PotP #11: People want the government to both spend more and spend less at the same time
Plus a decline in "traditional" values, a look into how Americans view their jobs, and more!
Hello all—Happy Monday! Welcome to Pulse of the Polis #10.
Late last week, Former President Donald Trump was indicted on criminal charges in New York. As of writing the exact charges are currently sealed. And you and I know for a dang fact that this has inspired a flurry of organizations rushing polls into the field to publish a “hErE’s WhAt tHe InDiCtMeNt HaS dOnE tO hIs PoLl NuMbErS” piece in the next few days. (I wrote a short post on LinkedIn on some things to keep in mind as these come across your newsfeed. ) That’s not to say that interesting work can’t/won’t be done on the topic, but I have a sneaking suspicion that such stories will be centered on how this affects Trump v Biden or Trump v DeSantis matchups. I’d strongly advise not putting a whole lot of weight into that. For one, the primary is months away; at this stage good ol’ Jeb! was riding high. But, also, primary audiences are super difficult to poll correctly because it’s not like we have a lot of good ways to weight for the different intra-party factions that exist, nor do we know for sure those are even going to be the salient divisions in the party by the time the primary rolls around!
This is a serious moment in the history of the republic. I’m very glad that we are collecting data on attitudes surrounding it. I just hope that what will get released will boil down to more than simply reading tea leaves.
I’ve got 6 surveys for you this week
A project looking at a decline in “traditional” American values
A set of MRPs that show the varying salience of abortion attitudes over the last few months
And some nuggets that I happened to come across last week.
America Pulls Back From Values That Once Defined It, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds | Published: Mar. 2023| The Wall Street Journal & NORC
This survey of 1,019 US adults show steep decreases in the proportion of Americans who saying that a host of values are “very important to them.” Patriotism, Religion, Having children, Community involvement, Tolerance for others, and Hard work (last two not pictured below) have all experienced large declines in the proportion of people who say that it is “very important to them.” The only thing that more people rated as importance compared to previous years was “money.”
This survey absolutely exploded across the web last week. (Well, insofar that any survey "explodes" on the internet; think firecracker rather than dynamite). There are two really important things to note here: One, as others have mentioned elsewhere, is that a good chunk of this movement can be attributed to the fact that the surveys from 2019 and prior were done over the phone whereas 2023 was done online. Second, choosing “very important” is kind of an arbitrary bar. If you group people into those who say either very/somewhat important, the numbers are far more stable. (e.g., patriotism goes from 87% to 73%; money 92% to 90%). That said, these are still declines! And other, similar surveys with consistent modalities show decreases over time—so it can’t all just be chalked up to mode effects! Plus! There was a pretty major global event that strained people's social ties and ability to invest themselves in their communities between 2019-2023. So I’m curious to see how much things will change from here; whether the decline continues and, if so, if it will be at the same rate.
The Salience of Abortion Rights, Which Helped Democrats Mightily in 2022, Has Started to Fade | Published: Mar. 2023 | Morning Consult
In the months prior to the 2022 midterm elections, there was an expectation that the President’s party was in for, to use is former boss’ term, a “shellacking.” But then came the repeal of Roe v. Wade and the polls started suggesting a far closer race than it had any right otherwise being. And, sure enough, while Republicans did gain in the House, they netted a loss in the Senate and their gains were tepid. The prevailing wisdom for now is that abortion1 was a critical component to stemming the Democrats' House losses. However, this Morning Consult project uses Multilevel Regression and Poststratification (MRP) to show that the salience of the abortion issue is on the decline in numerous districts, across the political spectrum. The proportion of people saying that "abortion, birth control, and equal pay" are among their "top issues" has declined to levels seen just before the early leak of the Dobbs decision.
