Relate political attitudes to race, gender, age, income, and other factors.
Americans share a range of core beliefs. And, as we learned in the previous section, a broad range of socialization agents—from the news media and popular entertainment to government leaders and the schools—reinforce one another to shape our ideas about what it means to be an American and to live in the United States. However, Americans also grow up and live in a variety of distinctive environments that shape general political outlooks and specific attitudes in distinctive ways. In this section, we explore some of the most significant circumstances that define and often divide us in our political views.16
Polling reveals differences in political attitudes that divide significantly along racial and ethnic lines. Among the biggest differences are those between white and black Americans. Hispanics and Asian Americans also have some distinctive political opinions. Many white ethnic groups, however, are no longer much different from other members of the population.
On most core beliefs about the American system, few differences are discernible between black Americans and other Americans.17 Similar percentages of each group believe, for example, that people can get ahead by working hard, that providing for equal opportunity is more important than ensuring equal outcomes, and that the federal government should balance its budget. Equal numbers say they are proud to be Americans and believe democracy to be the best form of government. On a range of other political issues, however, the racial divide looms large,18 particularly with respect to what role government should play in helping people and making America more equal. But Barack Obama’s election to the presidency made African Americans more confident in the country and their place in it. Indeed, African Americans now believe more than white Americans that voting is a duty and that casting a ballot makes a difference.19
Partisanship is one important area where African Americans differ from whites. Blacks, who stayed loyal to the Republican party (the party of Lincoln and of Reconstruction) long after the Civil War, became Democrats in large proportions in the 1930s during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal greatly expanded the federal government’s role in providing safety nets for the poor and unemployed. During the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, African Americans began to identify overwhelmingly as Democrats and continue to do so today. In 2012, African Americans were the most solidly Democratic of any group in the population: 87 percent said they were Democrats or independents who leaned toward the Democrats, while less than 5 percent called themselves Republicans or Republican leaners (see Figure 5.1). In 2012, 95 percent of African Americans voted for African American Democrat Barack Obama; only 3 percent supported Republican Mitt Romney.20
African Americans also tend to be much more liberal than whites on a range of issues that require an activist government to solve pressing problems. This liberalism reflects African Americans’ economically disadvantaged position in American society and the still-real effects of slavery and discrimination. However, blacks tend to hold strong religious values and to be rather conservative on some social issues.21 More are opposed to abortion, for example, than are whites. In general, however, African Americans are very liberal (i.e., favor an activist government to help solve social ills; see Figure 5.2). More blacks identify themselves as liberals than as conservatives or moderates, a pattern that is almost exactly reversed among whites.22 African Americans also are more likely than Americans in general to favor government regulation of corporations to protect the environment and to favor labor unions.23 Black and white divisions are most apparent on issues related to policies that have a particularly sizable effect on non-white Americans. For example, 54 percent of African Americans but only 22 percent of whites think the government should play a major role in trying to improve the social and economic position of blacks and other minority groups in this country.24
Hispanics—people of Spanish-speaking background—are the fastest-growing ethnic group in America and the largest minority group in the nation. As a whole, the Hispanic population identifies much more with the Democrats than with the Republicans; among this group, Democrats enjoy a 59 percent to 22 percent advantage over Republicans (see Figure 5.1). However, the Hispanic population itself is quite diverse. Cuban Americans, many of them refugees from the Castro regime, tend to be conservative, Republican, strongly anticommunist, and skeptical of government programs. The much more numerous Americans of Mexican, Central American, or Puerto Rican ancestry, by contrast, are mostly Democrats and quite liberal on economic matters. In 2012, 71 percent of the Hispanic vote went to Democrat Barack Obama. Republican sponsorship and support for laws to crack down on illegal immigrants and on people who help them may make this group view Democrats even more favorably in the future. On the other hand, because Hispanics are predominantly Roman Catholic, one may expect them to be more conservative—and hence more attracted to Republicans—on social issues. On some issues this is true. Hispanics tend to be more conservative than Americans in general on abortion. On other issues—like those pertaining to homosexuality—their preferences are similar to those of the rest of the population.25
Asian Americans, a small but growing part of the U.S. population—a little under 5 percent of the population in 2010—come from quite diverse backgrounds in the Philippines, India, Vietnam, Korea, Thailand, Japan, China, and elsewhere. As a group, Asian Americans are more educated and economically successful than the general population but are less likely to vote and express an interest in politics than people of equal educational and financial status. Though there is only sparse systematic research on the politically relevant attitudes of Asian Americans, we do know the following.26 On social issues, Asian Americans are somewhat more conservative than other Americans; a majority supports the death penalty and opposes same-sex marriage, for example. On the role of government, they are more liberal, however. For example, a small majority supports efforts to provide universal health care. Importantly, though once split fairly evenly between Republican and Democratic identifiers, they have been trending more Democratic in recent elections; in 2012, 71 percent voted for Obama.
