The Party Line
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This NPR poll (via Krieger) has an interesting feature that measures agreement with a series of statements with and without partisan labels. On the whole, the overall difference in support or opposition for a given position between the “partisan” and “non-partisan” respondents is not that great (the GOP’s position loses approximately 60-40 regardless of labeling), but there was one figure that caught my attention in the breakdown of the Iraq responses. When told that it was the Republican position, Republican respondents were significantly more likely to support that position than otherwise. Agreement was 69-28 in the “partisan” group and 55-38 in the “non-partisan,” so when not conditioned to respond tribally according to party loyalty Republicans were much less likely to support the party’s standard Iraq position. Put simply: when voters are considering the policy substance offered by the competing parties, the Republican position scarcely wins a majority of its own partisans and loses badly with everyone else. It will hardly be news to anyone that supporting the war in Iraq is a losing issue for the GOP, but past polling has given the misleading impression that the party is overwhelmingly supportive in such a way that makes Republican dissent difficult. Perhaps these results point towards a more evenly-divided GOP that would tolerate more open opposition to the war.
Partisanship was a bigger factor in Republican responses. Democrats were only slightly more likely to choose their party’s position when given a “partisan cue”–agreement was 80% in the “partisan” and 76% in the “non-partisan” group. Independents were slightly less likely to agree with the Democratic position when it was associated with the Democrats by name (53% in “partisan” vs. 57% in “non-partisan”), but this is obviously not as dramatic as the difference in the Republican responses. There does seem to be some small resistance to the Democratic position on Iraq simply because of that party’s ”brand” image among independents, and this resistance naturally grows much stronger among Republicans. It is actually Republicans who make up this 14-point difference who bother me the most, since it seems that these are the people who don’t really believe what the party leadership is offering but go along out of herd instinct. It is not entirely surprising that party loyalty (or antipathy) would shape how people respond to these questions, but the gap between Republicans who agreed with the substance of the position and those who seem to have felt compelled to agree with the party line is quite remarkable.
More striking, and also of interest to readers of TAC, is the difference among Republican respondents to positions on trade. When told that it was the Republican “free trade” position, Republicans agreed with it 63-33. Without partisan cues, Republicans agreed with a less “free trade”-oriented Democratic statement that included a call to renegotiate NAFTA 54-43. That’s a forty-one point swing that apparently hinges entirely on partisanship. All that cognitive dissonance has to give these people a headache. Interestingly, Democrats feel more obliged to agree with their party’s line on trade in an almost mirror image of the differences in Republican responses on Iraq: 69% of Democrats in the “partisan” group agreed with their party’s line, while just 53% agreed in the “non-partisan.” Independents are significantly more likely to agree with the Democratic position when the Democratic label isn’t attached to it: 61% agreement in “non-partisan” and 52% in the “partisan” group. The Republicans have a policy problem. It’s the Democrats who seem to have a brand or image problem.
P.S. There’s no comfort for the GOP in these results when it comes to tax policy, either. Without partisan cues, Republicans agree with the Democratic line 52-38, which is a 53-point shift from the “partisan” group where Republicans agreed with their party’s view 66-27.
Filed under: foreign policy, politics
Thanks, Daniel. To paraphrase John Cole, you read all these things (like TNR, which I stopped reading years ago) so that we (your readers) don’t have to. Seriously, the signal to noise ratio on Eunomia is about as high as a general interest blog can get (I’d put GNXP in the same category; no others come to immediately to mind) – keirei!
(not being a political junkie, I didn’t recognize Glen Bolger’s name, though a quick Google tells me he’s an R – do you think he sufficiently balanced Greenberg to make it a neutral poll?)
I find it remarkable that you find the degree of partisan pull on the Republicans remarkable; it’s not just the herd mentality (which is a nearly universal human characteristic) but the ever tightening (since at least 2000 if not 1994) top-down centrally controlled dissemination of the orthodoxy.
OTOH, as a generally left leaning independent, I am surprised by how little penalty the Democratic partisan label carries for other independents (perhaps my fellow Inds. are more able than I to overlook the sheer fecklessness of so many actually existing Ds; I doff my metaphorical cap to them). But look at the Congressional disapproval ratings in the poll – what would have been interesting is separate approve/disapprove ratings for Rs and Ds in Congress (I know Ds are winning big on the generic congressional ballot, but that’s a different question from approval/disapproval of the existing delegations in toto).
This is not even a little bit surprising. Two sources:
1. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt set out a schema with five “spheres” of morality: not harming, fairness, loyalty, respect for authority, and purity.
