RNC Student Protest (Sept. 4th)

[Deejay]

and then the following correlation of those kids leaving college and becoming conservative as they start families and own things.

Diddy could own you if he wanted to and he begs to differ.

[Beckwin]

yeah I think there's just some bitchassness in this topic. stop trolling, neocons

[Tyche]

ORLY? I'd ask for proof but then I don't think it matters. The Republican party has changed so much in the past 20 years. Conservatism has changed so much as well - at least in the populist sense.

Well, luckily for you, the poll was taken within the past 20 years. No heritage.org site and the results are from the 2000 National Election Study. The site is irrelevant (Beckwin).

http://volokh.com/2004_02_08_volokh_...56713823142589

Table 2.5
Political Knowledge by Strength of Party Identification
2000 National Election Study
Self-Described Party Alignment / Average Political Knowledge Score
(Average number of correct answers on 31 point scale)

"Strong Republican" / 18.7
"Independent-Republican" / 15.7
"Strong Democrat" / 15.4
"Independent-Democrat" / 14.2
"Weak Republican" / 14.1
"Weak Democrat" / 13.3
"Independent-Independent" / 9.5

Second source quotes the GSS (General Social Survey)

http://www.instapundit.com/archives/014093.php#014093

Yet Republicans in the general public tend to be better educated than Democrats. In the 1994-2002 General Social Surveys (GSS), Republicans have over 6/10ths of a year more education on average than Democrats. Republicans also have a higher final mean educational degree. Further, Republicans scored better than Democrats on two word tests in the GSS--a short vocabulary test and a modified analogies test.

If one breaks down the data by party affiliation and political orientation, the most highly educated group is conservative Republicans, who also score highest on the vocabulary and analogical reasoning tests. Liberal Democrats score only insignificantly lower than conservative Republicans. The least educated subgroups are moderate and conservative Democrats, who also score at the bottom (or very near the bottom) on vocabulary and analogy tests.

[Elvis]

Don't tase me bro!

[Kuya]

... Conservative Democrats...? By the way, did the study take into account composition? As in, which side had the most minorities, those of lower income, etc?

[Deejay]

Well, luckily for you, the poll was taken within the past 20 years. No heritage.org site and the results are from the 2000 National Election Study. The site is irrelevant (Beckwin).

http://volokh.com/2004_02_08_volokh_...56713823142589



Second source quotes the GSS (General Social Survey)

http://www.instapundit.com/archives/014093.php#014093

woamg rich people get better standardized education than the poor?

holy crap guys i think tyche is on to something

[Elvis]

Liberal versus Conservative would be a better analysis. Various ideologues basically rather than party affiliation. We're talking about politics not Coke and Pepsi.

http://pewresearch.org/pubs/17/in-se...ues-in-america

http://pewresearch.org/assets/obdeck/17-3.gif

People with consistent ideological views do not differ demographically in dramatic ways from the ambivalents, though as a group the ideologues are somewhat better educated than the ambivalents. But the ideological groups differ from each other on certain characteristics.

Libertarians are much more likely to be male (59%) and young (33% are under age 30) than are any of the other groups; they are also more numerous in western states. Liberals are far better educated than other groups (48% college graduates, compared with an overall average of 27%). By contrast, populists are less educated, with just 16% holding college degrees, and nearly half of them live in the south. They are less affluent as well: only 13% live in households with incomes of $75,000 or higher - 8 percentage points lower than the national average.

Evangelical Protestants are much more common among the ranks of conservatives (38%) and populists (33%) than among the other groups. Conservatives and populists also attend church at higher rates than do members of other groups (majorities say they attend religious services at least once a week, compared with 28% of libertarians and a mere 20% of liberals).

The study concluded:

In short, while the influence of ideas in U.S. history and American politics should not be underestimated, the impact of ideology is less clear. Far from being an ideologically bipolar nation divided between liberals and conservatives, the U.S. is much more accurately described as an ideologically multipolar polity, with many ambivalent non-ideologues occupying a large middle ground.

[Tyche]

woamg rich people get better standardized education than the poor?

holy crap guys i think tyche is on to something

Elvis's chart disagrees with what you are saying.

@Elvis, it would be difficult to conduct a non bias survey on conservative vs liberal, because of many factors...

A. There are varying types on conservatives. Most high earning liberals are fiscal conservatives, etc..

b. You register party affiliation, non-bias studies can be done with education levels, income levels, and party affiliation from census inputs. You don't register whether your a conservative or liberal...you can make the assumption, but then we get back into A.