Other ethnic groups are not so distinctive in their political opinions. Americans of Italian, Polish, and Irish ancestry, for example, became strong Democrats as part of the New Dealcoalition, but by the 1980s, their attitudes about political and social issues were not much different from the majority of other white Americans.
Compared with much of the world, the United States has had rather little political conflict among people of different income or occupational groupings. In fact, few Americans have thought of themselves as members of a social “class” at all, but when asked to place themselves in a class by survey researchers, more than half say they are middle class. Things may be changing, however, after the decades-long growth in inequality, and rising popular anger with Wall Street. One survey in early 2012, for example, reported that about two-thirds of Americans now believe that strong conflicts exist between the rich and the poor in the United States.27
Since the time of the New Deal, low- and moderate-income people have identified much more strongly with Democrats than with Republicans. This still holds true today;28 households in the lowest two income quintiles (the lowest 40 percent) are almost three times as likely to call themselves Democrats as Republicans. Upper-income people—whether high-salaried business executives, doctors, accountants, and lawyers or asset-rich people with no need to hold a job—have identified more strongly with the Republican Party for a long time.29
People in union households have long favored the Democrats and continue to do so. About 6 in 10 people in union households say they favor the Democrats. In 2012, 58 percent of them voted for Barack Obama. This Democratic advantage has changed hardly at all since the mid-1970s, although it is important to be aware that the proportion of Americans who are members of labor unions is quite low compared with other rich countries and has been steadily declining.
Lower-income people have some distinctive policy preferences. Not surprisingly, they tend to favor much more government help with jobs, education, housing, medical care, and the like, whereas the highest-income people, who would presumably pay more and benefit less from such programs, tend to oppose them.30 To complicate matters, however, many lower- and moderate-income people, primarily for religious and cultural reasons, favor Republican conservative positions on social issues such as abortion, law and order, religion, civil rights, education, and gay rights. Non–college-educated, moderate-income white men, to take another example, are less likely than in the past to identify with Democrats, with race issues such as welfare and affirmative action playing a key role in this change. Furthermore, some high-income people—especially those with postgraduate degrees—tend to be very liberal on lifestyle and social issues involving sexual behavior, abortion rights, free speech, and civil rights. They also tend to be especially eager for government action to protect the environment. But on the whole, the relationship of income to party choice and economic policy matters still holds; upper-income people are more likely than others to favor Republicans and conservative economic policies, while moderate- and lower-income Americans are more likely to favor Democrats and liberal economic policies.31
Region is an important factor in shaping public opinion in the United States. Each region is distinctive, with the South especially so. Although southern distinctiveness has been reduced somewhat because of years of migration by southern blacks to northern cities, the movement of industrial plants and northern whites to the Sun Belt, and economic growth catching up with that of the North, the legacy of slavery and segregation, a large black population, and late industrialization have made the South a unique region in American politics.32
Even now, white southerners tend to be somewhat less enthusiastic about civil rights than northerners; only people from the Mountain West (excluding Colorado and New Mexico) are as conservative on race. Southern whites also tend to be more conservative than people in other regions on social issues, such as school prayer, crime, and abortion, and supportive of military spending and a strong foreign policy (although they remain fairly liberal on economic issues, such as government health insurance, perhaps because incomes are lower in the South than elsewhere).33
These distinctive policy preferences have undercut southern whites’ traditional identification with the Democrats, especially since the 1960s and 1970s, when Democrats became identified with liberal social policies. The white South’s switch to the Republican Party in the 1994 elections, in fact, is one of the major reasons Republicans were able to maintain control of Congress for a dozen years until the Democrats won back both houses in 2006. Though a plurality of southerners say they favor Republicans, more of them than in the past say they identify as independents.34 This may help explain why moderate Democrats who appeal to independents have made some inroads in the region; Jim Webb won a Senate seat in Virginia in 2006, as did Kay Hagen in North Carolina in 2008. However, a Republican tide swept South in 2010.35 In 2012, the trend towards a strongly Republican South continued, as the GOP won five formerly Democratic House seats in North Carolina, Arkansas and Kentucky. Democrats Timothy Kaine and Bill Nelson, however, won Senate races in Virginia and Florida. In the 2014 mid-terms, Kay Hagan lost her Senate seat to Republican Thom Tillis and Democratic Arkansas Senator Mark Pryor lost by a wide margin to Republican challenger Tom Cotton.
On many issues, northeasterners tend to be the most different from southerners, being the most liberal of any region on social and economic issues, and most likely to be Democratic identifiers. On most issues and party identification, Midwesterners, appropriately, are about in the middle between the South and the northeast. Pacific Coast residents resemble northeasterners in many respects, but the Rocky Mountain States, with the exception of Colorado and New Mexico, tend to be quite conservative, with majorities opposed to a big government role in health insurance, for example.36
These regional differences should not be exaggerated, however. Long-term trends show a narrowing in regional differences on many core beliefs and political attitudes.37 This is the outcome of years of migration of Americans from one region to another and the rise of a media and entertainment industry that is national in scale, beaming messages and information across regional lines.
The level of formal education that people reach is closely related to their income level because education helps people earn more and also because the wealthy can pay for more and better schooling for their children. But education has some distinct political effects of its own.
Education is generally considered the strongest single predictor of participation in politics. College-educated people are much more likely to say that they vote, talk about politics, go to meetings, sign petitions, and write letters to officials than people who have attained only an elementary or a high school education. The highly educated know more about politics. They know what they want and how to go about getting it—joining groups and writing letters, faxes, and e-mail messages to public officials. Within every income stratum of the population, moreover, college-educated people are somewhat more liberal than others on non-economic issues such as race, gay rights, and the environment.38 They also are more likely than other people in their same income stratum to favor multilateralism in international affairs, favoring the use of diplomacy, multination treaties, and the United Nations to solve global problems.39
People who have earned postgraduate degrees also have some distinctive policy preferences. They are especially protective of the civil rights, civil liberties, and individual freedom of atheists, homosexuals, protesters, and dissenters. Education may contribute to tolerance by exposing people to diverse ideas or by training them in elite-backed norms of tolerance.
A partisan “gender gap” first appeared in the 1980s and persists today, with the percentage of women who identify themselves as Democrats about 6 percentage points higher than men (refer again to Figure 5.1). What seems to have been happening is a decline in the proportion of men who identify as Democrats, and a sharp rise in identification as Democrats among unmarried women.40 The differences show up in elections; in 2012, only 44 percent of women voted for Republican Mitt Romney, compared with 54 percent of men. However, although the partisan gender gap is real and persistent—women identify more with the Democrats and are more likely to vote for Democratic candidates—the scale of the gap is not enormous, leading some scholars to suggest that the gender gap issue has been exaggerated.41
Women also differ somewhat from men in certain policy preferences. Women tend to be more opposed to violence, whether by criminals or by the state. More women over the years have opposed capital punishment and the use of military force abroad and favored arms control and peace agreements.42 Perhaps surprisingly, there is no gender gap on the issue of abortion.43 Go to Figure 5.3 to try making a prediction about how supportive men are of protective policies for the poor, the elderly, and the disabled compared with women.
