Left turn?, part 3

I thought I just had a few odds and ends to clear up regarding my last post, but then I ran across a post from January.  That was about a claim by Thomas Edsall that "as the gulf between rich and poor widens, voters become increasingly mean spirited and hostile to the welfare state, progressive taxation and regulations designed to protect consumers, workers and the environment."  I selected some items from the GSS that dealt with those issues.  I was concerned with trends rather than year-to-year changes, but on looking at it again I saw that opinions on all of them moved in a liberal direction between 2014 and 2016.  That is, the liberal move involved a range of opinions, not just opinions about race.  That led to the question of whether there was really anything unusual about opinions on race, as I had been assuming.   

I had a total of twelve items--four on race discussed in my post from last week, and eight others from January.  They were measured on different scales, so you have to standardize them in order to compare the size of the changes.  I did that by using the standard deviation of differences among annual means.   The three largest differences all involved questions about race--the fourth question on race (affirmative action) was in the middle of the pack.  So it seems that opinions about race did change more than other opinions.  Still, there was also a general liberal movement. 

I made a simple index by adding together all the means.  Here are the values form 1994-2018, with lower meaning more liberal:

That looks like a liberal trend, with 2010, 2012, and 2014 as exceptions and the big change from 2014-6 as a return to the trend.  That is a little misleading, since research has shown that there is a tendency for opinions on many issues to move right when a Democrat is in office and left when a Republican is in office.  Still, I think it points at part of the explanation--there was a reaction against Obama that was running out of steam by 2016. 

Five of the items, all involving spending on various domestic issues, go back to the 1970s.  The index for them:

The red line includes an adjustment for the estimated effect of party control.  There's no clear trend since the late 1980s, just ups and downs.  But overall, it seems like opinion on these issues is as liberal as it's ever been.