Liberals are controlling overpopulation -- in the Democratic Party

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
Me, clearly. However, since I choose not to breed, you can let me die of old age.

Think of how much you'll be wasting in terms of resources that could be put to better use.

[Elok]

Originally posted by MrFun
more like pop bullsh!t

So we're distinguishing between sociology and "bullsh!t" now? Talk about hair-splitting...

[DanS]

Originally posted by DinoDoc
Which one of you (You or Yehban) should be purged for the good of the planet?

[Darius871]

Originally posted by VJ
I'm not the guy who has to prove it, on the contrary I'm the guy calling "BS" and waiting for the proof.

And we all know it isn't coming.

Why are you hiding now?

[RGBVideo]

I didn't realize anyone has answered. You could've grabbed my attention by sending a PM. But that isn't dramatic enough, now is it?

The Social Logic of Politics: Family, Friends, Neighbors, and Workmates as Context for Political Behavior (edited by Alan S. Zuckerman) contains pieces by a number of academics backing up the assertion "those who talk together vote together" (and by extension that "those who live together vot strawman.e together")

So really, people living [/b]within the same household currently[/b] vote similarly? That's nice, and not surprising considering they communicate with each other daily and thus have time to change knowledge of political insights and scandals several times a day. Now answer this: Do they vote together AFTER they have left the same household, the question actually presumed true in this thread? Did you even realize there is a difference? Like I said before, for people I know well enough to know how they vote for in Finland, the answer to this question is an overwhelming "no".

Your fancy "omg this can be googled in five minutes " syrveys don't talk about the topic discussed at all.

So now that I answered your question, let me throw you a counter-question: Was that an intentional strawman or were you honestly too lazy to think that you thought there wouldn't be any difference between people living under the same household and people who were raised under a similarly voting household before they had a right to vote?

[RGBVideo]

Note: I don't have an axe to grind here, I'm just getting tired of the "omfg them stupid liberals/conservatives" spambot-like lies which fill OTF every time there's a national election in the USA. Endlessly parroted "repeat-until-true" lies degrade the overall long-term quality of OTF.

[Darius871]

Sorry for the delay, it's been a busy 2 weeks...

Originally posted by VJ
I didn't realize anyone has answered. You could've grabbed my attention by sending a PM. But that isn't dramatic enough, now is it?

Sorry for seeming rude with that post, it was tongue-in-cheek but I forgot how hard that is to get across on teh intarwebs.

Originally posted by VJ
So really, people living [/b]within the same household currently[/b] vote similarly? That's nice, and not surprising considering they communicate with each other daily and thus have time to change knowledge of political insights and scandals several times a day. Now answer this: Do they vote together AFTER they have left the same household, the question actually presumed true in this thread? Did you even realize there is a difference? ...

Your fancy "omg this can be googled in five minutes " syrveys don't talk about the topic discussed at all.

So now that I answered your question, let me throw you a counter-question: Was that an intentional strawman or were you honestly too lazy to think that you thought there wouldn't be any difference between people living under the same household and people who were raised under a similarly voting household before they had a right to vote?

All I meant by the google comment was that I didn't have time to go in-depth and that that obviously inadequate study was the best I could come up with in a few minutes before darting to class. Of course high intra-household concordance doesn't prove offspring will vote the same way their entire lives.

However, not all political socialization studies have been intra-household, and even those on young adults living on their own (both college student and non-student) revealed party concordance rates in the ballpark of 60-80%. Furthermore, Jennings & Niemi (cited below) conducted a landmark eight-year longitudinal study to address the exact problem you raise (changes after moving out), and they concluded the data "unequivocally" shows party concordance stability throughout early adulthood.

Considering longitudinal studies also show very high party affiliation stability among the general public (see Converse & Markus below for just one example), it's reasonable to infer that a concordant twenty-something living independently will - by and large - vote the same way through later adulthood. Sure not 100% of the time, but certainly often enough for the 41% "fertility gap" to have a noticeable effect in the long-term.

Originally posted by VJ
Note: I don't have an axe to grind here, I'm just getting tired of the "omfg them stupid liberals/conservatives" spambot-like lies which fill OTF every time there's a national election in the USA. Endlessly parroted "repeat-until-true" lies degrade the overall long-term quality of OTF.

Not in dispute.

Originally posted by VJ
for people I know well enough to know how they vote for in Finland, the answer to this question is an overwhelming "no".

