Sociological Images

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog.

In recent Democratic primaries in Appalachian states, Obama lost 40% of the vote.  The anti-Obama Democrats voted for candidates like “uncommitted” (Kentucky), an unknown lawyer (Arkansas), and a man who is incarcerated in Texas (West Virginia).

Could it be that there’s racism at work in Appalachia?  Or is the anti-Obama vote based entirely on opposition to his policies?

The 2008 Presidential election — Obama v. McCain — offers some hints.  For those with short memories, the Bush legacy — an unpopular war and an economic catastrophe — may have hurt the GOP.  In that election, the country went Democratic.  The Democrats did better than they had in 2004, the Republicans worse.  But not everywhere.  The Times provides this map:

Still, it’s possible that those voters in Appalachia preferred the policies of candidate Kerry to those of candidate Obama.  As Chris Cilizza says in in a Washington Post blog (here), the idea that race had anything to do with this shift is…

…almost entirely unprovable because it relies on assuming knowledge about voter motivations that — without being a mindreader — no one can know.

Cilizza quotes Cornell Belcher, the head of a polling firm with the Monkish name Brilliant Corners:

One man’s racial differences is another man’s cultural differences.

Right.  The folks in Appalachia preferred John Kerry’s culture.

I’m generally cautious about attributing mental characteristics to people based on a single bit of behavior.  But David Weigel, in Slate, goes back to the 2008 Democratic primaries – Obama versus Hillary Clinton.  A CNN exit poll asked voters if race was an important factor in their vote. In West Virginia and Kentucky, about 20% of the voters in the Democratic primary said yes.  Were those admittedly race-conscious voters more anti-Obama than other Democrats?

As Weigel points out, this was before Obama took office, before voters really knew what policies he would propose.  Besides, there wasn’t all that much difference in his policies and those of Hillary Clinton.

Cilizza is right that we can’t read voters’ minds.  But to argue that there was no racial motivation, you have to discount what the voters said and what they did.

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog.

Do Democrats and Republicans have a similar lack of respect for science?  Alex Berezow seems to think so.  The title of his op-ed in USA Today is “GOP might be anti-science, but so are Democrats.”

I hope that others will point out the false equivalence.  For evidence of  Democrats’ anti-science, Berezow cites mostly fringe groups like PETA, which objects to scientific research on animals, and fringe issues like vaccination.  According to Berezow, many people who oppose vaccination are Democrats.  True perhaps, but these positions are held by only a small minority of Democratic voters.  And neither of these positions has been espoused by any of the party leaders.*

Compare that to Republican anti-science.  Most of the leading GOP presidential hopefuls, now and in the previous election, have voiced their skepticism on evolution and global warming.  Only Huntsman and Romney have hinted that they agree with the near–unanimous opinions of scientists in these fields.

Maybe the candidates take these anti-science positions because the people whose votes they want – the GOP faithful – also reject the scientific consensus.

Here are the results of a recent Gallup poll that asked which position  “Comes closest to your views.”

• God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10 000 years or so
• Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process
• Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process

Half of all Republicans think that humans have been around for only 10,000 years.

The Republican base is also much more dubious about global warming than are Democrats.

The graph goes only to 2008, and beliefs about global warming since then Americans’ have become somewhat more skeptical about the issue, but I am certain that Republicans are still well above Democrats on the chart.

As for the anti-vaccine crowd, Berezow sees them as mostly Prius-driving, organic-vegan liberals.    Maybe so.  I have a scientist friend whose son runs an organic food co-op, and she is furious at his decision not to have his kids (her grandchildren) vaccinated.  (FWIW, she drives a Prius.)  But is there more systematic evidence of this liberal/anti-vaccine connection?  Here’s Berezow’s proof.

…a public health official once noted that rates of vaccine non-compliance tend to be higher in places where Whole Foods is popular — and 89% of Whole Foods stores are located in counties that favored Barack Obama in 2008… With the exception of Alaska, the states with the highest rates of vaccine refusal for kindergarteners are Washington, Vermont and Oregon — three of the most progressive states in the country.

