I ran across one that I'd written about in the pioneering days of this blog, where people were asked to choose among three statements:

a.  "Our form of government, based on the constitution, has stood the test of time and no fundamental changes need to be made in it."

b.  "The Constitution has served its purpose well, but it has not kept up with the times and should be thoroughly revised to make it fit present day needs."

c.  "Changing times have outmoded our system of government and we might as well accept the fact that sooner or later we will have to have a new form of government."

At that time, I just found that it was asked in 1971, but now I discovered that it was also asked in 1973, 1976 and 1979.  The percent choosing each response:

The earlier numbers are from a question that had the same statement for option b, but somewhat different statements for a and c (see the linked post for complete wording). Over the long term, opinions shifted away from "no change" and towards the middle option, but between 1971-3 and 1976-9 there was a move towards "no change."  I can think of two possible reasons:  first, the celebration of the bicentennial in 1976 brought a lot of mostly favorable attention to the founders and second, after the Watergate scandal concluded with Nixon's resignation there was a widespread feeling that "the system worked."  

As far as group differences in opinions, liberals were more likely to favor revising the Constitution, but it was only a small difference.  The Democratic/Republican difference was even smaller.  Two larger differences were that younger people and blacks were more likely to favor revision or replacement.  Education also mattered:

Not HS grad:    36%     35%    28%

HS:                   44%     43%    13%

College:            63%     33%      4%

College graduates were substantially more likely to favor "no fundamental changes," and much less likely to favor "sooner or later we will have to change."  In my earlier post, I found the same general pattern in the 1971 data, and remarked that it could be regarded as surprising because more educated people are usually less attached to tradition.   I think this example shows something important about the effect of education on political views.  There's a tradition, going from Joseph Schumpeter through Rob Henderson's "luxury beliefs," that educated people are attracted to oppositional or edgy views.  But in some cases, like this one, educated people are more strongly attached to what you could regard as the core beliefs of a society.  

Hopefully someone will repeat the question in connection with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.  I think that the connection with ideology and party would be considerably stronger today, since the idea of constitutional originalism has become a central part of conservative thought. 

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research] 

The root of all evil?, part 2

People are more optimistic about the future when their party is in power.  This isn't surprising--in fact, it would be surprising if this wasn't the case--but you'd expect the effect to fade as they look farther into the future.  There's a question that I've written about several times, "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?"   The average (higher numbers mean more optimistic) for Democrats and Republicans:

Both Democrats and Republicans are more optimistic when a President of their own party is in office, but the gap is much bigger for Republicans:  70-46 vs. 62-59.  Although it's hard to be sure because of the small number of cases, this gap doesn't seem to have existed in the 20th century:  it emerged in the GW Bush or Obama administrations.  

This question focuses on economic prospects.  There's also a broader question:  "Looking ahead to the next 10 years in the United States, would you describe yourself as optimistic or pessimistic about the future of the country?"  followed by wheter that is very or only somewhat optimistic/pessimistic.  Unfortunately it hasn't been asked since 2014, and I could only get party breakdowns for a few cases, but here are the means for those:

The percent "very pessimistic":

In the first two surveys (under Clinton and GW Bush) there were only a small number of "very pessimistic" responses among both Democrats and Republicans; then there was a surge among Republicans in 2011 and 2014.  

Why has the effect of partisanship grown?   I think it is because of a change among Republican opinion leaders:  rather than just saying that liberals/progressives have bad ideas, they increasingly say that they are evil people (or the tools of evil people) who are trying to destroy America.  Of course, there's always been some of this, but it was mostly confined to the fringes:  the mainstream leaders would make some effort to show respect and give their opponents credit for good intentions.    

Finally, to return to the subject of my previous post, progressives in general support the proposition that people are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights, but what about Wilson?  Thomas is not the only one to claim that Wilson rejected it.  Glenn Beck, and on a more respectable level, Christopher Cox (a long-time member of Congress and later a chair of the SEC) also make that claim and offer quotes from his work to support it.  However, they are very selective quotes:  Beck says that "To Wilson, the 'question is not whether men are born free and equal or not,' because we all 'know they are not.'"  He omits a crucial part "Suppose they were born so.  You know they are not .  They may have been born free and equal, but they are neither free nor equal if things of this sort can go on...."   So Wilson was appealing to the principles of freedom and equality, and saying it was not realized in contemporary society.  Of course, Wilson didn't always live up to those principles, especially when it came to race.  But his racism wasn't an expression of the progressive philosophy--it was in conflict with it.*

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

*W. E. B. Du Bois supported Wilson for president in 1912.    He was disappointed, but said that was because Wilson was "overwhelmed by a sudden and vicious onslaught on the part of his Southern supporters. Hungry for office they poured into Washington and regarded the election of a Democrat as a signal for a host of anti-Negro measures."