Out of the file drawer, part 2

 My last post was about data on perceptions of moral conditions from 1949 to 2022.  There is a clear decline over the period, but I wanted to go beyond that and consider questions like whether the decline was steady or concentrated in particular periods and whether it's something that continues today.  A simple starting point is a regression model with time and time squared (plus dummy variables for the different question) as predictors.  In this model, the squared term is statistically significant (t=2.3)--I tried a couple of higher order terms and they were not.  Another model has two linear terms for different periods--the best fit comes with the periods 1949-68 and 1969-2022.  Predicted values for the two model are shown in the figure:

Both models (which fit about equally well) indicate that the decline was larger in the early years, but the predictions diverge in recent years--according to the quadratic model, the low point came around 2007, and assessments have becoming more favorable since then; according to the spline model, the decline is continuing.  With both models, there is some correlation in the residuals--periods when the values are consistently above or below the predicted values.  So overall, I don't think it's possible to be sure about whether the decline has stopped, but it's clearly slowed down.

This connects to a point that I've made before--that views about people and society in general became more negative in the 1960s and 1970s, but haven't changed much in the last few decades.  So accounts which attribute the recent rise in political polarization to discontent about people or society or economic conditions don't fit the timing.  In principle, you could argue that there was some kind of delayed response--that discontent didn't start affecting political views until time had passed.  However, another possibility, which I find more convincing, is that polarization in the public is a reaction to political developments--that is, it started with elites.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]    

Out of the file drawer, part 1

 Sometime around 2000, I searched for questions about the general moral condition of the country.  I wanted to trace changes in the assessment, so I was only interested in questions that had been asked at least twice.  I found seven questions with a total of thirty occasions, ranging from 1949 to 1999.  I didn't try to publish the research, although I talked about it at a conference or two, but I thought about it from time to time and finally came back to it, thinking that at least I'd have more data to work with.  To my disappointment, I found only a five more occasions, and none after 2005.  The questions and results are listed below--I give the results in the form of favorable vs. unfavorable assessments.  

1.  On the whole, would you say that you are satisfied or dissatisfied with the honesty and standards of behavior of people in the country today?

Positive    Negative          Year       

34%         59%               1963

27%         66%               1965

26%         66%               1966

22%         72%               1973

33%         63%               1986

23%         71%               1987

24%         73%               1991

20%         78%               1992

27%         68%               1992

32%         68%               1998

21%         74%               1999

2.  Do you think people in general today lead as good lives--honest and moral--as they used to?

47%         46%               1952                         

39%         52%               1965                         

30%         66%               1976

26%         71%               1998

21%         73%               2002

21%         74%               2005

3.  Do you think that young people today have as strong a sense of right and wrong as they did, say, fifty years ago?

57%         34%               1952                   

41%         46%               1965                         

20%         78%               1998                         

15%         82%               1999                         

19%         76%               2002

18%         79%               2005

4.  Which of the following statements comes closest to expressing how you feel about the state of morals in this country at the present time?  (Pretty bad vs. pretty good).

37%         55%               1964                    

19%         77%               1996                    

32%         63%               2004

5.  Do you believe that life today is getting better or worse in terms of morals?

20%         52%               1949             

 8%         78%               1968                               

17%         70%               1985

17%         69%               1986

6. Do you believe that life today is getting better or worse in terms of honesty?

24%         36%               1960

13%         61%               1968

7.  Do you personally agree or disagree with those who feel that there is something morally wrong with the country at this time?

35%         61%               1976

25%         71%               1992

19%         77%               1993                    

Then I discovered the good news--almost every year since 2002, Gallup has asked "Right now, do you think the state of moral values in the country as a whole is getting better or getting worse?"  Results can be found at: https://news.gallup.com/poll/393659/record-high-americans-rate-moral-values-poor.aspx

So now I can put it all together and get a picture of changes since 1949:

There's a pretty clear downward trend, but to go beyond that observation, you have to consider the fact that the questions aren't identical, and even if you trust my judgment that they are similar, they might get somewhat different responses.  The simplest way to adjust for this is to calculate the mean for the question and subtract it from the score at each time.  The results:

