SATURDAY POLITICS: Gallup Poll Says Americans 23% Liberal, 34% Moderate, 38% Conservative

The latest Gallup poll indicates that the percentage of Americans who identify as Liberal has reached an all-time high of 23%. That's the good news, but the bad news is that the percentage who identify as conservative is still the plurality in America, at 38%, a full four percentage points ahead of the moderate fraction of the population.

Gallup summarizes the implication of the polls as reflecting the increase in political polarization we have experienced recently.

Americans' perceptions of their political views -- if not the views themselves -- are undergoing unmistakable change, contributing to greater political polarization in the country. Now, the plurality of Democrats consider themselves to be politically liberal, whereas a decade ago, Democrats were most likely to say they were moderate. That could be because Democrats are now more comfortable calling themselves "liberal" -- a term that was less popular in the recent past -- even if their current and past views on issues are similar. But it could also reflect an evolution in their views to favor more traditionally liberal issue positions.

Meanwhile, Republicans, who have always been overwhelmingly conservative, have become increasingly so. One manifestation of that may have been a series of primary election challenges for long-serving GOP members of Congress by candidates aligned with the Tea Party movement.

These data confirm the tendency for Americans who identify with the two major parties to be more ideologically homogeneous than was the case in the past, a tendency that appears to be matched by the increasing polarization between Democratic and Republican members of Congress.

The changes in ideological identification among party groups has resulted in a rise in the percentage of Americans overall who call themselves liberal and a decrease in the percentage of moderates. Even though the percentage of conservatives has generally held steady, the rise in liberal identification leaves conservatives with their smallest advantage over liberals in the last two decades. If the trends in Democratic self-identification continue, that gap will likely continue to shrink over time, and could lead to further polarization in U.S. politics.

Hat/tip to Talking Points Memo.

ENDA Now Supported By Majority of U.S. Senate!

With the addition of Tom Carper of Delaware, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) now sports the public support of 51 Senators, a clear majority of the United States Senate. However, in order to become law, the measure will almost certainly need to clear a Republican filibuster, so the real level of support necessary for passage of this key legislative priority is 60 votes.

Astonishingly, ENDA has bipartisan support with moderate Republicans (Yes, Virginia, they do exist!) Mark Kirk of Illinois and Susan Collins of Maine supporting S. 815. However, there are still 5 members of the Democratic caucus who have not signed on:

The 5 Democrats who have not publicly said whether they oppose anti-LGBT discrimination are Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Bill Nelson of Florida, Tim Johnson of South Daoka, Joe Manchin and Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia. It must be noted that Machin and Pryor are two of the three remaining Democrats who do not support marriage equality (the third is Mary Landrieu of Louisiana). Oddly, Johnson and Nelson and Rockefeller all do support the right of gay people to marry the person they love but not the right of gay people to hold a job without getting fired! (Cognitive dissonance, much?)

There's no question the clamor around full civil rights for LGBT Americans is going to get louder as the month of June continues and the Supreme Court weights in on the issue in the Hollingsworth and Windsor cases by the end of the month.

STUDY: Trust Science? You're a Liberal!

Towleroad reports about a very disturbing result that public distrust of science is correlated with partisanship. In "Politicization of Science in the Public Sphere: A Study of Public Trust in the United States, 1974 to 2010" published in the American Sociological Review (Volume 77, issue 2, pp. 167-187), Gordon Gauchat, a professor at the University of North Carolina, details the ongoing politicization of science. Conservatives mistrust science the most, with Liberals trusting science the most and Moderates are closer to conservatives than liberals in this instance.

From the graph above you can see that conservative trust of science is at an all-time low, with just 35% of self-identified conservatives saying that they have "a great deal of trust in science." The numbers for conservatives have been dropping for year while those of liberals have remained relatively steady.

In his paper, Gauchat says:

As mentioned, one interpretation of these findings is that conservatism in the United States has become a cultural domain that generates its own knowledge base that is often in conflict with the cultural authority of science. For example, on fundamental ontological questions about who we are and how we got here, conservatives are far more likely to doubt scientific theories of origins, including theories of natural selection and the Big Bang (Newport 2007, 2009). A growing number of conservatives also doubt climate change: in 2010, only a third of conservatives believed that global warming is occurring, compared to almost half in 2008 (Jones 2010). These particular opinions, coupled with the general trends examined in Table 2, suggest a growing chasm between conservatives’ ideas about “what is the case” and liberals’ willingness to trust science on these matters. 

Given the theoretical relationship between education and confidence in science, an additional explanation relates to whether conservatives’ educational composition changed over the period. Simply, if conservatives as a group are less educated than they once were, this might account for the decline in trust in the scientific community. First, according to the combined GSS data, the proportion of conservatives who received at least a high school degree is greater than the proportion for liberals. Second, the percentage of conservatives and liberals who received bachelor’s degrees is nearly identical, approximately 17 percent. Liberals, however, were more likely to receive graduate degrees compared to conservatives, and the gap between ideological groups grows over the period. Importantly, this growing gap is due to an increase in the percentage of liberals receiving graduate degrees and not a decline among conservatives. Altogether, the data provide little evidence that group-specific differences in public trust in science are attributable to changes in conservatives’ educational composition.

In other words, the increasing gap is not because conservatives are any less educated than liberals. Gauchat's overall explanation is that there has been a marked change in the distrust of science among people who are conservative and attend church frequently and this drives the overall decline in the numbers.

Do you agree with his explanation for the gap between conservatives and liberals? Do YOU trust science?