No opinion or no well-crafted response

After his upset victory over Eric Cantor in the Republican primary, David Brat (currently a professor of economics) was asked about whether he supported raising the minimum wage.  He replied "I don't have a well-crafted response on that."  Justin Wolfers says that "admitting to being uncertain on an issue . . . [is] a mark of intellectual honesty":  "assessing the evidence on the effects of the minimum wage is a tricky business" and economists are divided on the issue.

But Brat didn't say he was a typical economist--he said he was "a free-market guy," and "anything that distorts the free market, I'm against." He also didn't say that he was uncertain, but that he "didn't have a well-crafted response."

His dilemma is that if you start with the position that a free market is best, there's a strong case against having any minimum wage; however, there's also strong public support for the minimum wage.  Many surveys going back to the 1940s have asked whether the minimum wage should be increased, and almost all have found solid majorities in favor.   I wondered if any had asked if there should be a minimum wage at all.  I found only one, back in 1948.  It asked "Do you think we should have national laws... providing that employers all over the country have to pay a certain minimum wage to employees... or do you think we should have such laws but they should be handled by the states, or do you think we shouldn't have any laws of this kind at all?"  46% said national, 31% said state, and only 13% said none (11% didn't know).  Then I looked for surveys that gave people the option of saying that the minimum wage should be reduced.  There was one from 1987 that asked if the minimum wage was too high, too low, or about right. About two percent said it was too high (there were two different forms of the question--in one, 1% thought it was too high, in the other 3% did).


[Data from iPOLL, Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Losing our freedom?

Many people today (especially conservatives) think that our basic freedoms are threatened--that even apparently innocuous reforms are a step down the road to serfdom.   But there have always been people like that--in 1961 Ronald Reagan warned about how Medicare was part of the process of  "imposing statism or socialism" on the people--so the question is whether there are more than there used to be.

In the 1960s and 1970s, there were only a few questions on the general topic:

1964: "The federal government is gradually taking away our basic freedoms."
            42%  Agree;    51%  Disagree;    7%  Don't Know

1965:    "Some people say that Americans have lost or are losing some of their constitutional freedoms.  Just your own personal opinion, do you agree or disagree?"
          46% agree; 44% disagree; 10% Don't Know

1976:  "The Federal Government is gradually taking away our freedoms"
           34% Fully agree;  36% Partially agree;  30%  Disagree

1977:  "The Federal Government is gradually taking away our freedoms"
          37% Fully agree;  31%  Partially agree;  31% Disagree

Since 1995, the following question has been asked pretty frequently "Do you think the federal government [has become so large and powerful that it] poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens, or not?"  Sometimes the words in brackets were included.  A graph of the percent agreeing:

The red line is questions including the "large and powerful" language.  Agreement is consistently higher when those words are added, but either way there seems to have been a decline from the mid-1990s to about 2000, and then a rise.  Unfortunately the few questions from the 1960s and 1970s are worded differently, so it's hard to come to any definite conclusions about long-term trends.

[Data from iPOLL,  Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

What's the matter with everyone, part 2?

As discussed in my last post, the Southern states have moved towards the Republicans over the last century.  But there has been a lot of movement even when you set that aside.  After taking out the shifts associated with the South, I followed the same strategy of estimating an election score and a state score.  The product of those two predicts Democratic share of the two-party vote (relative to the national average), for each state in each election.  The five highest state scores are Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Arizona and Nebraska.  The five lowest (ie most negative) are Vermont, Alabama, Massachusetts, Maine, and Rhode Island.  The complete rankings appear at the end of this post.  These scores can be understood in conjunction with the election scores shown in this figure:

Basically, positive scores mean states that have moved towards the Republicans, negative ones mean states that have moved towards the Democrats.  The general identity of the states at the extremes isn't surprising (the negative score for Alabama occurs because it had a pretty substantial Republican vote in the 1920s and 1930s, unlike other deep South states--in effect,  it hasn't moved as far towards the Republicans because it didn't have as far to move).  What did surprise me is how steady the shift has been.  In fact, the method was not designed to produce a trend, just to show variation.  Only one election stands out as unusual (1948), and it seems to have been simply an exception rather than the beginning of something.  Aside from 1948, there hasn't been much election-to-election variation.  That suggests that the roots of the change are "sociological" (ie related to long term social or economic trends) than "political" (ie related to party ideologies or election issues).



