The Ambivalent Majority!
By amba | Related entries in General Politics, PollsWell, plurality, anyway.
The Pew Research Center asked a sampling of Americans six questions carefully designed to plot their location on a grid of four ideological positions — conservative, liberal, libertarian, and populist. The six questions with their total survey answers:
Economic Issues Sphere
Favor government guaranteeing health insurance for all (65% yes, 30% no)
Government regulation needed to protect public interest (49% yes, 41% no)
Favor private retirement accounts for Social Security (54% yes, 30% no)Social Issues Sphere
Favor legalizing gay/lesbian marriage (32% yes, 61% no)
Oppose banning books with “dangerous ideas” from school libraries (51% yes, 44% no)
Worry government too involved in promoting morality (51% yes, 41% no)
Respondents’ patterns of response to these questions fell into four distinct groups — and one indistinct one.
“Liberals” tend to favor an active role for government in regulating the economy, but oppose government attempts to regulate morality or private life in the social sphere. “Conservatives” take just the opposite approach, preferring a smaller role for government in the economy but a bigger role for it in promoting morality. [ . . . ]
[T]he two other important U.S. political traditions [are] libertarian and populist [ . . . ]
Americans espousing a “libertarian” ideology oppose government regulation in both the economic and the social spheres. “Populists,” by contrast, favor an active role for government in both the economic and the social spheres
The majority of Americans, 58%, can be ideologically pigeonholed, but they are fractured among the four quadrants: 18% liberal, 16% populist, 15% conservative, and 9% libertarian. By far the single biggest group, at 42%, was . . . AMBIVALENT! A.K.A. non-ideological: “people with a mixture of views, or who declined to offer opinions on several of the six questions in the test.”
The demographic breakdown of the groups is quite fascinating. Liberals are far and away the most educated (no great surprise there). More libertarians are men (especially young men); more ambivalents, liberals, and populists are women. White Protestants and frequent churchgoers are the most conservative AND populist. Libertarians skew west, populists skew south.
This can tell you a great deal about political coalitions, about the current isolation of liberals, and above all, the volatility and alienation of the huge, ambivalent “swing vote” — an enormous well for the right centrist candidate to tap into. Go see.
(Thanks to Mike McGillicuddy.)
Cross-posted on AmbivaBlog
This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 11th, 2006 and is filed under General Politics, Polls. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
April 11th, 2006 at 2:46 pm
My views:
Economic Issues Sphere
Favor government guaranteeing health insurance for all: No, my private-sector-supplied health insurance is bad enough, no need to make it worse.
Government regulation needed to protect public interest: Yes, but only when demonstrably necessary.
Favor private retirement accounts for Social Security: No, largely because that part of the private sector is largely populated by wolves.
Social Issues Sphere
Favor legalizing gay/lesbian marriage: No, well sort-of. I think gay/lesbian partners should be given the exact same legal rights, but I’m not keen on calling it “marriage”. I think it’s a completely different situation that ought to be given a completely different term.
Oppose banning books with “dangerous ideasâ€Â? from school libraries: Yes, because that’s a slippery slope if ever there was one.
Worry government too involved in promoting morality: Yes, oh good grief, yes.
Now, I’m pretty certain those answers don’t line up nicely with any of the major parties. Does that make me ambivalent? Heck no. It just makes me difficult to classify. Not the same thing. I’m not uncertain, I’m not conflicted, and I don’t consider myself to be characterized by fundamentally opposed views. Not ambivalent.
April 11th, 2006 at 2:49 pm
No, an enormous well for the LEFT centrist candidate to tap into.
April 11th, 2006 at 2:52 pm
You scored 1.5 conservative and 4.5 liberal
If you count your answer to “Favor legalizing gay/lesbian marriage: ” as 1/2 and 1/2.
easy call if you have insurance, a little more difficult if you are one of those with out.
April 11th, 2006 at 3:06 pm
When I’ve seen that 4 pointed chart, it has “moderate” right in the middle. That’s not ambivalent to me, or even hard to classify. It is just Moderate.
Why are moderates not considered a major classification? No representative party? No exciting and wacky platform? Too reasonable?
April 11th, 2006 at 3:13 pm
I find it really surprising that people favor private Social Security accounts by 24 points. There seemed to be a pretty comfortable majority of Americans against Bush’s plan to do that.
This seems to me to be a situation where the idea sounds great in the abstract, but when an actual plan has to be put forth along with its costs and risks, then people are so enthusiastic.