Younger citizens are less likely to identify with a political party than older cohorts, although those who do are increasingly leaning toward the Democrats.44 The young and the old also differ on certain matters that touch their particular interests: the draft in wartime, the drinking age, and, to some extent, Social Security and Medicare. But the chief difference between old and young has to do with the particular era in which they were raised. Those who were young during the 1960s were especially quick to favor civil rights for blacks, for example. In recent years, young people have been especially concerned about environmental issues, and they are much less supportive than other Americans of traditional or conservative social values on homosexuality and the role of women in society. More than any other age cohort, those between the ages of 18 and 34 support the idea of government-sponsored universal health insurance and legalization of same-sex marriage.45 They were particularly attracted to youthful presidential candidate Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, with 66 and 60 percent voting for him, respectively (Table 5.1).
Aged 18–29 | Aged 65 and over | |
---|---|---|
Follow election news very closely | 17% | 36% |
Voted for Obama in 2008 | 66% | 45% |
Voted for Obama in 2012 | 60% | 46% |
Favor allowing gays and lesbians to marry | 59% | 33% |
Agree that “Newcomers threaten our customs.” | 27% | 45% |
Want bigger government, with more services | 41% | 25% |
Identify as conservatives | 30% | 46% |
Unfavorable views of the Democratic Party | 36% | 56% |
“The United States is the greatest country in the world.” | 32% | 64% |
Keep Social Security and Medicare where they are | 53% | 64% |
Government does too much for the wealthy | 62% | 63% |
Source: Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “The Generation Gap and the 2012 Election,” Pew Research Center, November 3, 2011; American National Election Study (2012).
Often social change occurs by generational replacement in which old ideas, like the Depression-era notion that women should stay at home and “not take jobs away from men,” die off with old people. But it is worth noting that older Americans are not necessarily entirely fixed in their views; like other Americans, those over the age of 60 have become, over the past decade or so, more tolerant of homosexuality and more supportive of the idea of women pursuing careers.46 There is no difference between the generations, moreover, on the privileged position of the wealthy in the American political system (refer again to Table 5.1); both think the government does too much for them—a product, perhaps, of the 2008 financial collapse, the Great Recession, and the bailout of financial institutions.
Although religious differences along denominational lines are and have always been important in the United States,47 the differences between the religiously observant of all denominations and more secular Americans is becoming wider and more central to an understanding of contemporary American politics. We look first at denominational differences, then at what has come to be called the “culture wars.”
Roman Catholics, who constitute about 24 percent of the U.S. population, were heavily Democratic after the New Deal and now identify with Democrats over Republicans by a margin of 48 to 33 percent, a sign, perhaps, of the growing numbers of practicing Catholics of Hispanic dissent in America (see Figure 5.1).48 Catholics’ economic liberalism has faded somewhat with rises in their income, although this liberalism remains substantial. Catholics have tended to be especially concerned with family issues and to support measures to promote morality (e.g., antipornography laws) and law and order. But American Catholics disagree with many church teachings; they support birth control and the right to have abortions in about the same proportions as other Americans, for example.
A majority of Americans are Protestant. Protestants come in many varieties, however. There are the relatively high-income (socially liberal, economically conservative) Episcopalians and Presbyterians; the generally liberal Unitarian-Universalists and middle-class Northern Baptists; and the lower-income and quite conservative Southern Baptists and evangelicals of various denominations. The sharpest dividing line seems to be that between evangelical Protestants and mainstream Protestants. Evangelicals are much more likely to identify themselves as Republicans than as Democrats, 50 percent compared to 34 percent, whereas members of mainline Protestant churches are pretty evenly split between Republicans and Democrat (see Figure 5.1). Evangelicals and mainstream Protestants also are sharply divided on issues, with evangelicals taking decidedly more conservative positions on homosexuality and abortion.49 In 2012, evangelicals cast an astounding 79 percent of their votes for Mitt Romney.
A little under 2 percent of Americans are Mormons, members of the fast-growing Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. They are the most staunchly conservative and most solidly Republican of any major religious denomination in the country. Sixty percent claim to be conservative in their political orientation, with only 10 percent choosing liberal. They also favor Republicans over Democrats by a margin of 65 percent to 22 percent. Not surprisingly, two candidates for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination were Mormons, Jon Huntsman and Mitt Romney.
