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Hmmm. Thanks for the links. I've only scanned a couple but I see some interesting reading ahead. One thing I noticed, if you look at "opintab5.pdf" the questions are broken down by income level, and as income increases, answers become more conservative. That supports my personal feelings that when people become more knowledgeable about how social programs are paid for, and see what results they're (not!) getting from the 30, 40, or 50% of their income taken as tax dollars, they're less inclined to have more & more of that $$ taken from them, and they start voting against those programs. I'd assumed that since higher education generally leads to higher income, "opintab4 -- by degree" would show the same result.
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Well said VulcanRider. I'm glad you checked out 5, as I intended to mention it. As income grows, you find increasing support for conservative viewpoints, particularly economic ones vs social ones (though that's there to some degree as there is on the other side). Statistically, one begins to favor one's income over policy, and who can blame 'em? That 'opintab4.pdf' is different, I'd say is a function of years of education having a positive (quantitatively, not qualitatively) liberalizing** effect. We should also consider that education does have an effect on an individual's income over the course of a lifetime, BUT the vast majority of wealth, and I mean class defining wealth, comes from 1) Marriage, and 2) Inheritance, according to sociology classes I've had.* Thus it's possible to have money and little education, as it's possible to have lots of education and little money hehe.
There's so many things going on here, and it's cool once you do the "multivariate analysis" that gives you an equation for a data set that lets you see the effect of income, gender, education, age, etc on something like political ideology. Each variable has a coefficient of effect, and each statistic like gender or income has one coefficient. That's right: it's boiled down to a number. If we're calculating chance of liberal support in a population: age, income, and male genders generally have a decreasing effect (like my grandpa's motor-home community lol), whereas female gender, years of education, and minority status have a liberalizing effect.
It can be complicated/convoluted, but it's worth it, or at least reading the works of others who've done it if you have any interest in this stuff. As for all of this real life vs isolated academics, I should just mention (as a social science major) that there is way more out there in 'the real world' that isn't obvious simply by living in it. Take the first footnote for example.
*That is to say, it's a commonly held American myth that the norm is to work up to great wealth: to pull yourself up from your bootstraps. That happens, don't get me wrong! We have plenty of examples of that - but note that we do take the time to notice stories like that. It happens every day on the stock market, but they're nothing more than a statistical abnormality when we look at the whole of society. For every lottery winner, member of a Board of a corporation, and success story on the cover of Forbes, there are scores of people who simply inherit it or marry into it. For each of those, there are hundreds that inherit or marry into their current socialeconomic standings. Doesn't hurt to try though right? lol
**good point about the relative term Liberal (and unmentioned: Conservative). This is determined by self-appointment in the links I believe.
[ 10-20-2004, 05:59 AM: Message edited by: Lucern ]