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Special to the Pew Research Center
A Static America: A Contrarian View of Current U.S. Public Opinion Trends
Special to the Pew Research Center
Précis
With predictions of a wave of Republican victories come the November elections, there has been talk of a sea change in American politics. Pew Research Center long-time consultant Michael J. Robinson offers a contrarian view. While acknowledging that changes in political and economic conditions can, and often do, produce substantial shifts in the partisan makeup of governments at all levels, Robinson argues that such transformations are rarely the product of major shifts in such basic American values as the belief in God, in country, in the duties of citizenship and equality of opportunity. "Political values don't change much in America," says Robinson, "Unless cataclysmic circumstances produce those changes. Or, unless the state makes a concerted effort to generate them."
Robinson questions whether transformative changes in politics are actually in process. "Is the electorate moving in any meaningful political direction, other than toward pique and annoyance?" he asks. His answer is no.
In an extensive review of survey data over more than 20 years, Robinson examines trends in the public's responses to 33 different political and social values questions extracted from Pew Research Center surveys taken during the period. Robinson finds that, on average, Americans' judgments on such issues have changed only marginally if at all since the late 1980s. This is so even when mean responses are disaggregated between Republicans and Democrats. While there is evidence of greater dispersion at the conservative and liberal extremes of the two parties, Robinson does not see these as indicative of any widening ideological gap. He writes:
One might have expected that the journey from the Reagan years on through to the Obama honeymoon would have magnified changes in values. But neither the change in the political zeitgeist-nor the impact of the Great Recession-produced marked impact on political values.
This is made even more surprising when one considers that some change did occur on items asking about the government's proper role in helping the have-nots. But, between 1987 and 2009, the shift was toward less government involvement. The percentage feeling that the government should do more for the needy, even if it means more debt, declined by 5 percentage points. Over the same period, the percentage believing the government should take care of those who can't take care of themselves also declined, by 8 points.
These modest changes indicate that neither Obama nor economic stress has moved the public toward liberalism in the last three difficult years. In fact, the findings about growing slightly less sympathetic toward the dispossessed in the late '00s reinforce the basic premise: that from Reagan's America on through to Obama's America, changes have been, at most, modest. But the recent, if slight, shift toward more conservative values concerning the welfare state also suggests that some changes in values, however small, may be less counter-intuitive than counter-cyclical.
A plot of more than 20 years of data from the General Social Survey in which respondents classified themselves on a scale ranging from "extremely conservative" to "extremely liberal," produces a graph that is "mind-numbing in its consistency and the small variations that do occur seem to have no consistent relationship to larger happenings on the political scene." In other words, an ideological flatline.
Download the full report (PDF).