Update: See here from Steve Kass. Apparently the researchers below made a mistake in reading the data. That sort of thing happens sometimes–that’s one reason it can be helpful to post things on a blog, so that people can catch mistakes.

My bad in not screening this more carefully before posting. In defense of Subramanian and Perkins, they sent me the paper and it was my idea to blog it. They were planning all along to do more systematic analysis of the raw data (which they haven’t yet received).

S. V. Subramanian and Jessica Perkins write:

The prevalence of poor self-rated health was substantially higher among Democrats (25.8%) as compared to Republicans (8.5%). Lower prevalence of poor health among Republicans was also observed in analyses stratified by poverty, education or race. The prevalence of self-rated poor health among poor Democrats or Black Democrats or Democrats with less than high school education were 3 – 14 times higher than comparable Republicans, suggesting that the observed differences in health status by political ideology may not be due to confounding by race or socioeconomic status:

These patterns remain in conditional linear regression models where self-rated health is modeled as a function of political ideological bent (ranging from strongly Democrat to strongly Republican) adjusted for age, sex, race, marital status, income, poverty, education, smoking and religious affiliation.

We also found that more than twice as many Democrats smoke (16.7%) compared to Republicans (7.1%). The prevalence of smoking among poor, less than high school education, or Black Democrats is 3 to 20 times the smoking prevalence among Republicans (see above).

The observation that Republicans enjoy better health status may reflect the core Republican value of individual responsibility, which could translate into increased adherence to health-promoting behaviors. It is also likely that Republicans tend to exhibit greater religiosity compared to Democrats.5 This could lead to health promoting social conditions, such as enhanced social ties and networks, in part facilitated through increased attendance in places of worship.

Our observations should not be interpreted to suggest that a Republican government necessarily equals better health. It would be erroneous to draw macro inferences based on individual-level correlations. Indeed, the question of which type of political ideology, reflected at the government-level, is better for population health or for reducing health disparities are entirely different queries. At the same time, our findings suggest that certain aspects of Republican ideology may implicitly be health enhancing for the individual. The healthier status of Republicans might also explain, perhaps, why they place lower priority on health care.

Interesting. S.V. said they’re waiting to get the raw data so they can run logistic regressions.

P.S. Let me add a few thoughts based on the comments below and at my other blog:

1. To the extent that difference in smoking rates are that large, this would be a big part of the story. But are smoking rates really so low among those groups of Republicans? Perhaps some mistake? I’d really want to look into this before going further.

2. To the extent that the above (or similar) patterns are actually occurring, I think they’re interesting, even if they’re explained by reporting bias or by experiences or by differences between people in big cities and elsewhere, or whatever. As S.V. noted in his article, differences in perceived health–even if explainable by biases–could result in differences in attitudes toward health policy in general.

Somebody asked me what I thought of this article by Wall Street Journal writer Robert Frank, “The Rich Support McCain, the Super-Rich Support Obama.” Frank writes,

According to a new survey by Prince & Associates, voters worth $1 million to $10 million are favoring Sen. John McCain, while voters worth $30 million or more are favoring Sen. Barack Obama. The survey of 493 families showed: More than three quarters of those worth $1 million to $10 million plan to vote for Sen. McCain. Only 15% plan to vote for Sen. Obama (the rest are undecided). Of those worth more than $30 million, two-thirds support Sen. Obama, while one third support Sen. McCain.

Do I believe this? Not really. My problem here is that I don’t know where the survey is coming from. How did Prince & Associates sample people making $30 million or more? Without knowing at least something about the sampling, it’s hard to say anything at all about these claims.

For example, a graph accompanying the article linked above gives estimates of about 0.1 million households with over $25 million and 9 million households with over $1 million. This ratio is about 1%; thus, in a simple random sample of 493 people worth over $1 million, you’d expect to see about a whopping 5 people in the survey worth over $30 million. Or maybe there were 6 such people in the sample; that would explain why the percentages of the super-rich cited in the linked article are 16% (1 in 6) and 67% (4 in 6).

The survey might have more than 6 super-rich people in it; I don’t know since no details are given. (I searched on the web for the survey but all I could find were links to the Robert Frank article discussed here.)

How do you take a sample of super-rich people? Prince & Associates is a Connecticut-based consulting company that describes itself as “the foremost empirical research firm in the realm of private wealth. . . Using purposive sampling methodologies, Prince & Associates, Inc. has created statistically valid single-study and panel samples providing detailed insights into the hard-to-reach and exceptionally private universe of the affluent.”

I respect that this sort of sampling is difficult but it’s hard for me to evaluate it when no description is provided of the sample. I’ll email Russ Alan Prince to see if he can enlighten me on this, but really I’d think it would be the responsibility of a Wall Street Journal reporter to ask some questions here. (I guess it’s possible that Frank did ask some questions but for proprietary reasons did not want to describe the sampling methodology, but if so I would’ve appreciated just a sentence or two on it, to give me a little more confidence in the results.)

