Friday, October 25, 2019

What's wrong with them?

A few weeks ago, the Pew Research Center released a survey about views of the parties and partisanship (I got the reference from a piece by Philip Bump in the Washington Post).  The survey contained questions asking them to rate members of the other party against other Americans on the following traits:  open-minded/closed-minded, patriotic/unpatriotic, moral/immoral,  hard-working/lazy, and intelligent/unintelligent.  Democrats were somewhat more likely to see Republicans as closed-minded than vice-versa; Republicans were substantially more likely to see Democrats as unpatriotic and somewhat more likely to see them as immoral.  In the sample, Democrats were slightly more likely to see Republicans as unintelligent, although the differences are probably not statistically significant.  This all fits with what seem to be the general images of the parties. 

The more surprising thing is that there is a big difference in hard-working/lazy.  46% of Republicans see Democrats as lazier than other Americans, while only 20% of Democrats see Republicans as lazier than other Americans.  This is the biggest gap except for "patriotic."  I would have expected that relatively few people would rate the other party as "lazy"--it seems like admitting that your opponents are just as hard-working as everyone else is an easy concession to make.  That may be the case for Democrats, but apparently not for Republicans.  I've had a few posts suggesting that conservatives are more likely to rate hard work as a more important factor in getting ahead, and maybe this is part of the answer--Republicans tend to think that Democrats want the government to help them with problems that they could solve themselves if they tried. 

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