Areas with Whole Foods have both more vaccine skeptics and more Obama voters.  The thread of the logic is a bit thin (how big a difference is “tends to be higher”?), and it runs the risk of the ecological fallacy.  But it sounded right to me – my friend’s son lives in Vermont – and 75% (three states out of four) is pretty impressive evidence.

But there are 46 other states plus DC, and I wondered if they too followed the pattern.   So I looked up the CDC data on the  percentages of vaccination refusal for non-medical reasons in each state (here).  I also got data on how Democratic the state was – the margin of victory or loss for Obama in 2008.**

Sure enough, the top three — Washington, Vermont, and Oregon — are all on the Obama side of the line, though it’s worth noting that in Washington, vaccine exemption was as common in the conservative eastern part of the state (near Idaho, which also has a high exemption rate and was strongly for McCain) as it was in the more liberal western counties.   And of the states with 3% or more taking non-medical exemptions from vaccination, eight were for Obama, four for McCain. But overall, the correlation (r = 0.12) is not overwhelming.   And even in the most anti-vaccine, pro-Whole Foods states like Washington and Vermont, nearly 95% of parent s had their kindergartners vaccinated.  That’s hardly convincing evidence that Democrats are anti-science.   Compare that with the 50% of Republicans (and 75% of their presidential hopefuls) who think evolution is a hoax or at best “just a theory.”

———————

*Berezow notes that seven Democratic senators (and one Republican) wrote a letter to the FDA “threatening to halt approval of a genetically modified salmon.”  But he implies that their position had more to do with money than anti-science.  They were from the salmony Northwest, while the company seeking approval is in Massachusetts.

** The CDC had no data for Arizona, Colorado, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Wyoming.

Nate Silver, famous for his analyses of the 2008 elections, predicts race-based voting in this 9 minute video with the hopes of designing interventions against racism:

This Clymer for Pennsylvania governor poster attacks his opponent, Geary, and the Republican exponents of black suffrage, with a familiar caricature of blackness  (Jim Crow History):

Text:

Every RADICAL in Congress VOTED for NEGRO SUFFRAGE.  Every RADICAL in the Pennsylvania Senate VOTED for NEGRO SUFFRAGE.  STEVENS, FURNEY, & CAMERON are for NEGRO SUFFRAGE; they are all Candidate for the UNITED STATES SENATE.  NO RADICAL NEWSPAPER OPPOSES NEGRO SUFFRAGE.  GEARY said in a Speech at Harrisburg, 11th of August, 1866 — “THERE CAN BE NO POSSIBLE OBJECTION TO NEGRO SUFFRAGE.”

For more caricatures of black people in U.S. history, see these posts: one, twp, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen.

And for examples of modern reproductions of these stereotypes (literally), see these: one, two, three, four, and five.

The nature/nurture debate that posits a competition between biological and social/cultural influences on human behavior  is alive and well in the mass media.  But scholars largely agree that culture and biology interact; biological realities shape our social world, but our social world also shapes our biologies.

One strain of research demonstrating this has shown that men’s testosterone levels (associated with feelings of well-being) rise and drop in response to social (and socially constructed) cues.  For example, the testosterone levels of the winner of a tennis match will rise after his win, while his opponent will see his levels go down.  Similarly, measuring men’s testosterone levels won’t tell you which men walking down the sidewalk will enter a strip club, but the men leaving the strip club will have higher testosterone levels than the men who passed it by.

Matt C. alerted me to a test of this phenomenon using the Presidential election.  There was a slight drop in testosterone levels for men who voted for Obama (normal because men’s testosterone levels tend to drop at night), but a dramatic drop for men who voted for McCain or the Libertarian candidate, Barr.

So, there you have it, biological responses to social cues.

Chris Uggen, at our sibling Context blog Public Criminology, posted an interesting graph showing that background checks for gun sales during the period from November to April for each year from 1999-2000 to 2008-2009. We see that they’ve increased significantly this November-April compared to previous years:

Background checks should serve as a decent proxy for gun sales, keeping in mind that not everyone who requests a check will eventually purchase a gun, not everyone who gets a gun bothers to go through legal channels and get a background check, and people who get a background check might then buy multiple guns.