It'd be wrong to take away from this that abortion (and the repeal of Roe) isn't as potent an issue or that people have grown acquiescent to the status quo. Abortion hasn't become less important, it's simply hibernating. It's actually quite expected for issues that play prominently in national (and nationalized) campaigns to see lower salience once the topic is no longer being constantly blasted across the airwaves. But salience is oft about mental immediacy rather than raw importance2. Once we get into the general next year, you can absolutely bet that it will raise in salience again. It may not be the most important issue by then—who knows what the state of the world will be—but the sleeping giant will at least be prodded.
How Americans View Their Jobs | Published: Mar. 2023| Pew Research
A Pew Research study of over 5,000 US adults working part time or full time provides a snapshot into Americans’ attitudes towards work as well as the benefits (both financial and intangible) their jobs provide. 51% of workers are extremely + very satisfied with their jobs overall. Workers are most satisfied with the relationship they have with their coworkers (67% ) and the relationship they have with their manager or supervisor (62%), but they are the least satisfied with their pay (34%) and their opportunities for promotion (33%). Nearly 80% of workers say that they are “treated with respect all/most of the time, but only 44% say that they have someone at work they could “consider a mentor.” The study identified some important cleavages in many of the attitudes surveyed: Higher education and more highly educated adults tended towards greater satisfaction and greater benefits, but also greater personal investment (e.g., higher shares of people who said that their identity is tied to their work) and a higher difficulty disconnecting (e.g., they are more likely to respond to correspondence after work hours). Racial differences in various forms of discrimination, as well as levels of workplace safety, were also observed.
I'm pretty excited for when Pew's going to publicly release this data; I'm really curious as to just how important all these factors are to people's overall job satisfaction—and how that ranking might vary across different groups. Another thing that stood out to me is how lower income Americans are more likely to feel like they work too many hours compared to middle and higher income folks (though all groups tend to feel that they work the right amount). I wonder if they're actually working substantially fewer hours than the groups and that, rather, they feel like they're wanting more hours because they're being paid less per hour worked.
Toward Parsimony in Bias Research: A Proposed Common Framework of Belief-Consistent Information Processing for a Set of Biases | Published: March 2023 | Perspectives on Psychological Science
The field of psychology has published many, many types of bias over the years. This Wikipedia article of cognitive biases outlines dozens of them. This article argues that many of these biases are simply different manifestations of a far smaller set of latent, fundamental beliefs. The “biases” arise out of a general tendency for our prior beliefs to have large (sometimes outsized) influences on the perceptions/beliefs that follow—what the authors label “belief-consistent information processing.”
I remember being told that, in science, there are “splitters” and “lumpers.” Splitters tend to (sometimes over)emphasize what is unique about things and lumpers tend to (sometimes over)emphasize what’s common. Both instincts are incredibly important to the pursuit of knowledge. I’m generally favorably disposed towards the idea that there are far fewer “bias generating processes” in our brains compared to the number of biases identified in scientific articles. But I harbor doubts about the number of “true” biases and the sub-effects they identify—and I think that the centrality of “belief consistency” doesn’t fit for things like various memory biases or for cases where biases towards novelty/changes were observed.3 Not to say that their list isn’t good or useful, just that it most likely isn’t capital T truth. Still, I applaud the overall push towards synthesis and think that there are bound to be contexts where this more general conceptualization will be more useful than the more fragmented status quo.
Urban-Rural Residency, Place Identity, and Affective Polarization in the United States | Released: March 14 | OSF Preprint
As mentioned in Pulse of the Polis #9, it’s been well known for quite a while that attitudes in rural areas are different than in urban areas. The former tends to be associated with more conservative leanings; the latter more liberal leanings. But that’s not to say that the leanings/sortings are absolute: plenty of liberals live in rural areas, and plenty of conservatives live in urban areas. But the prevailing pattern means that these folks will wind up with a lot of ideologically cross-cutting ties. This working paper by Jennifer Lin and Kristin Lunz Trujillo uses American National Election Study data to show that Republicans who identify themselves as a “city person” tend to hold democrats in higher esteem than Republicans who see themselves as a “country person”—and Democrats who see themselves as a “country person” tend to hold higher opinions of Republicans than Democrats who see themselves as a “city person.” However, this relationship does not hold as cleanly when people report more objectively on the urbanicity of their living conditions; it continues for Democrats but breaks down for Republicans.
