Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Gallup: Record USA Liberal Moral Views. Why?

USA: Why Liberal Morality and Conservative Politics?


Gallup: The Acceptability of Various Moral Behaviors
Topic
2017
Record
First
Year
Gain
Loss
Year First
Asked
Birth Control
91%
High
89%
+2
2012
Divorce
73%
High
59%
+14
2001
Unmarried sex
69%
High
53%
+16
2001
Gambling
65%

63%
+2
2003
Gay/lesbian relations
63%
High
40%
+17
2001
Unmarried pregnancy
62%
High
45%
+17
2002
Human Stem cell research
61%

52%
+9
2002
The death penalty
61%
Low
63%
-5
2001
Doctor assisted suicide
57%
High
49%
+8
2001
Animal fur wearing
57%

60%
-3
2001
Animal medical testing
51%
Low
63%
-14
2001






Abortion
43%

42%
+1
2001
Sex between teens
36%

32%
+4
2013
Pornography
36%
High
30%
+6
2011
Suicide
18%

13%
+5
2001
Polygamy
17%
High
7%
+10
2003
Extramarital Affairs
9%

7%
+2
2001

Data extracted and rearranged from Americans Hold Record Liberal Views on Most Moral Issues

Liberals have been very successful in spreading their moral views in these first two decades of the twenty first century.  As the above chart indicates, divorce, unmarried sex, gay/lesbian relationships, and unmarried pregnancy have reached new highs this year, have achieved double digit gains since 2001, and now have substantial majorities (60% plus).  This has not been accompanied by sweeping liberal political gains.  No issue shows significant gains in the conservative moral direction; however politically conservatives have taken control of many state governments, the Congress, the Presidency and the Supreme Court..

Andrew Greeley maintained that the sixties sexual revolution was greatly exaggerated.  Acceptance of extramarital affairs, and sex between teens remains low even now. What has happened is that marriage has been redefined to include serial marriage, monogamous sex before marriage, and now gay marriage. Although polygamy and pornography have made some gains now, their acceptability still remains low. The acceptability of abortion has remained essentially the same, the acceptability of suicide remains low.

Is there a good sociological theory that explains how we can be conservative and liberal at the same time? Yes, there is!    

The World Values Study & Liberal Cultural Success


The World Values Survey, which started in 1981, is the largest non-commercial, cross-national, time series investigation of human beliefs and values ever executed, currently including interviews with almost 400,000 respondents. The WVS consists of nationally representative surveys conducted in almost 100 countries which contain almost 90 percent of the world’s population, using a common questionnaire.
The Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map 2017 integrates all the changes in values that have been taking place as a result of moving from agrarian to industrial and service economics in terms of two variables and regional cultural labels. The table below and its following describe are your guides to using this map which should open in a different tab. Flip back and forth to understand all this.


Guide to the Ingel-Welzel Cultural Map (2017)
Very Secular
+2
Std.
Baltic
China
Confucian

Protestant
Europe
Secular
+1
Std.
Orthodox
Catholic
Europe
Catholic
Europe
English
Speaking
Traditional
-1
Std.
Orthodox
African Islamic
South Asia
African Islamic
South Asia
Latin America
English
Speaking
Very Tradition
-2
Std.
African
Islamic
African
Islamic
Latin
America

Industrial Economy
-2 Std.
-1 Std.
+1 Std.
+2 Std.
Service Economy
Very Survival
Survival
Expressive
Very Expressive

Graph is in terms of standard deviations with 0 being the world average, 68% of the data within 1 Std., 95% of the data within 2 Std.

1. The major correlate of Industrialization is that societies move from traditional values (bottom of graph) to secular values (top of graph).

Traditional values emphasize religion, human life, authority, and family.

Secular-rational values have the opposite preferences to the traditional values. Divorce, abortion, euthanasia and suicide are seen as relatively acceptable.

2. The major correlate of the service economy is that societies move from survival values (on the left of the map) to self-expressive values (on the right of the map).