Anyway, it appears that the reason for the jump in sales may be the election of President Obama (although as Chris points out, it’s possible the recession or some other factor could be driving it). When I mentioned this to a couple of friends, they assumed it meant some crazy White people were preparing for a race war. I presume that is true for some people, and that some of them are my relatives. However, there’s another explanation, which is what most news stories I googled report and which, having talked to a number of very right-leaning individuals I happen to know, seems more likely to me: with a Democratic controlled Congress and a Democratic President, many people are convinced that gun control is right around the corner, and they are taking advantage of the period before guns can be outlawed to stock up, with the hopes that after guns are outlawed, they can either hide them or maybe people who bought theirs before the law was passed get to keep them.

I haven’t seen as much news coverage of it, but in addition to gun sales, apparently bullet sales have gone up. My friends and family members who have guns have been complaining about the increasing price of bullets, as well as their scarcity. I was recently with a friend who is a police officer and needed to buy some bullets for shooting practice, and when he asked at Wal-Mart, the price was much higher than usual (I don’t remember the specific price, just that he said it was high) and they only had one specialty kind in stock; the rest of the shelf was bare.

So anyway, it’s sort of an interesting social trend that appears likely to be related to Obama’s election and the fear of liberals taking away guns (something I find highly unlikely), though I’m open to other explanations.

And as for why I don’t object to my friends and relatives having guns and buying bullets, I have a friend who is a police officer, so he has to have a gun while at work, and I gave up long ago on my family members, who are mostly ranchers and hunters; I’ve settled for being happy that my grandma shoots a lot fewer things than she used to.

UPDATE: In response to my story about going to Wal-Mart with my friend and checking on the price of bullets, Jeremiah says,

I question the veracity of this anecdote. In all my years of firearm ownership, only the most n00b newbz buy retail ammo for ‘practice.’ Everyone else buys repacked rounds at a HUGE discount.

People call me dumb or question my interpretation frequently enough, but being called an outright liar is new. I did, indeed, go to Wal-Mart with my friend Clint, who is a cop, and he went to the gun section and asked about bullets. I just called him and asked what kind he was looking for; he said he asked about .22 bullets, and I asked what he needed them for. He said “just for practice.” I didn’t think to clarify if he meant official practice at the firing range, or informal practice as in “a group of my friends and I are going to drive to a field and shoot at stuff.”

Point being, I am many things: crazy, bossy, sometimes overdramatic, a bit cranky. I am not, however, a liar.

UPDATE TWO: Joshua provides more information on background checks:

In states like Georgia, without a mandatory waiting period (the majority of states), the background check occurs at the time of purchase. The dealer makes a phone call, gives your identifying information, and in most cases gets an instant answer. At that point, you purchase the gun and away you go. The idea that someone would “request a background check” and then not purchase a gun seems questionable to me, because it is the act of attempting to purchase a gun that triggers the background check.

…

There are many legal channels for buying a gun without a background check. Only gun dealers are required to perform background checks. In most states, non-dealers can sell or give away guns just like they can sell any other possession. No background check is required for so-called private-party sales. There are limits on the number of guns a person can sell before they become a de facto dealer. A few states amend the federal requirements by requiring all gun sales to go through a dealer, who typically charges a small fee for the service.

…

Also, in states who issue concealed-carry permits, and whose permit requirements meet federal minimum standards, people who have a permit can buy firearms without a background check. The thinking is that the federal minimum standards mean that a permit-holder has already been vetted to a much higher degree than the NICS check system does, and at that point, NICS is redundant. This serves as an incentive for states to meet the federal recommended standards for carry permits.

Thomas Sander at the Social Capital Blog writes: “Obviously the $1,000,000 question is whether these behavioral changes are likely to continue beyond the Obama candidacy.” I think the answer to this, at least as far as racial composition goes, is yes. What we see here is a two decade long trend, not a blip inspired by Obama.

Data compiled by the the Pew Research Center, via Thick Culture.