Originally posted by VJ
And in case you didn't understand why I wasn't convinced: children don't really grow independent until they move away from the household, mentally or physically. It's pretty natural that a group of people which has to interact between each other so often eventually blends their political opinions into a relatively uniformed mix. But as for adults who have moved away from their homes, most of the ones I know actually are opposing their parents. I don't know if they're trying to be TEH REBELS and my sample size definitely is too small (I know how about 60 RL friends of mine vote, I usually diplomatically ask them during small talk since I'm a curious person). So I could be wrong.

Aside from the sampling problem you mention, I'd also caution against making any nomothetic cross-national comparison here. First of all you have 3 major parties and over half a dozen parties represented in parliament IIRC, which makes party defection far more likely than in the Billy Yank's 'either-or' choice.

Secondly, there could very well be subtle cultural differences at play here. Perhaps, for instance, Americans are less encouraged to think critically than Finns (damn likely IMO), so the latter would be more likely to "rebel" once they move out and the former would be more likely to simply gravitate toward like-minded people and shelter themselves. In that scenario your anecdotal observations hold even less water when it comes to the Brooks' piece on American voters.

Originally posted by VJ
I'd be interested to know if there have been some real studies regarding the original claim of DanS in the thread, the claim that offspring of the supporters of political party X vote for the political party X Y% of the time (the article DanS cited as truth had Y at 80). I would very much appreciate if you could spend some of your time finding one for me.

Oddly enough we were assigned a literature review in a class the same week this topic piqued my interest, so I dug up about a dozen:

Do Those Who Live Together Vote Together?
A Review of the Political Socialization Literature

Introduction

In the past few years, there has been a great deal of discussion regarding the relationship between fertility rates and political ideology. The annual General Social Survey conducted in 2004 reveals that any 100 politically liberal adults only have 147 children between them on average, while every 100 conservative adults have 208 children on average. This accounts for what Arthur Brooks of Syracuse University has called a 41% “fertility gap” in the American right’s favor that has not been below 20% in the past 30 years and has continually widened by over .5% each year, which he concludes will lead to a widespread shift to the right side of the political spectrum in the next half-century (Brooks, 2006).

Renowned demographer Phillip Longman has come to the same conclusion, citing the fact that fertility rates in “red states” during the 2004 presidential election were 12% higher than in the “blue states.” He also noted that the 17.4% of baby boomer women who had only one child were parents to only 7.8% of the next generation, while the 11% who had four or more children were parents to over 25% of the next generation. This would mean there are a disproportionate amount of children coming from more traditional, patriarchal family structures where mothers are the primary caregivers (Longman, 2006) – households which other research has shown to be more politically conservative (Driedger & Halli, 1997).

To conclude that the higher fertility rates on the American right will produce more conservative voters in coming decades has intuitive appeal, but it is ultimately based on the underlying assumption that children are statistically more likely to adopt their parents’ political partisanship than not. How has this assumption held up to scientific scrutiny? A number of studies over the past half-century have made it an “unspoken political truism” that elements of social context (such as neighborhood or socioeconomic status) shape voting preferences (Burbank 1997), but what about families? This literature review summarizes the findings of scholars who studied the phenomenon of intergenerational “political socialization” over the past half-century.

The heyday of political socialization research (from the late 1950s through the early 1970s) reflected the “behaviorist” zeitgeist in American political science at the time (Wasby, 1966), which eschewed the intangible, qualitative theories of old and insisted that only quantitative measurement of political behavior could hint at objective reality. As such, the study of political socialization was composed mainly of survey and statistical studies, which can be loosely categorized based on their focal points: party affiliation, political attitudes, parental differences, and the continuity of parental influence.

Party Affiliation

Political socialization research at first had a parochial focus on party affiliation, beginning with about a dozen disparate studies which – according to Hyman’s (1959) comprehensive synthesis – showed a strong correlation near 0.9 (on a scale from -1 to 1) between the party preferences of any one parent and his/her 18-year-old child. That same year, McCloskey & Dahlgren (1959) went one step further to compare the party affiliations of actual adults to those of their parents. Even though the study specifically sought a sample least likely to have parent-child concordance (in order to focus on variables among party defectors), they still found that 67.7% of their test subjects displayed concordance, and those subjects who remained personally and geographically close to their parents displayed 77% concordance. Another important variable – the level of political activity among parents – was factored in by a study the next year, which showed a concordance of 75% when parents were “politically active” and a concordance only 4% lower when they were not (Campbell, Converse, Miller, & Stokes, 1960).