In Haidt’s surveys, liberals value avoiding harm and fairness “inordinately,†while conservatives value all five. (Jihadists, like conservatives but moreso, put inordinate value on loyalty, authority, and purity.)
Cato research fellow Will Wilkinson explains:
http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2007/09/19/whats-the-frequency-lakoff/
2. Bob Altmeyer has spent decades studying “authoritarian followers.” People of this personality type are self-described conservatives, by a huge margin.
See Altmeyer’s page, and Republican turncoat John Dean’s Conservatives Without Conscience
We’ve seen the loyalty gene in spades this week re: McClellan outrage. A commenter on Red State said, “loyalty *is* everything.”
Is “yes, comrade, whatever you say, comrade” an admirable or worthy basis for morality?
Daniel,
Do you think you might write something about what these and other such polling numbers reveal about the public support for paleoconservative and traditionalist/crunchy conservative views, especially once partisan and ideological labels (liberal/conservative/populist/progressive/etc.) are taken out of the equation? Obviously the question of health care stands out like a sore thumb, but on other prominent issues like the war, bad free trade agreements, immigration, inflation, federal deficits, and – perhaps – an overdependence on foreign oil, not to mention the deep mistrust of Congress and the federal government more generally, it seems to me that – contra Ross Douthat – there are serious signs for hope here. (If Ron Paul could magically be made to have a [D] after his name whenever Democrats read about him and an [R] for the Republicans, I think he could win.) I thought about trying to pull something together myself, but I don’t have the time. You, on the other hand, seem to have a limitless capacity for things like this. In any case I would be interested to hear what you think.
I like that–Larison’s Limitless Capacity. I think the numbers on the war and trade are promising signs for paleo and traditionalist conservatives, and I would be curious to see how people would respond to “non-partisan” positions that propose scaling back our presence overseas and bringing forces deployed in Europe and Asia back home. The support on the Democratic side would already be fairly high, and I suspect it would be much higher on the GOP side in a “non-partisan” or “non-ideological” survey than otherwise. Obviously, a “non-partisan” survey on immigration would also be very revealing, and I think would show a much broader and also deeper level of support for restrictionist positions. Maybe not as much as I might like, but certainly more than there is in the standard polling. I have thought for some time that paleos have a better sense of the public’s frustrations on a number of issues and have been closer to the “American political scene” in that sense than some of our reformist friends, but the trouble remains that the agenda we propose does seem to hit a ceiling of support electorally. However, things may be changing. I’ll have to think more on this.
Thanks. Based on my quick look over those NPR data, it seems to me that if a consistent message could be crafted that:
1. Stresses the need for a real immigration policy (I am actually far less hardline than you paleos on this, but we can compromise);
2. Rails against the corruption, inefficiency, and essential unaccountability of Washington politicians and bureaucrats;
3. Emphasizes the rights of states to determine their own fates, especially on such issues as abortion, gay rights, etc., without taking a stand on how they ought to decide them;
4. Demands a balanced federal budget;
5. Echoes the populist calls for middle-class tax cuts, child tax credits, and so on;
6. Calls for an end to the Iraq war and a reduction in defense (as opposed to espionage and counterintelligence) spending;
7. Takes a stand against bad trade agreements but not free trade itself;
8. Advocates protectionist measures for trade involving countries where workers are exploited or mistreated;
9. Takes seriously the oil crisis (not that I have any sense, aside from promoting higher-density living, of what to do about this);
10. Proposes ways to deal with inflation; and
11. Demands an end to corporate welfare;
… then we’d have something close to a majority on our hands. All of these are issues that seem to be very much on people’s minds, and proposing sane, sensible, federalist, and minimally activist solutions to them is the sort of thing that would resonate with an awful lot of voters. And these are, I take it, very much the sort of things that paleoconservatives are out to do. Again, I’m not enough of an expert – either on the principles of paleoconservatism or on the relevant polling stats – to make any hard predictions here, but I do think I know where I’d put my money.
I crunched the numbers on this a little bit.
It’s stunning that attaching the Republican brand adds double digits to Republicans’ (tepid) support for Republican policies.
For Democrats, it’s *exactly the opposite* (but with single-digit moves). Branding a policy “Democratic” *reduces* Democrat’s support for it.
Who’s got the branding problem, and who’s got the policy problem?
Numbers here:
http://trueconservative.typepad.com/trueconservative/2008/05/pubs-and-dems-brands-and-beliefs.html
Well, yes, I agree, which is why I wrote, “The Republicans have a policy problem. It’s the Democrats who seem to have a brand or image problem.”