Class and Religion
Does this chart to the right, conveniently stolen from Kevin Drum really show that "class is still far more important than religion in America, despite the culture wars of the past couple of decades?" What it clearly does show is that class -- if, at least, by class you mean "income" rather than educational attainment or some other signifier -- has a real, large, independent influence on voting behavior. Across the board, as people get richer they get more Republican. This is true even of white evangelicals and of Jews, two religious groups oft said to simply leave their pocketbooks behind in the polling booth.
That said, the chart also seems to me to show that religious differences largely dominate income differentials. There are three religious groups -- Jews, the non-religious, and African-American Protestants -- such that the highest-income cohort of all three groups is less likely to vote Republican than are the lowest-income cohorts of the three other groups -- white evangelicals, white mainline protestants, and white catholics. And, again, rich white mainline protestants are less Republican than are lower-middle class evangelicals.
This, I think, is fundamentally what makes American politics tricky. It's often said that class doesn't matter -- or doesn't matter any more -- and our current politics is defined by culture. But that isn't true, and the chart clearly shows it. Movement up and down the economic ladder has a big impact on voting behavior. But religious affiliation also has a very large impact -- an impact so large it's doubtful to me that any sort of political strategy is really going to transcend it. Politicians and operatives just need to deal with a very complicated political landscape that's not amenable to the sort of simplifications that make for a good 800 word column.
Comments
I don't think this is what makes hte US tricky, per se, but rather it's what makes the entire world and all of its history tricky.
Some theoryheads call it "intersectionality" - no person is ever reducible to just one of the cultural axes along which they gain their identity, but they are always forming themselves along every axis at once. No one is just poor or just heterosexual or just Asian - they are all at once and more, and their participation in one category is colored by all the others, though some more or less than most.
It's one of those super-obvious insights that shouldn't need such a stupid name, or shouldn't need repeating over and over on political blogs. But I think that our statistical culture causes us to always want to reduce identities and choices to the simplest variables, even when the data shows clearly that isn't going to reflect reality very well.
This graph also fairly cries out for a companion graph depicting each religious affiliation's proportionate income breakdown--for example, mainline Protestants and Jews, say, probably have a higher proportion of their adherents toward the upper end of the income scale than some of these other groups. But in the absence of such a graph, I must confess I have no clear idea what it might add to the party.
Matt,
I wouldn't say that no political strategy will transcend religious affiliations. It's worth noting that this graph would have looked quite different fifty years ago, and quite different yet again fifty years before that. Those shifts were at least in part due to political strategies adopted at various times.
The interesting thing to me is that the only two groups that vote in excess of 50% Republican are conservative protestants with incomes over $50k and mainline protestants with incomes over $100k.
A couple of thoughts:
First, I'd be interested to know what percent of the population (and of voters) each of those lines, and data points, represents. (I'm sure there are stats somewhere out there...) Are there really so many conservative protestants with incomes over $50k and mainline protestants with incomes over $100k, such that Republicans in total get in excess of 50% of the votes?
Second, Matthew notes that this shows "what makes American politics tricky". But I don't think that's quite right. The really tricky part is that the graph doesn't tell you what to do. Should a Democrat focus on turning out more Afro-American protestants, since that line is entirely below the 25% line? Or should a Democrat try instead to convince conservative or mainline protestants to vote for Dems, thereby moving those lines from over 50% to under 50%? This simple graph doesn't tell you what is a more effective strategy.
This graph isn't all the meaningful, since most research today shows it isn't religion, per se, that influences the vote, it's religiosity--how often people go to church. Even within religious groups, there are significant differences of voting patterns based on religiosity. So to demonstrate that it's income that matters most, you'd need to control for religiosity as well.
How interesting that you entirely conflate money and class. Now, that's American. Poor lords have generally snubbed the upwardly mobile booshwah.
brian beats me to the point: income is income.
to be rich requires capital. (last time i checked, for example, something like 2% of american households had a net worth above $1M exclusive of primary residence - and, of course, of the value of art and antiques.)
and class is partly rooted in your capital position, but it's also partly rooted in your social position.
Al-
I assume it's party affiliation, not voting pattern. The total percentage of registered Republicans in the US is in the 35-40% range, I think, which is about where the graph centers.
I know you don't like to correct typos.
But could you *please* correct "nominate" to "dominate" in the clause "religious differences largely nominate income differentials"?
I mean, I know you're talking pay-off matrices. But some of your readers may not. The trouble is that this typo, unlike many of yours, produces English, and even syntactical English. But it still doesn't say what you meant it to say.
Just break down and edit a post, will ya?