Other data

The substantive reason I’m skeptical about these findings (as well as a similar report by Daniel Gross in 2004) is the following passage from page 144 of our Red State, Blue State book:

Probably the best evidence [about the political views of the richest Americans] comes from studies of political contributions. Political scientist Thomas Ferguson has tracked political donations of top corporate executives and the Forbes 400 richest Americans (or their equivalents, in earlier periods). The data presented in his 1995 book, Golden Rule, indicate that America’s superrich have generally learned Republican, but with some notable exceptions that have changed over time. Certain industries have persistently higher rates of contributions to the Democrats. In the New Deal, these included industries with a strong interest in free trade. Since the Reagan years, finance, and high technology firms have been much friendlier to Democratic presidential candidates than most of the rest of American business.

For 2004, Ferguson consolidated the lists of top executives and richest families into a lot of 674 firms and investors. Out of this list, 53% contributed to George W. Bush’s reelection campaign and 16% donated to Kerry, with Bush doing better among the oil and pharmaceutical
industries and Kerry getting more from investment banks and hedge funds.

Given that this 53%-16% gap in contributions in 2004, I’m skeptical of the claim that, in 2004, “the haute millionaires, those worth more than $10 million, favored Kerry 59-41.” Which leaves me skeptical of the 2008 survey as well. Perhaps Prince & Associates is oversampling hedge-funders in Connecticut?

I’ll email Prince and let you know if he replies. As I’ve noted above, this stuff is tricky and I’m certainly willing to believe that there is some way by which Ferguson’s and Prince’s results can be reconciled. My guess right now is that Prince’s sample is unrepresentative but I’m open to other explanations.

P.S. Typo above fixed (thanks to commenter).

P.P.S. Tom Ferguson points me to this tally from April of primary election contributions by the super-rich.

I spoke on the book at NYU on Tuesday and used the line about religion as the “opiate of the elites,” showing this graph:

Pat Egan was my discussant and presented some data casting doubt on this story. He took poll data from 2004, I think it was, and fit logistic regressions to vote preference, given attitudes on three issues: taxes, abortion, and Iraq. He fit separate models to high, middle, and low-income voters. His hypothesis was, if social issues are truly the opiate of the elites, that the coefficient for attitude on abortion would be higher among the rich than the poor. But this didn’t happen: the coefficient for abortion was slightly higher among the poor–that is, social issues, by this measure, seemed to be more important among lower income voters.

What do I make of this? My quick response was that, in their Purple America paper, Ansolabehere, Rodden, and Snyder put together pretty comprehensive measures of social and economic attitudes, and found social attitudes to be more important among the rich than the poor in predicting vote.

I was thinking more about this and have a few other thoughts. Perhaps Pat or someone else will be interested in looking in to this.

- Measurement is key. Responses to different issues have low correlations, so it can help to use multiple issue questions for each issue domain, rather than simply one question per domain.

- My impression is that, for richer voters, both economic and social issues are more closely tied to party preference and also more closely tied to each other. I’m not sure how this should come out in Pat’s multiple regression analysis. I’m still struggling to see how the “opiate of the elites” story fits in to this.

- Religious attendance, and even religious belief, isn’t the same as social attitudes. Not by a long shot. (Similarly, income is not so strongly correlated with economic ideology.) See the graphs on page 90. A challenge is to fit together our findings on income and religion with what we know about issue attitudes.

John Cassidy writes:

If Barack Obama is victorious on November 4th, someone on his transition team should send inauguration tickets to Richard Fuld, the chairman and chief executive of Lehman Brothers.

This is meant to be ironic, I believe: Fuld was the straw that broke the camel’s back and brought down the house of cards that was the American banking system etc etc.

But this got me wondering . . . could Cassidy’s statement be literally true??

I remember from talking with Tom Ferguson that, while the superrich generally favor the Republican Party, the financial sector is one area that leans Democratic. So I looked up Richard Fuld and–hey–here he is:

Richard Fuld, Lehman Rothers – Chairman, CEO 1994-present
Total donations since 1978: $208,550
To Democrats: 63%
To Republicans: 16%
To Special Interests: 21%

In 07/08, he seems to have been covering his bets: $10K each to the Republican and Democratic Senatorial Committees, $4600 to Hillary Clinton, $2300 to Barack Obama, $4600 to Chris Dodd, $2300 to John McCain, $2000 to John Reed in Rhode Island, and $10K to the “Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association Political Action Committee.”

So maybe he’ll get an invite to the inaugural party no matter who wins.

P.S. I was kinda hoping Fuld had only contributed to Obama–that would make a more interesting story. (Or I suppose if he’d only contributed to Republicans all his life, then there’d be an even better story of Richard S. Fuld, Jr., as a sleeper agent for the Democratic Party.) Actually, though, he’s all over the map, basically giving to almost every big name in the tri-state area and then some, including Pete Dawkins, Pete Du Pont, John Glenn for President (remember that?), Brendan Byrne, Phil Gramm, Joe Lieberman, Bob Dole, Al D’Amato and several of his opponents, Joe Lieberman, Jon Corzine, etc etc.