andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1385 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: After our discussions of psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s opinions about working-class voters (see here and here ), a question arose on how to reconcile the analyses of Alan Abramowitz and Tom Edsall (showing an increase in Republican voting among low-education working white southerners), with Larry Bartels’s finding that “there has been no discernible trend in presidential voting behavior among the ‘working white working class.’” Here is my resolution: All the statistics that have been posted seem reasonable to me. Also relevant to the discussion, I believe, are Figures 3.1, 4.2b, 10.1, and 10.2 of Red State Blue State. In short: Republicans continue to do about 20 percentage points better among upper-income voters compared to lower-income, but the compositions of these coalitions have changed over time. As has been noted, low-education white workers have moved toward the Republican party over the past few decades, and at the same time there have been compositional changes
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1 In short: Republicans continue to do about 20 percentage points better among upper-income voters compared to lower-income, but the compositions of these coalitions have changed over time. [sent-8, score-0.416]
2 As has been noted, low-education white workers have moved toward the Republican party over the past few decades, and at the same time there have been compositional changes so that this group represents a much smaller share of the electorate. [sent-9, score-0.217]
3 I think it’s reasonable to study this group and to understand their psychological motivations, just at it also makes sense to consider the psychological motivations of higher-income whites who tend to have more conservative economic attitudes and are more likely to vote Republican. [sent-10, score-1.252]
4 In particular, one thing we’ve found is that higher-income and higher-education voters tend to be more constrained in their political attitudes. [sent-11, score-0.319]
5 Pro-abortion whites were over twenty percentage points more likely than anti-abortion whites to vote for Obama, and this difference was largest among high-income, high-education whites. [sent-13, score-0.949]
6 In contrast, pro-abortion Hispanics and anti-abortion Hispanics voted nearly identically for president. [sent-14, score-0.163]
7 Rich conservative whites are often showing a lot of consistency, or constraint, with highly conservative attitudes on economic and social issues. [sent-15, score-1.097]
8 The big picture, here, I think, is that we need to look at the entire electorate rather than picking out individual pieces. [sent-16, score-0.076]
9 I find a lot to like in Thomas Frank’s book, but Kansas is only one state—actually, a state that’s been strongly Republican for nearly a century—and I think people were misled by taking it as a stand-in for the whole country. [sent-17, score-0.379]
10 That’s one of the themes of Red State Blue State: political commentators focus on the parts of the country they know well, then they jump to generalizations about the rest of the country. [sent-18, score-0.211]
11 Also, the term “blue collar,” which is sometimes used, ratchets the Republican-ness up another notch, as it is typically men, not women, whose jobs are categorized as blue collar. [sent-20, score-0.25]
12 Finally, I think there is something to the conservative talking point about public employees, the idea that some people (in particular, ethnic minorities and public sector employees) are beneficiaries of taxes whereas other people (often in the private sector) are payers of taxes. [sent-21, score-0.526]
13 And this sort of personal experience does inform one’s political ideology, even though the correlation is not 100%, for example military officers tend to be conservative and Republican. [sent-22, score-0.78]
14 In most groups of the population—especially the more conservative and Republican groups—richer people are more conservative. [sent-23, score-0.375]
15 For example, military officers are much more conservative than military enlisted personnel. [sent-24, score-0.832]
16 This is one reason why I think that people such as Haidt who study psychology of voting should look at upper-class as well as lower-class voters. [sent-25, score-0.199]
17 As I noted earlier, lower-class whites (especially in the south) may well be trending Republican, but upper-class whites are even more strongly in the Republican camp, and it’s worth understanding their motivations as well. [sent-26, score-1.07]
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Introduction: After our discussions of psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s opinions about working-class voters (see here and here ), a question arose on how to reconcile the analyses of Alan Abramowitz and Tom Edsall (showing an increase in Republican voting among low-education working white southerners), with Larry Bartels’s finding that “there has been no discernible trend in presidential voting behavior among the ‘working white working class.’” Here is my resolution: All the statistics that have been posted seem reasonable to me. Also relevant to the discussion, I believe, are Figures 3.1, 4.2b, 10.1, and 10.2 of Red State Blue State. In short: Republicans continue to do about 20 percentage points better among upper-income voters compared to lower-income, but the compositions of these coalitions have changed over time. As has been noted, low-education white workers have moved toward the Republican party over the past few decades, and at the same time there have been compositional changes
Introduction: Stephen Olivier points me to this horrible, horrible news article by Jonathan Haidt, “Why working-class people vote conservative”: Across the world, blue-collar voters ally themselves with the political right . . . Why on Earth would a working-class person ever vote for a conservative candidate? This question has obsessed the American left since Ronald Reagan first captured the votes of so many union members, farmers, urban Catholics and other relatively powerless people – the so-called “Reagan Democrats”. . . . Sorry, but no no no no no. Where to start? Here’s the difference between upper-income and lower-income votes in presidential elections: Ronald Reagan did about 20 percentage points better among voters in the upper third of income, compared to voters in the lower third. The relation between income and voting since 1980 is about the same as it was in the 1940s. Oh yeah, Haidt said something about “across the world.” How bout this: It varies. In mos
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Introduction: An interview with me from 2012 : You’re a statistician and wrote a book, Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State , looking at why Americans vote the way they do. In an election year I think it would be a good time to revisit that question, not just for people in the US, but anyone around the world who wants to understand the realities – rather than the stereotypes – of how Americans vote. I regret the title I gave my book. I was too greedy. I wanted it to be an airport bestseller because I figured there were millions of people who are interested in politics and some subset of them are always looking at the statistics. It’s got a very grabby title and as a result people underestimated the content. They thought it was a popularisation of my work, or, at best, an expansion of an article we’d written. But it had tons of original material. If I’d given it a more serious, political science-y title, then all sorts of people would have wanted to read it, because they would
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Introduction: In a review of psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s recent book, “The Righteous Mind,” William Saletan writes : You’re smart. You’re liberal. You’re well informed. You think conservatives are narrow-minded. You can’t understand why working-class Americans vote Republican. You figure they’re being duped. You’re wrong. . . . Haidt diverges from other psychologists who have analyzed the left’s electoral failures. The usual argument of these psycho-pundits is that conservative politicians manipulate voters’ neural roots — playing on our craving for authority, for example — to trick people into voting against their interests. But Haidt treats electoral success as a kind of evolutionary fitness test. He figures that if voters like Republican messages, there’s something in Republican messages worth liking. He chides psychologists who try to “explain away” conservatism, treating it as a pathology. Conservatism thrives because it fits how people think, and that’s what validates it. Workers who
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Introduction: Conservative data cruncher Charles Murray asks , “Why aren’t Asians Republicans?”: Asians are only half as likely to identify themselves as “conservative” or “very conservative” as whites, and less than half as likely to identify themselves as Republicans. . . . 70% of Asians voted for Barack Obama in the last presidential election. Something’s wrong with this picture. . . . Everyday observation of Asians around the world reveal them to be conspicuously entrepreneurial, industrious, family-oriented, and self-reliant. If you’re looking for a natural Republican constituency, Asians should define “natural.” . . . Asian immigrants overwhelmingly succeeded, another experience that tends to produce conservative immigrants. Beyond that, Asian minorities everywhere in the world, including America, tend to be underrepresented in politics—they’re more interested in getting ahead commercially or in non-political professions than in running for office or organizing advocacy groups. La
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