Survival values place emphasis on economic and physical security, ethnocentrism, low levels of trust and tolerance.

Self-expression values give high priority to environmental protection, tolerance, gender equality, and democracy in economic and political life.

3. Where societies are in the map is also a function of the values derived from their historic cultures (this is an implicit third variable).

Protestant Europe is both very secular and very self-expressive. Catholic Europe is secular, and either survival or self-expressive. English speaking countries are very self-expressive but straddle the border between secular and traditional.  Latin American countries are self expressive; some are traditional and some are very traditional..

Confucian countries are very secular and survival oriented. Orthodox countries are very survival oriented, and either secular or traditional.  Right after communism they were very secular, up in the corner with the Baltics (some of which have a Protestant history which may be why they stayed there).

Interpreting American Values


American values, and value changes must be seen in the following two contexts:  we are a very self-expressive country influenced by the post-industrial economy; and we are a traditional society little influenced by the changes from agrarian to industrial society (i.e. we never become as secular as other places became).  

In comparison to secular Catholic Europe and very secular Protestant Europe the United States is traditional. The Orthodox also became very secular under communism These differences may have  originated in how these cultures adapted to the Industrial Revolution. Cultural regions of the world tend to stick together on the map. Values change very slowly over generations and even centuries.  Nations rarely change their scores more than half a standard deviation over the waves of the World Values study. As one of the WVS researchers remarked in a conference “My Russian colleague and I are both atheists, except that he is an Orthodox Atheist, and I am a Lutheran atheist.”

The United States is very similar to Protestant Europe and most English Speaking countries in being very self-expressive. Post-industrialization is a recent phenomenon; there is a strong generational effect in the survival vs. self-expressive scales. People raised during the depression who experience World II retain survival values. The sixties in Europe and the USA represent the coming of maturity of people who had no personal experience of these events. They have self-expressive values which flourish when people are economically secure and have choices (education, birth control, etc.).

Current liberal values in the Gallup Survey are not a product of industrialization. They are not the downgrading of God, family and life in the name of materialism. They are the product of the post-industrial economy where people have freedom, choice, and are tolerant of others. They can abandon tradition without denigrating it.  The gains in liberal values since 2001 may be due to the dying of the older generations who clung to traditional values because they associated them with survival.

Are the liberal values of the Gallup survey permanent changes?  If they are due to self-expressive values fostered by people growing up without concern for survival, the answer is not necessarily.

There is considerable evidence that self- expressive values retreat during economic bad times: however they bounce back with economic good times. People return to the self-expressive values of their youth anytime they feel secure. For example the recent recession had little long term effect on liberal values.

Could the decline of middle class wealth, the vanishing of the American Dream, and the rise of Trump and other xenophobic politicians in the West have something to do with the return of survival values? The answer is yes but very indirectly. This will be discussed in a future post.

Could another depression, i.e. a long term major economic collapse, bring about a return to survival values, traditional values, and wipe out liberal values. Possibly. That appears to have happened in the economic collapse that followed the breakup of the Soviet Union.  Orthodox countries were very secular but have steadily moved to traditional values. The key event in value reversal is when the economic collapse is long enough that generations begin to be raised in survival values rather than in self-expressive values.

The key lesson for Democratic liberals is that the economy is more important than promoting liberal values! Sanders was right; that is why he has such high approval ratings. All this will become clear when I summarize and review an article by Inglehart on “Trump and the Xenophobic Populist Parties.”



21 comments:

  1. This might renew our discussion of generations started by Margaret. Important to distinguish among long term trends that effect everyone, the values that come together during our childhood, adolescence and early adulthood which interpret trends and events, and one time events that may interact with the first two.

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  2. Maybe liberal values have undermined liberal politics!

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  3. Actually Inglehart in a complex way would agree as we will see in the follow-up post

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  4. And not just liberal values, but the way some liberals shove liberal values down other people's throats!

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    1. Yew freedom of choice for liberals but not for others.

