A Mating Theory of the Partisan Divide

Most everyone agrees there is a partisan divide, that gap separating liberals and conservatives --  one that many say is widening, has led to congressional deadlock, and may or may not have something to do with global climate change thanks to all the hot air spewing forth from cable television "news."

More on cable news in a minute.

For those of you luckily innocent of social science research, let me warn you that there are lots of theories out there that attempt to explain what makes someone liberal or conservative.  Some focus on how you were raised, or some major socio-political event in your formative years, or even the kinds of schools you attended.

Now we have one that's more basic. It's all about mating.  Sex.  Reproduction. In other words, liberals drawn to liberals, conservatives drawn to conservatives.  According to this study published in Political Behavior, mating leads to, well, you know -- the making of more little liberals and conservatives.

The authors looked at dating profiles (how neat is that?).  I have access to the full study through my university account (email me if you want a copy).  They find:

...that liberals and conservatives do not differ wildly in their assortative tendencies, with both groups typically demonstrating a strong preference to date similar others. This suggests that our desire for social homogamy influences who we encounter as we date, and then within that group of like individuals we inevitably choose a partner who shares our political preferences. That is, assortation on factors other than
ideology could be driving assortation on ideology.

This is PhDspeak for liberals wanna date liberals, conservatives wanna date conservatives.  Conservatives were "less accepting of dissimilarity" than liberals, at least when it comes to potential mates.  This fits other studies that find media fragmentation along cable news networks to be even greater among conservatives or Republicans.  Other research suggests conservatives are less open to ideas that challenge their predispositions than are liberals.

Who would've thought it also applies to mating habits?

So, as the authors point out, "like seeks like," but this ideological pairing seems to be "a fairly modern phenomenon." 

In the "yes it gets worse" category, their computer simulation suggests this will lead to a greater divide among subsequent generations.  The partisan divide, made wider through reproduction.  There's a joke in there somewhere.


A number of factors may blunt this trend, they note.  I suppose that's the good news.  But in general the results suggest mate selection may lead to even greater polarization, as if the country could get even more polarized.

Dogs and Cats, Living Together. Mass Hysteria.

See my column in today's Athens Banner-Herald.

Persistent Misperceptions: The Death Panels

When you mess with people's health care, there's always going to be trouble.  And misperceptions.  Take, for example, the death panel myth, the notion pushed by Sarah Palin, Sean Hannity, and others that death panels would decide the fate of older folks if the Obama health care proposal made it through Congress.  A new paper published in The Forum gets at this health care myth.

There is an excellent Table 1 on page 9 that attempts to trace the history of the death panel myth.

If you don't want to follow the link, it begins with Betsy McCaughey on Fred Thompson's radio show (is there a Republican without a show?) on July 16, 2009, followed by a column by McCaughey in The New York Post a day later.  Sean Hannity picks up on it that same day, as does Laura Ingraham on her radio show.  Limbaugh arrives a few days later, and so on, including our future Speaker of the House on July 23 in a press release.  Palin is often credited for the myth, you betcha, but she doesn't repeat the myth until the following month, as does U.S. Rep. Paul Broun (my own congressional representative, and a bit of a fruitcake).  But Palin really ran with this one, despite two fact-checking web sites that point out she was wrong.  Never let pesky facts get in the way of a good narrative, I always say.

But there is no excuse for outright lying in an important debate, at least not in a perfect political world.  Or, as the paper's author argues:

As a result, until the media stops giving so much attention to misinformers, elites on both sides will often succeed in creating misperceptions, especially among sympathetic partisans. And once such beliefs take hold, few good options exist to counter them—correcting misperceptions is simply too difficult.

Recent research, for example, found that even when a news organization corrects a misperception, the result is to push some folks, based on their partisan predispositions, even further in the wrong direction and acceptance of an outright myth.  In other words, fixing it doesn't work, so partisans and journalists alike need to keep debate to the facts, not the myths.  And yeah, that's not gonna happen, especially from partisans who have air time to fill and are more than accepting of a certain moral flexibility when it comes to facts.

Are We Divided? Or are the Elites Divided?

My headline above sums up an old political science argument -- are political divisions the stuff of real people, or just the stuff of political elites?  This brief but excellent The Atlantic column gets into it.  Ultimately he blames the elites, the chattering class, not regular folks, for the festering political divide.  And the data kinda support this, that most of the partisan divide can be found among political elites, chatterers, and news junkies -- not real live regular people.

If We Just Ask More Questions . . .

A study in the latest issue of Public Opinion Quarterly examines the nature of political ideology, throwing at the reader a mix of cool advanced statistical methods to come to a simple conclusion -- for a lot of folks the standard single-item ideology question on a traditional 7-point scale, from liberal to conservative, just doesn't work.

Yes, the political elite have become more partisan and ideological.  And yes, they've dragged a lot of the chattering class and even everyday people farther to the left or the right.  What this study finds is a whole lot of people still answer liberal on some policy questions and conservative on other policy questions, so for them the single-item ideological placement question fails to capture who they really are, what they really think.

Or, as the authors note in their conclusions:

Our results show that failing to account for the multidimensional nature of ideological preferences can produce inaccurate predictions of voting behavior for the plurality of Americans who do not call themselves liberal or conservative.

Their recommendation?  Ask more questions.  Don't rely only on that good old fashioned liberal-to-conservative question to classify people, because for those in the middle, it fails to capture what people really think and believe.  Add policy questions since people can sometimes be fiscal conservatives and social liberals, or some other mix.

What's the media angle here?  I think the fragmentation of the news media (see Fox vs MSNBC) is dragging a lot of people, kicking and screaming, into the same partisan divide elites began sharing many years ago.  Listen to Sean Hannity, for example, and you'll hear him push for a whole slate of consistent ideological beliefs across the spectrum.  I'd love to know if "talk radio conservatives" are more consistent in their ideological beliefs than "non-talk radio conservatives."  Ooooh, future study. 

Study specs: Clarke, H.D. & McCutcheon, A.L. (2009).  The nature of political ideology in the contemporary electorate.  Public Opinion Quarterly, 73, 679-703.

The Partisan Divide

Are Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, dogs and cats, really growing further apart? Some new Pew Center numbers certainly suggest this is the case -- well, not for dogs and cats, but yes for political beliefs. Look at the graph to the right, hot linked from the Pew site. And especially look at the methodological info below. Over 22 years, 48 values, trended for your ease and enjoyment.

Pretty damn telling.

The full report is broader, more comprehensive, and worth the read. It'll be depressing at times for Republicans, but take to heart the fact the data here do not go as far back as the 1970s and post-Watergate. Other data sources, such as ANES, do so, and you'll see this is all cyclical. If you look at this graph, for example, you'll see the 1970s drop and another when Clinton was elected.

The Pew report is something special because it goes beyond attitudes about political parties and gets into the stuff of what people know and think about the important issues of the day. Section 4 on religious beliefs is a personal favorite because I do research in that area. Section 11 discusses the partisan gaps, if that's more your thing. Finally, section 8 examines political participation

I will explore this report in more detail as the week progresses because it is full of good stuff.