It's also interesting that, whereas the other religious distinctions represent a shift in the curve, being evangelical alters its slope. All the groups show a positive correlation between income and Republicanism, with the exact curves being similar but displaced from the origin by varying factors. But the evangelicals are not just displaced furthest, their curve is steeper. Their income-elasticity of wingnuttiness is dramatically higher.
I wonder how much of the upward slope on those lines is explained by an independent effect of age: younger voters have lower household incomes and are more likely to vote democratic, perhaps for reasons that are at least partly cultural rather than economic.
Thanks!
By the way, does "Mainline Protestant"=="White Mainline Protestant", and if so, what denominations are "Afro-American Protestant", that is, composed entirely of black people?
The easy way to show that religion matters just as much is to make the complimentary plot, where each of the curve represents one of the fixed incomes from this chart, and the x-axis is the different religions.
You'd show the exact same trend--for each income level, a movement along the religious axis would increase the proportion voting republican. And from my quick look at the numbers in the chart above, I think the slope on the religious graph would be significantly steeper than the class slopes plotted here.
"The easy way to show that religion matters just as much is to make the complimentary plot, where each of the curve represents one of the fixed incomes from this chart, and the x-axis is the different religions. "
So, is being Catholic twice as much "x" as being Jewish? Just how how are you going to quantify the religions?
It is a basic error to identify "class" with location on the income distribution, as Brian Richards notes.
The Peter J. Boyer article in this week's New Yorker (Oct. 30 issue) on the Virginia Senate race, James Webb & George Allen is touching on a lot of these issues, as to the origins of "red-statism" & class. I am about halfway through it and am finding it a very interesting piece & usually I would bypass such a politically specific title.
Also, off-topic (please forgive) but for Russian & 19th-century European cultural history fans here (I know there are some here), the Keith Gessen piece on Alexander Herzen, "The Revolutionist" (meant as a "critic at large" piece on Stoppard's play "Coast of Utopia") is a must-read, really spot-on stuff and well-written to boot. Actually, it's not that off-topic, it really got me thinking that this was the period when liberal do-gooders got their clueless elite rep cemented, right at the same time Marx was busy scribing on class and some of those in the most privileged class....well, read it...I actually was reminded of many contemporary allusions while reading it
Measuring class with location on the income distribution is pretty standard for American quantitative sociology. (The graph comes from a book by two American quantitative sociologists.) You don't have to agree--these are probably technical distinctions--but what some of you are calling "class" would probably be called "social capital" or "status" by these guys. Howard's right that wealth is an important consideration not captured by this measure, though.
"That said, the chart also seems to me to show that religious differences largely dominate income differentials. There are three religious groups -- Jews, the non-religious, and African-American Protestants -- such that the highest-income cohort of all three groups is less likely to vote Republican than are the lowest-income cohorts of the three other groups -- white evangelicals, white mainline protestants, and white catholics."
"Religious differences" s/b "ethnicity".
Religiousity = "how often you go to church" is a partially false equivalence.
Many people attend church frequently for social reasons, desire to associate with similar people.
It could be that tribalism, not religiousity, is the impetus for being Republican
I see the religion as the Christian Right's "MacGuffin. It is the pretext for getting tribalistic people together.
Would truly religious Christians be so callous and indifferent to 655,000 dead Iraqi's? To ask the question is to answer it.
Presumably, "Mainline Protestant" in the graph does mean white mainline Protestant.
There are a number of historically black denominations, such as National Baptist, AME, AME Zion, and Church of God in Christ.
artappraiser, thanks for the link. I had very vaguely heard of Herzen. The Wikipedia entry links to a column by Stoppard. Searching Marxists.org, they had nothing by him I could find. :) I did download a tribute by Lenin.
"So, is being Catholic twice as much "x" as being Jewish? Just how how are you going to quantify the religions?"
You don't quantify it, you just plot the values for the exact same 6 categories shown above. You plot the exact same data, just slicing it in a different way, plotting curves which are for constant class and different religions. It would be a discrete plotting, so interpolation between points wouldn't have any meaning. From the graph above, you take the vertical slices--12% of poor atheists vote Republican while 35% of poor Conservative protestants do. And 28% of rich atheists vote Republican while 70% of rich conservative protestants do. Those differences are bigger than the differences caused by class.
The richer you get the more likely you are to become a Republican? Is this because you begin to feel higher marginal tax rates are unfair to you? (Its harder to part with 39% of $1,000,000 than 31% of $100,000. If you're lucky enough to have it happen to you, you'll understand how it creates resentment). And if so, does lowering tax rates remove some of that sense of alienation and resentment, at least for some? Is lowering taxes therefore good for the Democratic Party, at least around the edges? Just wondering.
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