Another quarter

In November 2018, I had a post about the difference between elite and popular ideologies.  Politicians can be classified as simply liberal, moderate, or conservative, but in the general public opinions on economic and social issues are almost uncorrelated.  As a result, there are substantial numbers of people who are liberal on economics and conservative on social issues or conservative on economics and liberal on social issues.  So why don't any ambitious politicians try to appeal to those combinations?   In February, Paul Krugman had a column on the same issue, which even had a similar title.  I have a couple of disagreements with his analysis:  (1) he claims that there are very few people with the economic conservative/socially liberal combination and (2) he says social conservatism can be reduced to racism.  But he also linked to a paper by Brian Feinstein and Eric Schickler that offered some interesting historical evidence.  Their idea was that even though Franklin Roosevelt stayed away from issues of race, the New Deal ideology (government should help the disadvantaged) naturally led to support for civil rights and the ideology of opposition to the New Deal (defending states' rights and individual property rights against an overbearing federal government) naturally led to modern racial conservatism.  They showed that state party programs gradually diverged on civil rights issues, and in the North the Democrats were considerably more liberal than the Republicans by the 1950s.  This is in contrast to a widespread view that party differences on civil rights were minimal until the 1960s.  Their analysis led me to wonder if there were party differences in the general public as well.  There weren't many questions on civil rights before the 1960s, but I found one from May 1952, which asked "Which of the following statements best describes what you'd like to see done about legislation to prohibit employers from turning people down solely because the their race or religion?"  The options were "there should be a national law to protect minorities from discrimination in hiring," "it should be left to each state to pass such a law if it wants one," and "there shouldn't be any law like that; the problem should be worked out in some other way."  This question deals with an important issue of principle and doesn't mention any party or political figure.

As expected, blacks were overwhelmingly in favor of a national law (73%, 6% for leaving it to the states, 10% opposed, and 10% don't know). There were no clear party differences among Southern whites:  16% favored a national law, 33% said there should be no law, and 39% said it should be up to the states.  But among Northern whites, there was a difference between supporters of the different parties:  39% of Democrats favored a national law and 28% said their should be no law; 26% of Republicans favored a national law and 40% said there should be no law.   

Since the question also mentioned religion, you might wonder if the party difference had to do with religion rather than race.  Jews and Catholics were more likely to favor a national law than Protestants were (64% of Jews, 36% of Catholics, and 24% of Protestants), but the party difference is still there if you restrict it to Protestants. 

In summary, Northern Democrats were significantly more liberal than Northern Republicans on this issue, even at this early stage.  The example seems to support Krugman's suggestion that "advocating economic inclusion seems to spill over into advocacy of racial and social inclusion, too"--that is, that the dominance of the overall liberal/conservative dimension is not an accident.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]