PotP #9: Trust in Banks Post-SVB Shutdown and Rural Resentment's Association with Political Trust
Plus work on whether everyone thinks the same thing when they hear the term "penguin", trust in Fox News, and more!
Last week, I ran a totally scientific set of polls on Twitter and Substack to gauge people’s preferences for the newsletter moving forward. After applying the fanciest, most advanced models possible1 to analyze the responses, I’ve decided to shift the format of the newsletter slightly. I’ll be covering slightly more work weekly but trying to be more concise in my summary and take on them. Hope you all enjoy!
Hi all—Happy Monday! Welcome to Pulse of the Polis #9.
Let’s go ahead and talk about last week’s major event—something that was only anticipated by those truly in the know but a surprise to others. I am, of course, talking about Taylor Swift dropping 3 new songs to kick off her new Eras tour. Although recent Morning Consult data suggests that a slim majority (53%) of American adults consider themselves Taylor Swift fans, only 16% of adults classify themselves as “avid fans.” The survey also asked respondents what their favorite albums were. Among both avid fans and U.S adults, 1989 comes out on top. Which, in my humble opinion, shows the power of the wisdom of the crowd to arrive at the objectively correct answer.
(Yes we’ll also be talking about the other major event of last week: Silicon Valley Bank).
I’ve got 6 surveys for you this week:
A project investigating why many Black Americans identify as conservative yet vote Democrat.
American adults’ favorabilty towards a number of major religious traditions.
And some nuggets that I happened to come across last week.
The Curious Case of Black Conservatives: Assessing the Validity of the Liberal-Conservative Scale among Black Americans | Published: Forthcoming, 2023 | Public Opinion Quarterly
As mentioned in an earlier edition, a lot has been written on Black conservativism. One of the prevailing paradoxes is why Black Americans overwhelmingly vote Democrat yet many identify as “conservative.” Using data accumulated from multiple waves of the American National Election Study (ANES), Hakeem Jefferson finds that many Black respondents are not using the same operational meanings of “liberal” and “conservative” as those seen in the definitions employed by the likes of political scientists and pundits. Jefferson found that those who have more strongly adopted the “mainstream” definition are far more likely to vote in-line with their stated ideologies. That is, those more “familiar” with the measure who said that they were conservative were more likely to vote Republican than those who said that they were conservative but were less familiar with the measure.
This strikes me as a very clever argument. After all, you wouldn’t be able to take a defining set of first principles from either the “liberal” and “conservative” perspective and, without prior knowledge, correctly arrive at all of the sociopolitical positions these folks tend to hold. You have to be fairly decently-versed in the groups, histories, and paradigms of American political analysis to do it on all but the most popular issues (and many folks would rather watch paint dry than engage with this). So it makes sense that the more one internalizes the measure, the more their behavior will cohere with the measure's associated expectations. I would love to see some work on what different groups think of when they hear “conservative” and “liberal”; how stable those conceptualizations are and how important people see these constructs to their partisan identities.
Don’t fence me in! Rural resentment and political trust in the United States | Published: Mar. 2023 | OSF Preprint
It is pretty well known that are pretty substantial political differences between those who identify as living in a "rural" area versus those who live in an "urban" or "suburban" area. However, while identity alone may itself be a solid predictor of important attitudes (such as trust in little-d democracy), we would expect that attitudinal constructs that incorporate both identity and views on how the group relates to the State will be more powerful. Using data from roughly 7,500 respondents from the 2020 ANES2, Jack Thompson uses items from a validated measure of "rural resentment" (looking at whether rural people get more/less compared to others, have too much/too little influence on government, and have too much/too little respect from others) and constructs a 4-item measure of political trust. Controlling for a variety of important factors, he finds that higher levels of rural resentment is associated with lower levels of political trust. The results of his models suggest that movement along this resentment scale is a stronger predictor than one's rural identity.
I live in a more rural area (or at least adjacent to one). Anecdotally: the conversations I hear and the flags, t-shirts, and bumper stickers I see (and the surprising frequency that I see them) cohere well with Thompson’s models and arguments. One thing I wonder is if you’d see a different relationship politically-attuned liberals living outside of rural areas. An argument that I see frequently on left-leaning social media portals is that US institutions (such as the Senate) are systematically biased in favor of the positions in rural areas. So you may have a subset of people who also experience lower levels of trust due to the items on the rural resentment scale but for whom said scale is practically reverse coded. Though we’re talking a triple-interaction there so, yeah, may be tough to test fairly.
Americans Feel More Positive Than Negative About Jews, Mainline Protestants, Catholics | Fielded: Sep. 13-18, 2022 | Pew Research Center
A Pew Research study of over 10,500 individuals from their American Trends Panel finds differences in the favorability of religious groups/traditions. While the overwhelming majority of people tend to not stake an explicitly favorable/unfavorable opinion, American adults, on balance, felt more favorable than unfavorable towards Jews (+28 points), Mainline Protestants (+20), Catholics (+16), and Evangelical Christians (+2) but more unfavorable towards Atheists (-10), Muslims (-5), and Mormons (-1). There are major differences in these positions among the various faiths/traditions. The most group most positively seen across all groups is Jews and the most negatively seen is Muslims. The group with the most positive disposition towards the most groups are Mormons (who are net favorable towards all traditions) and the group with the most negative disposition towards the most groups were the religiously unaffiliated (who only held Jews in net positive esteem).
In another win for the “contact hypothesis”, the report also found that those who knew someone from one of the groups were more likely to rate that group favorably and less likely to rate them unfavorably. The exception to this trend, though, were Evangelical Christians. More people who knew an Evangelical rated Evangelicals positively compared to those who didn’t know an Evangelical (24% vs 9%) but those knowing an Evangelical were also more likely to have an unfavorable position to them compared to someone who didn’t know an Evangelical (31% vs 22%).
