Arkansas Tech University The Culture Wars & Political Polarization in Perspective
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The best fit is for the “rich” category model, and that is only a modest .252. It is barely a twenty-five percent improvement over simply using the mean of the category. The model fit for income as a whole classification is a mere .130. One of the poorest fits is the “poor” category (pun intended) with an R-Square of .026 (essentially no improvement over the mean by using the trend model). It isn’t much better with the “working class” model (R2 = .114). Note these are the categories of citizens that Franks argues have trended strongly towards Republicans and conservatives because of family values appeals and social issue positions of the Republican Party. There hasn’t been much of a trend in group polarization of class in the ideological dimension; however, I examine the contributions of the class categories as a percentage of total contribution and as a mean deviation from the global mean for the category in Tables 10.8 and 10.9. The maximum contribution to the weighted group polarization measure by the poor does come in 2004, the election year that Franks focuses on in What’s the Matter with Kansas? Unfortunately for Franks, the poor in 2004 where more ideologically polarized to the Left of the dimension, and not in the conservative direction. The lower contributions to polarization (which might be consistent with a conservative trend) are scattered and unpatterned throughout the time series. The ‘Poor’ contribution was near 11% in 1990, 1994, and 2000. The trend in contributions and the relative size of that contribution in the weighted models for the poor is very similar to that in the unweighted models, indicating the size of the category as a proportion of the population is not a significant factor in the percent contribution of the poor to ideological polarization. The working class contributions also seem to be fairly randomly distributed throughout the past three decades, with a low in 1996 (7.69%) and a high in 2000 (26.44%), just four years later. The trends for both the weighted and unweighted measures in the working class contribution to group polarization of class on ideology are fairly consistent: consistently inconsistent. The story for the poor is similar to that of the rich, though the relatively fewer number of ‘rich’ citizens means that there is a stronger group-size influence on its overall contribution to polarization than with the poor. There is greater variation in the percent contribution of the rich to class polarization on ideology. In the weighted measure, it was as high as 21% in 1978 and as low as 2% in 1994. The larger contributions of the rich do seem to have been located in the earlier survey years in the time series rather than the later years. Particularly in the 1990’s the rich were relatively small contributors to group polarization. The ideological position of the lower middle class is remarkably stable, ranging from 10 to just over 12 percent in every year since 1972. However, there is much more variation in their contribution when you take into account the size of the lower middle class, with 1982 standing out as a Table 10.8: Class – Weighted Percent Contribution & Mean Deviation on GP on Ideology, 1972-2004
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