Also surprising is the slim margin of support for protecting the public interest through regulation. With all the corporate scandals, I would think that more people would feel a need for that.
I guess this is a good example of why I am a liberal and the general public is centrist.
April 11th, 2006 at 3:33 pm
Very interesting post.
Not surprised, but I was 6 for 6 liberal. This is probably just semantics, but I do agree that not fitting into one of those four categories does not mean that someone is “ambivalent”, more that they are “independent” and just don’t fit into one of the four categories, plain and simple.
April 11th, 2006 at 5:09 pm
Rob, I’ve a good chunk of my life below the poverty line. My dad was a nurse, and my mom home schooled us, so there wasn’t a lot of income to go around. I know what it’s like to be in a family with no health insurance or really crappy health insurance. It’s no fun at all when things go wrong. That said, I still wouldn’t want to deal with public health insurance. At least with private health insurance, you have a choice. With public health insurance, you’re taxed and you get what they give you, and you hope you don’t get really screwed. Which, if you’re poor, you probably will.
April 11th, 2006 at 5:22 pm
Also, I’d argue that the questions chosen were actually quite lousy. Because in general, I fall a lot more on the conservative side than the liberal side, but the questions and my answers certain don’t make that obvious. The libertarian party’s website has a more accurate (IMHO) system for figuring this stuff out. Similar concept, but better questions, and the “maybe” option is important, I think.
Only issue, of course, is that the overall statistics are horrendously skewed towards libertarians simply because, you know, it’s on a libertarian site, so it figures that you’d get a lot of libertarian results. Obviously, not a controlled setup.
April 11th, 2006 at 7:07 pm
Wait a minute, 61% = YES – ban gay marraige, 51% = NO – to “dangerous ideas” (whatever that is) in books avaliable to schools, but, 51% – worry about government too involved in promoting morality? What am I missing? Gay marraige and dangerous books are both dealing with legislating morality. No wonder this country is screwed up!
April 11th, 2006 at 8:52 pm
Well, Amba, looking at the prior responses it would seem that the survey did expose one key item …. dissent is running so deep that even the results of a survey are cause for sharp discordance. If the survey is correct it presents a challenge for the centrist movement. I am not certain tha I agree with the metrics for the survey. I think that the survey questions were determined by pre-conceived notions of the designer. If we are going to tag respondents with psuedo-political categories, we are not going to break the 527 mentality that is being pushed as the new campaign funding strategy.
Pew should run some polls on issues, and report the metrics with no regard to affiliation so the numers make sense to the population as opposed to the machine. There is a significant shift in the mood of the country back to religion (say morality?) and I am not sure what the question regarding books and dangerous ideas is evn about. are we going to require another Scopes trial?
At any rate, I think Pew needs go back to the drawing board … and also needs to take a gander at the design specs for the questions.
April 11th, 2006 at 10:22 pm
Bradley,
I think the reason they don’t make “Moderate” a category because the real category is — in Bob Aman’s words — “hard to classify.” That is, the combinations of positions in the center are both more varied and more shaded than a simple yes or no question can often capture.
April 11th, 2006 at 10:25 pm
Jim B — for what it’s worth, it was 51 percent OPPOSED to banning books wth “dangerous ideas” frm school libraries.
April 11th, 2006 at 10:30 pm
Finally, on the word “ambivalent” — I’m probably misusing it too, when I call my blog AmbivaBlog. It wasn’t so much that I was ambivalent. It was that in the 2004 elections I couldn’t stand either party, and I have a mixture of so-called “liberal” and “conservative” views.
I am sometimes ambivalent in the sense that I can see both sides of an issue and so find it hard to choose between them. Rather than ambivalence, though, this is usually a desire for a third way that recasts the issue in a less polarized way that doesn’t set two necessary truths against each other (e.g. personal responsibility and safety net).
April 11th, 2006 at 11:14 pm
… but “TheyBothMakeMeWantToHurlblog” was taken already.
April 12th, 2006 at 8:19 am
Maybe I should’ve gone with APlagueOnBothYourHouses.com . . .
April 18th, 2006 at 9:11 am
Interestingly, populists are best served by democracy and authoritarianism, while libertarians are served the least or not at all.
Personally, I hope that large “ambivalent” faction includes people waking up to how corrupt the system is and how little it does for them. These people just want to get on with their lives and not tell others what to do.