Other important studies of party affiliation in the behaviorist era found a .79 correlation for teenagers and parents (Dowse & Hughes, 1971), and nearly 80% parent-child concordance when both parents identified with the same party (Baker 1974). Tedin’s (1974) innovative study design added to the literature that concordance was much higher when the subjects’ own perceptions of their parents’ affiliations proved accurate, and when the subjects’ issue stances matched up with party preference. He also found out that the more salient an issue was for the parent, the higher the parent-child concordance was on that issue (Tedin, 1974). Lampard’s (1997) study found that not only was there 73% party concordance among parent-child pairs who lived in the same household, but even among pairs who lived apart there was 63% concordance. More recently, Oxford’s Economic & Social Research Council (2003) found strong correlations between .75 and .82 (depending on statistical method used) for intra-household party affiliations generally.

Political Attitudes

Dodge’s and Uyeki’s (1962) study of college students innovatively went beyond party affiliation to also measure attitudes on 15 specific issues, and found a party concordance over 70% and issue correlations that averaged at a strong .78. A landmark 1968 study by Jennings & Niemi also included various values and attitudes. While there was party concordance nearing 70% and party defection no higher than 10%, their correlations on values and attitudes were substantially weaker than the issue-stance correlations found by Dodge (Jennings & Niemi, 1968). Subsequent studies similarly found far more party concordance than issue concordance (Styskal & Sullivan, 1975; Niemi, Ross, and Alexander, 1978).

It is notable, however, that Dalton (1980) later applied the 1968 data to a complex LISREL structural equation modeling program which – in lay terms – factors in patterns among each respondent’s indicators before comparing between responders in order to remove mitigating variables. He concluded that their data in fact showed strong correlations of .9 on partisan values and .83 on race issues, and moderately strong correlations of .44 on civic tolerance, .47 on political efficacy, and .5 on political knowledge. (Dalton, 1980)

Parental Differences

While over three quarters of spouses agree on party affiliation (Lampard, 1997) and are almost equally politically active (Glaser, 1959; Straits 1990), several studies looked into parental differences instead of referring to the generic “parent.” An early study of 21-24 year olds found 76% party concordance with mothers, 74% concordance with fathers, and 86% concordance when both parents had the same party affiliation (Maccoby, Matthews, & Morton, 1954). Similar findings were reported by Nogee & Levin (1959), with 72.5% maternal concordance and 70.6% paternal concordance among a sample of college students. While the ~2% differences in both studies were certainly within the margin of error, Jennings & Langton (1969) would conclude in their own study that when the mother and father sided with different parties, the average college student’s partisanship was as much as 15% more likely to be the same as the mother’s. Furthermore, in cases where both parents sided with the same party, parent-child concordance was more likely when the mother was most politically active than when the father was (Jennings & Langton, 1969).

Continuity

Since longitudinal studies of the general public have shown that individual party affiliations are remarkably stable over time (Converse & Markus, 1979), one can infer that affiliations ingrained by parental indoctrination are similarly stable. However, two important studies have analyzed the continuity of parental influence in particular. In the aforementioned 1959 cross-sectional study by Nogee & Levin, at least 65% of college seniors reported their political stance had not changed in the four years living away from their parents, and interestingly over 80% of business majors reported no change. Later Jennings and Niemi (1975) conducted an eight-year longitudinal study that surveyed the same subject dyads in both 1965 and 1973, and they concluded their data “unequivocally” supported the notion that party preferences absorbed in adolescence remain stable in early adulthood.

Other Relevant Research

While not directly concerned with intergenerational concordance, the work of Zuckerman, Kotler-Berkowitz, & Swaine (1998) on the influence of political discussions is relevant. They found that an individual’s party preferences are more strongly correlated to those of people he/she discusses politics with than they are to those of strangers whose self-identification on party preferences or left-right scales are the same. In other words, the old adage “those who talk together vote together” had been empirically verified, and it was also revealed that 76% of respondents discussed politics with a relative more than anyone else. It can be inferred from these separate findings (the strong influence of discussion on one hand and the family’s primacy as an arena for discussion on the other) that family is a major determinant of political behavior.

Conclusion

As the ultra-positivist hegemony of behaviorism in political science faded from the mid-1970s to the present, painstaking empirical research of political socialization largely faded with it (with some exceptions). In any event, the behaviorist epoch has produced such mountains of data on the subject that further inquiry almost seems superfluous. The strong correlations on party affiliation and affiliation continuity are enough to convince most social scientists that parents are a primary politicizing agent, but weak correlations on specific issues mitigate this idea enough to prevent social scientists from treating it like a deterministic iron law. Any conclusions beyond this common sense would require more extensive research.

