{"id":16810,"date":"2016-04-29T14:32:25","date_gmt":"2016-04-29T18:32:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=16810"},"modified":"2016-04-29T14:32:25","modified_gmt":"2016-04-29T18:32:25","slug":"the-most-educated-americans-are-liberal-but-not-egalitarian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=16810","title":{"rendered":"the most educated Americans are liberal but not egalitarian"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.people-press.org\/2016\/04\/26\/a-wider-ideological-gap-between-more-and-less-educated-adults\/\">Pew<\/a>\u00a0reports: &#8220;Highly educated adults \u2013 particularly those who have attended graduate school \u2013 are far more likely than those with less education to take predominantly liberal positions across a range of political values. And these differences have increased over the past two decades.&#8221; Indeed, &#8220;more than half of those with postgraduate experience (54%) have either consistently liberal political values (31%) or mostly liberal values (23%).&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Based on that finding, one might assume that the most\u00a0educated Americans stand\u00a0the furthest left on our political spectrum. And, based\u00a0on that premise,\u00a0one\u00a0might conclude\u00a0that &#8230;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The people\u00a0who would benefit\u00a0most from left-of-center\u00a0policies\u00a0don&#8217;t support those policies, and the people who do support those\u00a0policies don&#8217;t\u00a0benefit from them&#8211;which is a paradox. OR &#8230;<\/li>\n<li>Liberal programs are special-interest subsidies for people with advanced educations (like lawyers, physicians, and teachers), and that\u00a0is why they vote for them.<\/li>\n<li>Progressives tend to be <a href=\"http:\/\/www.vox.com\/2016\/4\/21\/11451378\/smug-american-liberalism\">smug<\/a> or <a href=\"http:\/\/www.motherjones.com\/kevin-drum\/2016\/04\/liberals-smug-condescending\">condescending<\/a>\u00a0because we tend to be highly educated and convinced that we support policies that are better for other people&#8211;and this is an unattractive attitude that loses votes.<\/li>\n<li>Colleges and graduate schools are moving\u00a0people left (either\u00a0because they have ideological agendas or\u00a0because &#8220;reality has a liberal bias&#8221;).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;d actually propose a different view from any of the above.\u00a0Pew does not find that\u00a0highly educated people are the furthest left.\u00a0Rather, people with the most schooling consistently give answers that are labeled liberal on\u00a0a\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.people-press.org\/2014\/06\/12\/appendix-a-the-ideological-consistency-scale\/\">set of 10 items<\/a> that range over economic, foreign, and social policies. None of\u00a0the survey questions\u00a0offers a <em>radical\u00a0<\/em>opinion as an\u00a0option. So Pew is measuring consistency, not radicalism.<\/p>\n<p>Ideological consistency is correlated with education, but\u00a0not necessarily for a good reason. More book-learning makes you\u00a0more aware of\u00a0the partisan implications of adopting a stance on any particular issue. So, for instance, conservatives are <a href=\"http:\/\/more\">more likely<\/a> to\u00a0disbelieve in\u00a0global warming if they have\u00a0more education&#8211;because their education helps them (as it helps everyone) to see the ideological valence of this issue.<\/p>\n<p>Many of the\u00a0most educated Americans endorse a certain basket of political ideas that are associated with the mainstream Democratic Party. They have learned to recognize these policies as the best ones, and the policies are designed to\u00a0appeal to them. All of the positions are labeled &#8220;liberal,&#8221; so the most educated are deemed liberals. Yet the most educated are\u00a0<em>not<\/em> the most committed to equality. Instead,\u00a0they are\u00a0quite comfortable with their\u00a0advantages, even as they\u00a0endorse\u00a0positions that Pew calls liberal.<\/p>\n<p>To test that hypothesis,\u00a0I wanted to look at a survey\u00a0question about equality that has been asked over a long time period with large samples. The best I found was this\u00a0American National Election Study question: Do you agree that society should make sure everyone has equal opportunity? This\u00a0is not an ideal measure, because support for equal opportunity is not the most egalitarian possible position. If you are very\u00a0committed to equality, you may prefer equal <em>outcomes<\/em>. Still, the question provides useful comparative data.<\/p>\n<p>In 2012, the more education you had, the <em>less<\/em> likely you were to favor equality of opportunity. The whole population\u00a0was less\u00a0supportive than they&#8217;d been in 2008 and less supportive than at any time in the 1980s. But the least educated were the least\u00a0supportive of equality during the Reagan years, and now they are the most concerned about it.<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-16824\" src=\"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/images\/inequality2-1.png\" alt=\"inequality2\" width=\"480\" height=\"288\" srcset=\"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/images\/inequality2-1.png 480w, https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/images\/inequality2-1-300x180.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 480px) 100vw, 480px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>As of 2012, the most educated Americans are the <em>least<\/em> egalitarian, even though they are\u00a0consistently &#8220;liberal.&#8221; Less than half of them strongly favored equality of opportunity.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s true that Democrats and liberals are (as of 2012) more likely to support equal opportunity than Republicans and conservatives are&#8211;and that the highly educated are the most liberal. However, the correlations between egalitarianism and partisanship or\u00a0ideology are not tight.\u00a0Forty percent of Republicans strongly agree that society should make sure everyone has equal opportunity, as do 30 percent of extreme conservatives. This is partly because conservatives also have an\u00a0equal opportunity\u00a0agenda, and partly because\u00a0the liberal-to-conservative scale is defined by a whole basket of\u00a0issues. It&#8217;s quite possible to be a strong liberal and yet <em>not<\/em> believe strongly in equality. And I think that is\u00a0a common view among the most educated Americans&#8211;who are also the most advantaged.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-16820 size-full alignnone\" src=\"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/images\/inequality.png\" alt=\"inequality\" width=\"435\" height=\"276\" srcset=\"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/images\/inequality.png 435w, https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/images\/inequality-300x190.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 435px) 100vw, 435px\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Pew\u00a0reports: &#8220;Highly educated adults \u2013 particularly those who have attended graduate school \u2013 are far more likely than those with less education to take predominantly liberal positions across a range of political values. And these differences have increased over the past two decades.&#8221; Indeed, &#8220;more than half of those with postgraduate experience (54%) have either [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16819,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-2016-election","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16810","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16810"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16810\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16834,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16810\/revisions\/16834"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/16819"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}