Consumer Trust in Banks Remains High Despite Recent Bank Collapses | Fielded Mar. 13-15 | Morning Consult
A Morning Consult poll of 2,200 US Adults fielded shortly after news of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (as well as Signature Bank and Silvergate Capital) finds that trust in banks generally remains unaffected with 70% of people saying that they trust banks to “do what is right.” About 80% of Adults are (very + somewhat) confident that their banks could provide them with all of the money in their accounts. Generally, older and wealthier Americans were more likely to trust banks and be more confident in the solvency of their accounts.
This is broadly good news. I would hazard a guess that the stability and continued confidence among the mass public stem from the fact that these banks were specialized and (relatively) unknown to most folks. What I would love to know, though (and it’d be almost impossible to do in a genpop poll) is how these closures affected the attitudes of large investors—who, by many accounts, were already on edge due to the Federal Reserve’s actions to combat inflation. I’m curious if this will push them (and, consequently, the companies they invest in) towards more conservative, cost-cutting measures—even if the general population is currently pretty nonplussed.
21% of Fox News Viewers Trust Network Less After Texts Revealed in Dominion Lawsuit: Survey | Fielded Mar. 10-12, 2023 | Variety
Fox News is currently being sued by Dominion for defamation over the former’s promulgation of unsubstantiated claims of fraud in the 2020 election. (Fox placed Dominion at the center of many of these conspiracies). Recently, documents released as part of the discovery phase of the suit revealed that many people at Fox (including people those at high levels in the organization) didn’t actually believe what they were peddling. A recent survey of roughly 1,500 Americans (including about 340 Fox viewers) by Maru on behalf of Variety has found that 54% of adults do not trust Fox news, including 12% who claim to trust it less as a consequence. Among Fox Viewers 21% say that they trust it less after the revelations. However, only 13% of Fox Viewers say that this affected their beliefs in the 2020 election.
I think that many outlets are a bit too uncritically fixated on the 21% figure—which, to me, is irresponsible. 340 respondents with a non-transparent methodology3 does not a robust survey make. I think that this survey is probably educating many of these viewers to the existence of these documents (Fox isn’t exactly covering the issue as much as outlets generally critical towards Fox are) and so likely doesn’t reflect the position of most Fox viewers. Additionally, it probably should have been among people who have viewed Fox within the last couple of months since, if their argument that the revelations have affected trust, some folks should be tuning out. But allowing that there's some proportion turned-off by these reveals (though I'm not at all convinced it's particularly large): I’d be curious as to what kinds of viewers are affected; they could already be the folks who started turning towards more conservative outlets in recent years rather than the more die-hard fans.
Latent Diversity in Human Concepts | Published: Mar. 2023 | Open Mind
When I say the word “penguin”, what concepts come to your mind? How confident are you that your conceptualization is the only one? This research used two different studies (one on 1,500 people from MTurk, another with 1,000 people from the platform Prolific) to show that many common animals and popular US politicans do not necessarily bring the same conceptualizations to mind for everyone. In essence, the first study asked people whether, for example, a eagle was more similar to a whale or to a finch (multiplied over many combinations of animals); the second study asked yes/no questions of the form of “is a whale smart” or “is a penguin carnivorous?” Similar numbers of clusters were found in both studies despite the difference in platform and clustering methodology. In all cases, the probability of their being one, overriding conceptualization was effectively 0. Multiple clusters of conceptualizations exist on the tested topics, pointing to latent differences across people broadly.
I think that this was a really fascinating study that coheres well with the voluminous literature on media framing. Basically, because entities and ideas contain a multitude of concepts, it’s possible to use surrounding information to “frame” what specific aspects come to people’s mind. (And, consequently, shape the attitudes they express on the topic). However, this power is limited: It’s not like a trusted source could assert that the sky is actually yellow, that grass is bright pink, or that pineapple belongs on pizza.4 Things that are unrelated to the topic's conceptual schema won't act as an effective frame. It doesn’t at all surprise me that some things are effectively more salient among different clusters of folks—but this is a very cool way of measuring the level of latent diversity (as suggested by the article’s title). I would love to see an explicit marriage of work like this with the aforementioned framing work.5 I can also see this methodology as useful for studies on brands, issues, candidates for purely descriptive/exploratory studies.
A couple more nuggets before you go
A recent Gallup poll suggests that 47% of Americans believe that we will not return to the world that existed prior to the start of the covid-19 pandemic. However, there are differences across different party identities: 50% of Republicans believe that life has already returned back to normal versus 24% of Democrats. 53% of the latter believe it will never be normal again, compare to 33% of Republicans.
67% of Americans have tried a non-dairy milk, according to a recent Morning Consult poll. Almond milk reigns as the most popular preference with Rice milk at the lowest. Which makes me think that people are seriously sleeping on the versatility of soy milk.
A recent IPSOS/Axios poll finds that about 90% of Americans oppose cuts to Social Security and Medicare, with wide bipartisan consensus (96% of Democrats oppose as well as 84% of Republicans).
That’s it for this edition. Stay safe out there. Enjoy the rest of your week!
There were a total of 8 respondents. The fanciest method possible was “ok, let me add up which had the most across the two platforms and hope that no one voted twice.” Maybe I should’ve asked GPT-4…
This is the second time the ANES features in just this single newsletter! Now you can understand why I’m such a dork about it; it is just so incredibly data rich.
The weighting methodology is either not-reported or behind a paywall—and I’m too cheap to buy a subscription to know for sure.
Fight me.
For example, maybe a study that explores the various coexisting concepts on an issue and then, in a second study, tries to frame opinions based on things that are seen as concepts that are shared across/unique to different groups. I’d expect things with greater agreement will be more effective frames.