Public Opinion Watch: More Values than Voters
Values to the Left of Me, Values to the Right of Me and Nary a Strategy in Sight.
But at the same time we’re supposed to believe that 40 percent now believe men are superior to women and that 52 percent believe the father should be the master of the house – increases of ten points in each case over the same period covered by the NES data. I guess we could reconcile the data from the two surveys by positing a trend toward believing women are equal but dumb and subservient. But pardon me if I’m a little skeptical – a skepticism that’s reinforced by trend data from the General Social Survey, the premier academic sociology survey, showing fewer, not more, people believing that women should take care of home, not the country, and fewer, not more, people believing that men are better suited for politics than women.
This illustrates the perils of relying on one survey for one’s data about Americans’ values – or anything else for that matter. Especially when that one survey is a consumer market research survey designed not for political research, but for very different purposes.
So why are observers like Franke-Ruta and others so captivated by the Nordhaus/Shellenberger analysis, when it relies on only one data source – a data source, moreover, whose superiority over other sources is simply an assertion lacking any supporting evidence? Several reasons:
1. The very fact that it is a consumer marketing survey actually adds to the survey’s cachet. We now realize values are important, the thinking runs, and who’s been paying attention to values all these years? Why, corporations and market researchers, of course, so they (or their data) might already have the answers we’re so frantically looking for.
2. Since the Environics survey tracks over 100 different values, there’s a ton of value trends to look at and everyone can find at least one trend (or several) that confirms their suspicions, based on pop culture/reading/hunches/whatever, about where the country is really going. In effect, the Nordhaus/Shellenberger presentation of these data functions as a sort of Rorschach test for progressives interested in values, where people see in the data what they wanted to believe to begin with.
This is especially the case since they cluster- and factor-analyze their data to death, showing in various “maps” how all these values relate to underlying value dimensions (survival vs. fulfillment; authority vs. individuality) both overall and for a multiplicity of different values-defined “constituencies of opportunity” for progressives. The result is many complex grids – some of them for groups whose sample size cannot be more than 25 or so in their data – with dozens of multicolored values sprinkled in different patterns on each grid.
Well, if you can’t find something you agree with or find significant with this much to choose from, you’re just not looking hard enough! And my sense is people do just that, hence the recent popularity of their analysis.
But the question must be asked: what, exactly, are we getting out of this analysis that we couldn’t get elsewhere? Here’s an example from Franke-Ruta’s article:
