I was looking through the Pew surveys and they are just full of fascinating things. I actually hate to tell youall about this because I think I could just go through this report and pull out one table per day for months and impress you with my political knowledge . . .

Anyway, here’s an interesting bit, having to do with how people view businesses in America: Nearly two-thirds of respondents say corporate profits are too high, but, “more than seven in ten agree that ‘the strength of this country today is mostly based on the success of American business’ – an opinion that has changed very little over the past 20 years.”

Everybody loves Citibank

People like business in general (except for those pesky corporate profits) but they love individual businesses, with 95% having a favorable view of Johnson and Johnson (among those willing to give a rating), 94% liking Google, 91% liking Microsoft, . . . I was surprised to find that 70% of the people were willing to rate Citibank, and of those people, 78% had a positive view. I mean, I don’t have a view of Citibank one way or another, but it would seem to me to be the kind of company that people wouldn’t like.

Professionals vs. working class

Now here’s where it gets really interesting. The Pew report broke things down by party identification (Democrat or Republican) and by “those who describe their household as professional or business class; those who call themselves working class; and those who say their family or household is struggling.”

Republicans tend to like corporations, with little difference between the views of professional-class and working-class Republicans. For Democrats, though, there’s a big gap, with professionals having a generally more negative view, compared to the working class:

A puzzling pattern

There’s a pretty consistent pattern across the entire table which I don’t fully understand, that goes as follows:

- For some corporations (Halliburton, Walmart, Exxon, McDonald’s, Pfizer, Coke), the working-class Democrats are much less supportive than the working-class Republicans. For these corporations, there is almost no difference between professional and working-class Republicans. The only exception is Coke, which was viewed much less favorably by professional-class than working-class Republicans.

- For the others (Citibank, GM, Coors, American Express, Target, Starbucks), working-class Democrats had views that were similar to or more favorable than their Republican counterparts. And for these, there was a consistent pattern of much stronger favorability by professional than working-class Republicans.

I can come up with a story in each individual case but I don’t really have a good way of thinking about all these together. (Also, for some reason, the report doesn’t give the responses for those who say their families are “struggling.” Perhaps the sample sizes were too small.)

One more bit

Respondents were asked how concerned they were about business corporations and government “collecting too much personal information about people like them.” In general, Democrats and Independents were more concerned about both.

80% of Democrats and Independents were concerned about business collecting personal information and 65% were concerned about government. Among Republicans, 60% were concerned about business collecting the information and only 40% concerned about government. The survey is from 2007; perhaps Republicans’ views about government snooping will change if there is a Democratic administration.

Also, people with higher income and higher education have “less concern about government data collection, while lower income is associated with higher concern. Income and education did not affect opinions about businesses collecting data.” The bit about higher status people trusting the government more makes sense and is consistent with other survey results I’ve seen, but I’m surprised that there isn’t a similar pattern regarding concern about businesses. Perhaps there are different patterns among the parties. The data are downloadable from Pew’s website so you can go crunch the numbers yourself it you’d like.

After we posted our graphs from chapter 8 (see below entry), we got a few questions and comments that seem worth responding to:

1. What evidence did we use to estimate ideology of voters and congressmembers?

House members and senators’ positions are estimated based on their votes in Congress. Voters’ positions are estimated based on some survey questions where people were asked their views on a number of issues that had also been voted on in Congress.

2. Political ideology is not just left-right; it’s multidimensional.

True. Studies have found that legislators’ positions can be captured pretty well on a single left-right dimension, but voters are much more diverse in their views. Basically, what Joe and Michael are doing is placing voters on the left-right scale that is determined by legislative votes.

3. Commenter Ctate writes, “The graphs suggest that there are members of Congress — perhaps several of them — who are noticeably more liberal than any voters. Living as I do in Berkeley, I [Ctate] find it pretty unlikely that there are multiple legislators in office who are MORE liberal than my local community.”

The distributions are scaled to be the same size. So the question is whether in a random sample of 435 Americans, you’d expect to see anyone further to the left than the leftmost congressmember. The answer to that appears to be no.

4. But, still, are congressmembers really more extreme than voters?

Maybe, maybe not. The ideologies estimated by Joe and Michael (and graphed in our book) are scaled based on actual votes. So if your far-left or far-right friends have extreme views on issues that don’t come up in Congress, they won’t show up in this analysis.

Summary

The measurement issues here are real. How “left” or “right” you are depends on what questions you are asked. I think Joe and Michael did a good job (which is why we got graphs from them to use in our book), and there’s room for more to be done.

These plots from John Sides reminded me of some graphs from our forthcoming Red State, Blue State book that display the distributions of voters, House members, and senators on a common scale:

House members and senators’ positions are estimated based on their votes in Congress.  Voters’ positions are estimated based on some survey questions where people were asked their views on a number of issues that had also been voted on in Congress.  As you can see, elected representatives are generally more extreme than voters.

Polarization in red, purple, and blue states

We also looked at these distributions among Republican, battleground, and Democratic states (categorized based on their presidential voting patterns in 2000 and 2004). Geographic polarization is strong, especially in the Senate:

Voters in Republican and Democratic states are slightly more conservative and liberal, respectively, on the issues. Elected representatives are more geographically polarized: winner-take-all elections generally magnify differences that are already there. In a strongly Democratic-leaning state, it is likely that both senators will be Democrats and will be on the left side of the political spectrum. Such a state will also typically have many strongly Democratic congressional districts. The reverse pattern holds in Republican states.

More detail is in chapter 8 of the book, and lots of other information is in an article by Joe Bafumi and Michael Herron.