[Kuya]

Elvis's chart disagrees with what you are saying.

Yes, but i'm asking for the demographics that your statistics had.

[Elvis]

Plenty of smart people have been wrong too mind you. History is full of smart people doing stupid shit. How's that for a sweeping and abstract generalization!

[Deejay]

You mean, the chart disagrees with what YOU are saying.

That was just me egging you on.

[Kuya]

Fiscal conservative = classical liberal

lol

[Tyche]

How does it disagree with what I'm saying if it delves not into political knowledge at all Deejay?

[Elvis]

Elvis's chart disagrees with what you are saying.

@Elvis, it would be difficult to conduct a non bias survey on conservative vs liberal, because of many factors...

A. There are varying types on conservatives. Most high earning liberals are fiscal conservatives, etc..

b. You register party affiliation, non-bias studies can be done with education levels, income levels, and party affiliation from census inputs. You don't register whether your a conservative or liberal...you can make the assumption, but then we get back into A.

I'd like to know how the polling was done as well. The Pew study was very detailed. It didn't judge the "nature" of the knowledge possessed by these various idealogues, rather simply listing income level/education/etc.

I do recall a study on The Daily Show viewers in which it was determined that that audience was more "informed." I'd like to understand how this conclusion came about.

[Kuya]

I would believe that Democrats know less about politics than Republicans. Of course it doesn't seem to define what knowledge of politics is.

[Wulfgang]

EDIT: Wrong thread

[Churchill]

Fiscal conservative = classical liberal

lol

Nowadays yes. Many "conservative" policies are what were former "liberal" policies. Not that they aren't still.

[Tyche]

The inherent problem is not all conservatives lean republican and not all liberals lean democrat. That's why I pulled studies on registered political affiliation.

@ Kuya.

The total sample included 2,984 eligible persons and produced 1,807 pre-election interviews. In the post-election survey, 200 randomly selected persons who provided a face-to-face pre-election interview were assigned to be re-interviewed by telephone - of those, 168 granted a post-election interview. Altogether, 1,555 persons provided post-election interviews.

In addition to content on electoral participation, voting behavior, and public opinion, the 2000 ANES contains questions in other areas such as values and predispositions, media exposure, social altruism, and social networks. Special-interest and topical content includes a sizeable battery on the Clinton legacy and a smaller retrospective battery on former President George Bush Sr., new social trust questions specific to neighborhood and workplace, expanded content on civic engagement, questions related to the debate about campaign finance reform, and the first ANES time series appearance of measures on cognitive style.

So it's people with telephones, rich white conservatives I guess =/

And I'm not going through years of GSSs. You can, I'm not.

[Elvis]

I would believe that Democrats know less about politics than Republicans. Of course it doesn't seem to define what knowledge of politics is.

Exactly. How did this conclusion come about?

First of all, it implies the polling company possess a superior knowledge of current events/history and thus understands context (which in and of itself can mean so many things).

That's also only if that was the intended meaning behind being more knowledgeable. How extensive should the knowledge of one's history be to constitute an acceptable standard for such a poll? Plenty of questions arise that basically ask what criteria had to be met.

@Tyche

Just read your post. Ok. Now, the ironic part about all this is that Bush voters in the 2000 election (maybe 2004 - dunno, but it was one of the two of Dubya) did not know where he stood on the Kyoto protocols - they incorrectly assumed he supported them. There's been polling that studied the public opinion at the time toward these policies.

This is just a symptom of a bigger problem following the years after the 2000 election. "Issue awareness" was going downhill. Polling conducted by Gallop and PIPA pointed out some embarrassing 'misunderestimations' (<3 Dubya) about where candidates stood on important issues and also on the facts surrounding the issues themselves.

Although I don't recall distinctions being made amongst these groups as in whether they were liberal or conservative or independent, etc etc.

[Tyche]

his is just a symptom of a bigger problem following the years after the 2000 election. "Issue awareness" was going downhill. Polling conducted by Gallop and PIPA pointed out some embarrassing 'misunderestimations' (<3 Dubya) about where candidates stood on important issues and also on the facts surrounding the issues themselves.

Although I don't recall distinctions being made amongst these groups as in whether they were liberal or conservative or independent, etc etc.
__________________

That will change this year I'm sure. Also, about the Kyoto protocols, you can't even for sure state a source as to the date, which would say if it was done before or after the study. Plus, it's one issue by one president when the study covered general politics, and well, I posted what all it entailed above.