References

Baker, K. L. (1974) The Acquisition of Partisanship in Germany. American Journal of Political Science 18 (3), 569-582.
Brooks, A. C. (2006) The Fertility Gap. Wall Street Journal. Retrieved September 25, 2006 from http://www.opinionjournal.com/editor...?id=110008831.
Burbank, M. J. (1997) Explaining Contextual Effects on Vote Choice. Political Behavior 19 (2), 113-132.
Campbell, A., Converse, P. E., Miller, W. E., & Stokes, D. E. (1960). The American Voter. New York: Wiley.
Converse, P. E., & Markus, G. B. (1979) Plus ca change...: The New CPS Election Study Panel. The American Political Science Review 73 (1), 32-49.
Dalton, R. J. (1980) Reassessing Parental Socialization: Indicator Unreliability Versus Generational Transfer. American Political Science Review 74 (2), 421-431.
Dodge, R. W. (1962) Political Affiliation and Imagery Across Two Related Generations. Midwest Journal of Political Science 6 (3), 266-276.
Dowse, R. E. & Hughes, J. (1971). The Family, the School, and the Political Socialization Process. Sociology 5 (1), 21-45.
Driedger, L. & Halli, S. S. Pro Life or Pro Choice: Politics of Career and Homemaking (1997) Population Studies 51 (2), 129-137.
Economic & Social Research Council. (2003). A missing level in the analysis of British voting behavior: the household as context. Retrieved September 25, 2006 from http://www.ccsr.ac.uk/methods/public...Paper%203.pdf.
Hyman, H. (1959) Political Socialization. New York: Free Press.
Glaser, W. A. (1959). The Family and Voter Turnout. The Public Opinion Quarterly 23 (4), 563-570.
Jennings, M. K. & Niemi, R. G. (1968) The Transmission of Political Values from Parent to Child. The American Political Science Review 62 (1), 169-184.
Jennings, M. K. & Niemi, R. G. (1975) Continuity and Change in Political Orientations: A Longitudinal Study of Two Generations. The American Political Science Review 69 (4), 1316-1335.
Jennings, M. K. & Langton, K. P. (1969). Mothers Versus Fathers: The Formation of Political Orientations Among Young Americans. The Journal of Politics 31 (2), 329-358.
Lampard, R. J. (1997) Party Political Homogamy in Great Britain. European Sociological Review 13 (1), 79-99.
Longman, P. (2006). The Return of Patriarchy. Foreign Policy, Spring 2006, 56-65.
Maccoby, E. E., Matthews, R. E., & Morton, A. S. (1954). Youth and Political Change. The Public Opinion Quarterly 18 (1), 23-39.
McCloskey, H. & Dahlgren, H. E. (1959). The American Political Science Review 53 (3), 757-776.
Niemi, R.G., Ross, R. D., & Alexander, J. (1978) The Similarity of Political Values of Parents and College-Age Youths. The Public Opinion Quarterly 42 (4), 503-520.
Nogee, P. & Levin, M. B. (1959) Some Determinants of Political Attitudes Among College Voters. The Public Opinion Quarterly 22 (4), 449-463.
Straits, B.C. (1990). The Social Context of Voter Turnout. The Public Opinion Quarterly 54 (1), 64-73.
Styskal, R. A., & Sullivan, H. J. (1975) Intergenerational Continuity and Congruence on Political Values. Western Political Quarterly 28 (3), 516-527.
Tedin, K. (1974) The Influence of Parents on the Political Attitudes of Adolescents. The American Political Science Review 68 (4), 1579-1592.
Wasby, S. (1966). The Impact of the Family on Politics: An Essay and Review of the Literature. Family Life Coordinator 15 (1), 3-24.
Zuckerman, A. S., Kotler-Berkowitz, L. A., & Swaine, L. A. (1998). Anchoring political preferences: The structural bases of stable electoral decisions and political attitudes in Britain. European Journal of Political Research 16, 1-37.

[DinoDoc]

When is che going to announce his planned suicide as an effort to stave off ecological collapse?

[Drake Tungsten]

He's killing off his genetic line by refusing to breed. I think we should be content with that.

[DinoDoc]

Based on the opinion he put forth, he's needlessly wasting resources and putting the survival of the planet at risk.

[Whoha]

suppose he discovers the secret of immortality and inadvertantly gives it to himself.

[Drake Tungsten]

Then he's assured of being the last commie on earth. The handful of his comrades still around now won't stand a chance...

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Elok

So we're distinguishing between sociology and "bullsh!t" now? Talk about hair-splitting...

[Eroberer]

Conservatives should not be counting their chickens before they hatch. If we're to believe Bill O'Reilly and co. on the issues, it's obvious that the "secular-progressives" and the "far left" will have already emerged victorious from their War on Our Culture by the time this fertility gap is able to make a difference. The future's monumental mass of conservatives will have nothing to vote on, because they will have been the underdog for so long by then.

[Darius871]

You're being facetious right?