UTAH         UT 2.69
IDAHO         ID 2.34
WYOMING         WY 1.66
ARIZONA   AZ 1.64
NEBRASKA NE 1.38
MONTANA         MT 1.18
NEVADA         NV 0.88
NORTH DAKOTA ND 0.77
*TEXAS         TX 0.73
INDIANA         IN 0.70
*SOUTH CAROLINA SC 0.60
*OKLAHOMA OK 0.56
KANSAS         KS 0.56
NEW MEXICO NM 0.53
*ARKANSAS AR 0.43
COLORADO CO 0.32
SOUTH DAKOTA SD 0.32
*KENTUCKY KY 0.29
*LOUISIANA LA 0.28
*MISSOURI MO 0.11
*NORTH CAROLINA NC 0.08
*WEST VIRGINIA WV 0.05
*TENNESSEE TN     -0.01
NEW HAMPSHIRE NH     -0.05
*MISSISSIPPI MS     -0.06
OHIO         OH     -0.06
*GEORGIA   GA     -0.09
*VIRGINIA VA     -0.13
*FLORIDA        FL     -0.23
OREGON    OR     -0.24
WASHINGTON WA     -0.37
WISCONSIN WI     -0.45
MARYLAND MD     -0.49
IOWA         IA     -0.56
DELAWARE DE     -0.56
MINNESOTA MN     -0.63
CONNECTICUT CT     -0.71
CALIFORNIA CA     -0.73 
ILLINOIS IL     -0.78
NEW JERSEY NJ     -0.79
PENNSYLVANIA PA     -0.85
MICHIGAN MI     -0.96
NEW YORK NY     -1.14
RHODE ISLAND RI     -1.16
MAINE         ME     -1.43
MASSACHUSETTS MA     -1.44
*ALABAMA        AL     -1.85
VERMONT         VT     -2.33

What's the matter with everyone, part 1

I have had several posts observing that the identity of "red" and "blue" states has changed a lot over the years.  Of course, every state is unique, but I have been trying to reduce the changes to a small number of basic patterns.  An obvious one is that the South has moved towards the Republicans.  However, that raises the question of what counts as the South.  I estimated a model in which the Democratic share of the vote in each state relative to the Democratic share nationally for the presidential elections between 1916 and 2012 was the product of an election score (how Democratic the South was) and a state score (how "Southern" a state is).  The eleven Confederate states and six border states (Oklahoma, Missouri, Kentucky, W. Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware) were allowed to have their own individual scores--all other states were put in one group.

Here is a histogram of the state scores, which are pretty much as you would expect.  

Here is a plot of the election scores by year:

Of course, the basic trend is that the South has moved towards the Republicans over the century.  The more interesting thing is that the movement was pretty much complete by 1972.  The South moved back a bit towards the Democrats in 1976 and 1980 (when Jimmy Carter was running), but apart from that there's been little variation since 1972.  I suspect that Southern whites have moved a bit more towards the Republicans during that time, but that's been offset by increased turnout among blacks.  

Crime and perception

Beginning in 1972, the Gallup Poll asked "is there more crime in this area than there was a year ago, or less?"  Around 1990, they switched to asking about "your area," but it doesn't seem to have made much difference (a Los Angeles Times poll asked the old form in 1994, so there's a little overlap).   I calculated a summary of perceptions:  the logarithm of the ratio of "more" to "less" answers.  It would have been simpler to use percent saying more to percent saying less, but there seems to have been a long-term decline in the percent volunteering "about the same," and using the logarithm of the ratio takes that out of the picture.

Positive numbers mean that the number who thought there was more crime was larger than the number who thought there was less.  It was positive in most years, but for a few years around the turn of the century the number seeing less crime was larger than the number seeing more.  The numbers seeing an increase in crime are generally smaller today than they were in the 1970s.  The crime rate has indeed fallen, so that raises the question of whether perceptions are related to reality.  I regressed the ratio on the change in the national homicide rate in the last three years.  Homicide is only one form of crime, but it's measured more accurately than other forms, and gets more media attention, so it seemed like the best place to start.  I used the last three years rather than the last year because I figured people probably didn't take the time frame all that literally, but just treated it as meaning "recently."

There is a positive relationship between change in the murder rate and perceptions of change in crime, with a t-ratio of 2.7 and 3.2 depending on the exact model.  There is a good deal of inertia*, so it takes a while for changes in reality to show up in people's perceptions, but they do show up.

*The coefficient on the previous value of  perceived change in crime was about .9**t, where t is the gap of time in years.  That means that a change in the murder rate would have a "half-life" of about 7 years in terms of its effect on perceptions.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Principle or prejudice?

Many liberals argue that the Tea Party and related conservative movements are basically about race.  The idea is that latent racial fears and resentments among whites were reawakened by the election of a black president or the recession.  In a column a couple of months ago, Paul Krugman says:

"Indeed, race is the Rosetta Stone that makes sense of many otherwise incomprehensible aspects of U.S. politics. . .  we’re told that conservatives, the Tea Party in particular, oppose handouts because they believe in personal responsibility, in a society in which people must bear the consequences of their actions. Yet it’s hard to find angry Tea Party denunciations of huge Wall Street bailouts, of huge bonuses paid to executives who were saved from disaster by government backing and guarantees. Instead, all the movement’s passion, starting with  Rick Santelli’s famous rant on CNBC, has been directed against any hint of financial relief for low-income borrowers. And what is it about these borrowers that makes them such targets of ire? You know the answer."

I don't find the idea that it's all about race to be very convincing, but those examples were especially puzzling.  My impression is that indignation about Wall Street bailouts has been important for the Tea Party and that opposition to mortgage relief has been a secondary theme.  (Rick Santelli just provided the spark--he wasn't a major figure before the Tea Party started, and he isn't one now).

 I recently found a survey, conducted by CBS News in March 2009, that gives some systematic evidence.  It had parallel sets of questions about aid to banks and other financial institutions, to homeowners having trouble with their mortgages, and to the auto manufacturers.  For each one, it asked four questions:  whether people approved of government aid, whether aid was necessary or things would improve on their own, whether the problems were their own fault or caused by things beyond their control, and whether you were mostly relieved or mostly resentful about the prospect of them getting aid.   Giving the complete wordings of all questions would take a lot of space, but here is an example:

"Which best describes your feelings about Barack Obama's policies toward the nation's housing and mortgage crisis -- mostly relieved that some homeowners might be able to avoid foreclosure, or mostly resentful that the policies could benefit irresponsible lenders and homeowners?"

The survey didn't contain any questions about the Tea Party (few surveys did until 2010), but it did have one about Rush Limbaugh (the options were favorable, unfavorable, undecided, or haven't heard enough to have an opinion).  Having favorable views of Rush Limbaugh seems like a good indicator of support for "movement conservatism."

 Here are the percents disapproving of aid by opinion on Limbaugh:

             Finance     Homeowners      Auto
Favorable      73%         61%            87%
Unfavorable    50%         15%            70%
Undecided      54%         24%            81%
No opinion     48%         16%            75%

Here are the percents saying aid was not necessary by opinion of Limbaugh

               Finance    Homeowners       Auto
Favorable       80%         72%            80%
Unfavorable     36%         28%            54%
Undecided       55%         36%            68%
No opinion      53%         27%            65%


Here are the percents saying the problems were their own fault by opinion of Limbaugh
    
               Finance    Homeowners       Auto
Favorable        70%       62%              68%
Unfavorable      83%       42%              74%
Undecided        78%       44%              58%
No opinion       64%       30%              56%

And finally, here are the percents saying that aid made them resentful by opinion of Limbaugh

               Finance    Homeowners       Auto
Favorable        75%       75%              72%
Unfavorable      43%       27%              42%
Undecided        53%       44%              58%
No opinion       43%       27%              37%


People who had a favorable opinion on Limbaugh had more negative opinions of the bailouts of banks and financial institutions than anyone else.  A striking thing about all of these tables is that people with a favorable opinion of Limbaugh made little or no distinction between banks & finance, homeowners, and auto companies:  the distribution of opinions was just about the same regardless of which one was being asked about.  Everyone else made distinctions, generally being more sympathetic to homeowners than banks or auto companies.  So on this evidence, movement conservatives actually are opposed to "handouts" in principle, and Krugman is offering a solution to a puzzle that doesn't exist.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Capitalism, Socialism, and Education

Continuing with the survey I discussed in my last post, positive views of big business and socialism declined with education:

                        Big Business    Socialism
High school or less        68%             46%
Some college               58%             32%
College graduate           59%             23%
Graduate education         49%             39%

Positive views of small business, entrepreneurs, and capitalism increased with education:

                           Small
                         Business   Entrepreneurs    Capitalism
High school or less        94%            83%          57%
Some college               98%            93%          67%
College graduate          100%            96%          80%
Graduate education         97%            92%          76%

There was no significant difference in views of free enterprise (or no significant linear increase; the contrast between high school or less and all others is significant):

                          Free
                         Enterprise   
High school or less        90%           
Some college               94%            
College graduate           94%            
Graduate education         94%       

There is a view, going back to Hayek, von Mises, and Schumpeter, that intellectuals are hostile to capitalism.  Of course, not everyone who graduates from college or even goes to graduate school is an intellectual, but it seems reasonable to assume that they'll be more influenced by the views of intellectuals (and Hayek, at least, meant "intellectuals" pretty broadly).   This idea remains popular among conservatives:  see slide 17 of Kevin Hassett's critique of Thomas Piketty for an example.  It clearly doesn't fit the data (or any data I've ever seen, for that matter).  

Another idea is that less educated people would be more suspicious of things that are abstract or remote:  that would include capitalism, socialism, entrepreneurs, and big business, but not small business.  That doesn't fit either.  

An idea that does fit is that involves distance from "elite" opinion.  American politicians invariably praise small business, entrepreneurs, and free enterprise, and condemn socialism and "big business."  (They often say nice things about particular big companies, but then they'll talk about free enterprise, or entrepreneurs, or job creators, etc.).   Less educated people may not have picked up this way of thinking (or at least speaking).

PS:  these differences are not driven by income; differences by income levels are small.  There are also some interesting gender differences:  women are considerably less positive about capitalism, and somewhat less positive about big business and entrepreneurs.  
  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]