American Jews (like Mormons, just under 2 percent of the U.S. population and very much their mirror image politically) began to join the Democratic Party in the 1920s and did so overwhelmingly in the 1930s, in response to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal social policies and his foreign policy of resisting Hitler. Most Jews have stayed with the party. Next to African Americans, they remain the most Democratic group in the United States: about 66 percent identify themselves as Democrats and only 24 percent as Republicans. Jews are exceptionally liberal on social issues, such as civil liberties and abortion. They also tend to be staunch supporters of civil rights. Although rising incomes have somewhat undercut Jews’ economic liberalism, they remain substantially more supportive of social welfare policies than other groups. In the 2012 presidential election, Jews cast 69 percent of their votes for Obama and only 30 percent for Romney.
The best estimates are that about 2 percent of people in the United States are Muslim and that most Muslims identify as Democrats. We do know that a high proportion of American Muslims feel discriminated against, are less supportive of state and federal law enforcement agencies, and vote in small numbers in national elections.50
People who say they are not affiliated with any religious institution or belief system at all are strongly Democratic in their party identification and relatively liberal on most social issues; 55 percent are Democrats and 23 percent are Republicans. Seventy percent of the unaffiliated say that abortion should always be legal or legal most of the time. Seventy-one percent of them agree with the statement that “homosexuality should be accepted by society.”
Among the factors that most differentiate Americans on political attitudes and partisanship is their degree of religious belief and practice.51 The religiously committed, no matter the religious denomination, are the most likely Americans to vote Republican and to hold conservative views, particularly on social issues such as abortion, the death penalty, same-sex marriage, and stem cell research. Committed and observant Catholics, Jews, and Protestants are not only much more Republican and socially conservative than people who practice no religion and/or claim to be totally secular, but they are also more Republican and socially conservative than their less committed and observant co-religionists. Taking all denominations together, to look at another example of how relative religious commitment matters, the “churched” are far more likely to vote Republican than those who are less “churched” or who don’t go to church (or synagogue or mosque) at all (see Figure 5.4, an interactive that allows toggling between data layers). In 2012, about 60 percent of people who reported attending religious services every week voted for Romney. Among those who reported attending services only a few times a year or never, Obama won about 60 percent of the vote.
The gap between the religiously committed and other Americans—particularly those who say they never or almost never go to church—on matters of party identification, votes in elections, and attitudes about social issues has become so wide and the debates so fierce that many have come to talk about America’s culture wars. On a range of issues—including Supreme Court appointments, abortion, the rights of gays and lesbians, prayer in the public schools, and the teaching of evolution—passions on both sides of the divide have reached what can only be called white-hot fever pitch. To be sure, much of the noise in the culture wars is being generated by leaders of and activists in religiously affiliated organizations and advocacy groups, exaggerating, perhaps, the degree to which most Americans disagree on most core beliefs and political attitudes.52 But, the battle between the most and least religiously observant and committed has helped heat up the passions in American politics because each group has gravitated to one or the other political party—the former to the Republicans and the latter to the Democrats—and become among the strongest campaign activists and financial contributors within them.53
People who say they are Democrats differ considerably in their political attitudes from those who say they are Republicans. More than any other factor, one’s political party identification structures how one sees the world, helps interpret what is going on in political life in the country, and determines which government polices one will support.54 Much more than in the past, Republicans are more likely than Democrats to vote for Republican candidates and approve of Republican presidents; they tend to belong to different social and economic groups; and they are more likely to favor policies associated with the Republican Party. Republicans are much more likely than Democrats to support big business and an assertive national security policy, and to be against stem-cell research, same-sex marriage, and abortions, for example; Democrats are much more likely than Republicans to support government programs to help the poor and to help racial minorities get ahead, to regulate business for consumer protection and greenhouse gas emissions, and to support gay rights and abortion on demand.
Table 5.2 is an interactive exhibit that lets you test your knowledge of the differences between Democrats and Republicans on some of the major issues of the day. (First hide all cells and then tap into each cell to reveal its contents.) Figure 5.5 shows, in addition, that the differences between them are growing ever wider. Republicans and Democrats face each other today across a wide chasm, particularly among the most committed and active among them.