This way, it doesn't seem like steady decline.  I'd describe it as a decline in  the 1960s, followed by some recovery and then stability into the 1980s, then a decline into the 1990s, and then rough stability, or maybe even some increase.  I've experimented with fitting some models, but haven't found anything that I have much confidence in yet, so I'll save that for a future post.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Substitute

 A couple of months ago, I had a post which discussed research and reporting on the link between mental illness and mass shootings.  Andrew Gelman blogged about it the other day, and it has become my most viewed post (by a large margin) so I thought I should follow up on it.   However, after I started a post on it I couldn't think of anything interesting to say.  I'll come back to the issue, but meanwhile here's a post on a totally unrelated subject: 

Georgia just finished its runoff election for Senator.  It's one of only two states that have runoffs in general elections (the other is Louisiana)--everywhere else, the winner is the candidate who gets the most votes on election day.  The Washington Post had a story on the origins of the system--it involved a state legislator named Denmark Groover who lost his seat in a three-way race in 1958, made it back to the legislature, and dedicated himself to getting a runoff added.  He also was a hard-line segregationist who helped to devise measures to limit black voting power after court rulings and legislation made it more difficult to simply prevent black people from voting.  So the runoff was seen as a measure to protect white supremacy, and later in life Groover said that was how it was intended.  

The history was interesting, but what surprised me was that the controversy continues.  The story concludes by saying "voting rights groups in Georgia overwhelmingly support abolishing runoffs" and quoting the director of a voting rights group as saying "it is a relic of Jim Crow, it is suppressive, inefficient and is also fiscally irresponsible.  It needs to just go away."  The reporter also seems to have been persuaded--he quotes several other critics and no defenders.

Regardless of the origins of the runoff in Georgia, the idea that it should take a majority vote to win seems to fit with the popular idea of democracy, so there's a good case for the runoff in principle (Brazil and France both have runoffs in their presidential elections).  So I was interested in looking at public opinion on the issue.  I found only one question, from 1984:  "In some states, if no candidate wins more than half of the votes in a primary election, a runoff primary is held between the top two candidates. Do you think this is a good system, a bad system, or don't you have an opinion on this?"  Although that asks specifically about primary elections, it involves the same general issue, and applies more widely:  quite a few Southern states had (and I think still have) runoff elections in primaries. 

40% said that it was a good system, only 11% said it was bad, and 45% said they didn't have an opinion (the rest said they didn't know--I eliminated them from the rest of the analysis, although you could make a case for combining them with "don't have an opinion").  

The breakdown by race:

                      Good      Bad          No opinion
Black              43%        11%           46%
Non-black      43%         13%          44%

No discernible difference.

Region:

East                 40%           15%           45%
Midwest          38%           10%           52%
South               48%           14%           38%
West                 46%             8%           46%

Maybe some differences, but it's hard to be sure, except that Southerners were less likely to have no opinion.

Education reduced the share of "no opinion" but didn't have much impact on the ratio of favorable to unfavorable opinions.  There were no visible differences by party or ideology.  Women were a bit more likely to have no opinion, and to favor a runoff if they had an opinion.  The strongest demographic factor was age--young people were more likely to favor a runoff.  

18-29               49%               8%            42%
30-44               47%             13%            41%
45-64               43%             13%            44%
65+                  25%             16%            58%

I also considered region by race:  Southern whites were more favorable and less likely to have no opinion, but there were no clear regional differences among blacks (the survey oversampled blacks, so the numbers were reasonably large).

While doing this post, I discovered that Jesse Jackson had called for an end to the runoff system, and was even suggesting that he might make it a condition of supporting the Democratic nominee (the survey was taken in June, so the issue was in the news at the time).  That makes the absence of a racial difference particularly interesting.  My guess is that intuitions about fairness dominated everything else, among voters who had an opinion.  Whether a runoff actually worked* against the interests of black voters is a complex issue, so even voters in states with runoffs wouldn't easily be able to judge from experience.  And unlike the Electoral College, the runoff didn't have a long history, so attachment to tradition wasn't a factor.

*I say "worked" because the effects may have changed since 1984, given changes in the racial composition of the parties and increased willingness of white voters to support black candidates.  

 

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]