This is a fascinating paper! A couple things to note (that are apparent in the full article and should be pretty evident from the chart): Holding a “higher” opinion doesn’t mean that they hold a particularly “high” opinion overall. Rural Democrats, on average, feel pretty cold towards Republicans, and Urban Republicans, on average, feel pretty cool towards Democrats. They’re just less icy than others in their respective parties. I find it interesting for there to be a disconnect between identity and place so I wonder if, for both Democrats and Republicans, how strong the more counterintuitive causal arrow is. That is, maybe Republicans who see themselves as city people ex ante are more tolerant of opposing viewpoints (tolerance for diversity is positively correlated with city residence) and that plays a stronger role than the fact that living in a city will bring them into more contact with Democrats.
Poll: Cut federal spending — but not big-ticket programs | Fielded: Mar. 16-20, 2023 | AP & NORC
In a survey of over 1,000 US adults, the Associated Press and NORC found that 60% of respondents said that government spending is “too much.” This may not be all that surprising in and of itself. However, when asked about specific policy areas such as education, healthcare, social security, Medicare, border security, and the military, the majority of adults in all cases sans one (the military) claimed that the government was spending “too little” on this policy area.
This is actually one of the most reliable findings in American public opinion research: Many people in the US tend to resonate with little-c conservative values, such as fiscal conservativism, and will be generally predisposed to believe the government is wasteful. However, when you point to specific policies, people will often want to spend as much or even more than is currently being spent. This ostensive paradox is at least partially resolved by realizing that 1) the more general question wording lends itself towards a more milquetoast take of "well, every budget has some fat that can be trimmed"; relatedly, 2) said wording allows people to impute into the ambiguity any particular program (or family of programs) that they personally see as useless or odious, even if they're not objectively the largest parts of the budget and, thus, less liable to be mentioned in the follow-up; and 3) that people tend to feel their personal contributions to the state merit more and better quality services than what they're receiving, so they'll lament "waste" as a reason why they aren't getting what they feel is due and bristle at the notion of cutting specific things even further.
As I said, it's such a common finding that it damn-near merits being a scientific law, but it's good that it make the rounds every so often to remind folks.
A couple more nuggets before you go:
Two different surveys (one by Pew and another by YouGov) show that at least a majority (51% YouGov; 50% Pew) support banning TikTok. Both surveys also show something that’s pretty rare for American politics: The out party (Republicans) having higher support for the proposed action than the in-party (Democrats). TikTok users, predictably, were far less supportive (53% oppose for Pew, 39% oppose YouGov).
Americans are generally favorably predisposed towards a number of federal agencies, according to this recent Pew survey.4 Wide, bipartisan support is felt for the Park Service, Nasa, Postal Service, and Veterans Affairs. Otherwise, though, Republicans were net negative on all other agencies, with Democrats being net positive.
66% of US adults believe that former President Trump either definitely or probably committed a crime—a sentiment shared by 48% of Republicans. (And, unsurprisingly, 87% of Democrats). However, only 41% believe that he will be convicted of a crime and 23% of Americans believe he’ll ever serve any prison time.
Americans’ economic outlook is still very poor but at least the percent of people expecting it to get worse (72%) hasn’t itself gotten worse over the last few months. Which is something. Right? RIGHT?
That’s all for this week. Stay safe out there. See you next time.
Including the eagerness of numerous GOP state governments to pass restrictions far exceeding what is actually popular in their states.
You probably aren't thinking of your access to fresh water as a top of mind concern, and there's very few things that are objectively more important!
Additionally, even if belief is the end-all-be-all (which is an oversimplistic articulation of the authors’ points): I highly doubt that the observed biases that they’ve published map cleanly to only one latent belief. It’s likely that the reported biases come stem from multiple beliefs.
This may be a record for the number of Pew surveys cited in a single PotP—but, hey, it’s Pew!!