{"id":15949,"date":"2015-11-09T14:00:23","date_gmt":"2015-11-09T19:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=15949"},"modified":"2015-11-09T14:09:32","modified_gmt":"2015-11-09T19:09:32","slug":"the-democrats-problem-is-social-capital","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=15949","title":{"rendered":"the Democrats’ problem is social capital"},"content":{"rendered":"

Notwithstanding the\u00a0fiasco that is the GOP presidential primary so far, Matthew Yglesias\u00a0warns<\/a>,\u00a0“The Democratic Party is in much greater peril than its leaders or supporters recognize, and it has no plan to save itself. … The vast majority \u2014 70 percent of state legislatures, more than 60 percent of governors, 55 percent of attorneys general and secretaries of state \u2014 are in Republicans hands. And, of course, Republicans control both chambers of Congress.”<\/p>\n

A major factor\u00a0is the turnout gap. That is worse for Democrats in local and off-year elections but will persist in 2016.\u00a0Today, the pollsters Greenberg\/Quinlan\/Rosner\u00a0report that<\/a>\u00a0\u201cunmarried women, minorities, and particularly millennials are less interested in next year\u2019s voting than seniors, conservatives, and white non-college men are.”<\/p>\n

Why do we see these gaps? On the whole, we\u00a0engage in politics when we\u00a0are brought into networks where political issues are regularly discussed and where people encourage each other to participate. This is a consistent finding of our own research on\u00a0youth as well as much research on\u00a0adults. Yglesias uses that theory to explain<\/a> why unionized teachers vote in local elections:<\/p>\n

Teachers talk to one another (they work together, after all) about questions of public policy (everyone talks at work about work, but public school teachers’ work is<\/i>public policy), and they also have hierarchical channels of information dissemination (the union itself) through which this work talk can connect to practical politics.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Yglesias is expanding on\u00a0Eitan Hersh’s argument <\/a>that “scheduling local elections at odd times appears to be a deliberate strategy aimed at keeping turnout low, which gives more influence to groups like teachers unions that have a direct stake in the election\u2019s outcome.” Yglesias is contributing an explanation of why the union members vote.)<\/p>\n

Let’s call participation in networks “social capital.” Since the 1970s, Democrats have lost social capital (of a politically relevant kind) and Republicans have not. The parties used to be on par, but the Republicans now have a meaningful advantage.<\/p>\n

To illustrate, I show rates of regular\u00a0religious attendance, membership in unions, membership in fraternal organizations, and a composite (defined as belonging to at least one of the three).\u00a0The data come from the General Social Survey, which hasn’t asked about unions or fraternal associations since 2004. But in some ways, that’s OK, because I think the trend from 1970-2004 is the significant one, and the subsequent period has been unsettled\u00a0because of social media and two high-profile presidential elections.<\/p>\n

\"politics<\/p>\n

Observations:<\/p>\n