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    2. Yeah, like the way former Gov. now U,S. Rep. Mark Sanford and the recent governor of Alabama, not to mention the groper-in-chief shoved their liberal values down innocent Christian throats. (Oops. Better watch that metaphor, Margaret.)

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    3. Watch that metaphor, indeed.
      A feature of the current partisan struggles is that both liberals and conservatives feel they must "impose their values" on others, or, at least, that dissenting others are obliged to agree to their claims.

      Per Jean's request for liberal examples...why make a baker bake a cake for my same-sex wedding, ditto photographers, etc., when they morally object. The Supreme Court said, Issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. They didn't say make the baker bake a cake.

      Last evening at a Fordham panel on religious liberty, the panelists, Protestant, Muslim, Catholic, all offered example both left and right about the way these cases are undermining any workable idea of religious liberty. No Mosques in Murphysboro, Catholic hospitals should perform abortions, etc. And North Carolina: stay out of the bathrooms!!

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  5. But it is equally true that conservatives are the worst enemy of traditional values.

    The real question is who will do themselves in the most

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  6. As always, looking for the gray area. Is gambling acceptable? I guess a Vegas Night for a charity is OK. Divorce? Yes, if some guy is beating the crap out of you and your kids.

    What does "acceptability" mean? That they shouldn't be criminalized? Or that they are good things that should be promoted?

    Example of liberals shoving things down people's throats?

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    1. Jean, "gray area", the much maligned " moral relativism". Or a term I haven't heard in a while, "situation ethics". I unabashedly am a practicer of situation ethics. So are most people if they are honest. Situations are the context in which we apply the ethics. Otherwise we're nothing but robots.

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    2. People tell me I am judgmental. It's true I make judgments. It's because I have a brain. I see distinctions. I see practicalities. Moral absolutes are great, but do we know what is absolutely moral? I doubt it.

      Does the state have an interest in criminalizing immoral behavior? Yes, when it disturbs the peace, prosperity, or property of the community at large.

      It's harder to trick out what should be illegal acts against individuals.

      Being the victim of adultery might do more damage to someone than being robbed of a few hundred dollars. But we don't lock up adulterers. Why? I would be happy to entertain arguments for why adultery should be criminalized.

      Gossip is never punished unless it is proved to be slander or libel. But we all know people whose incessant tale-mongering disturbs the general peace. Why are bookies and fortune tellers thrown in the can while drama queens and gossips are allowed to run free? Seems wrong to me.

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    3. Maybe we should bring back stocks and ducking stools (but not really). That's how they used to punish scolds and gossips in the old days. Funny how the scolds and gossips were always women.

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    4. Moral relativism is kind of scary. I do think some things are always going to be bad no matter what the situation - wife-beating, child sexual assault, rape, torture, murder, cruelty to animals, etc., and these things are crimes.

      Polygamy and porn - I think it's been shown that both end up having bad consequences for women and children.

      But all the rest of the stuff seems only moral/immoral in context.

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    5. Crystal, I agree about moral relativism and some things always being wrong. In talking about situation ethics I meant there's sometimes things about a given situation that make something not wrong or not as wrong. There's the classic example of lying to the Nazis to protect Jews who were hiding in the cellar. Or stealing food because otherwise your children would starve.

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    6. My students in Am Lit were assigned to look up puritan laws. Some were horrified/delighted to see that gossips had to wear a kind of bit that fitted of the head in a cage to shut people up.

      And my guess is that male adultery is as bad for women and children as porn and polygamy.

      Just sayin' ...

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    7. Yeah, lying to the Nazis. Everyone lies, even animals have been shown to lie. But when it gets creepy is when people find situational reasons to do something like torture - the ends justifying the means is a slippery slope.

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  7. This isn't about liberals shoving things down people's throats. This is about more and more people in our culture coming to believe for themselves in certain things. Conservatives may think they are only the values of liberals but it is a majority of people, not just liberals, who have sex before marriage, who believe it's ok to be LGBT, who think divorce is sometimes a good thing, etc.

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  8. divorce is "sometimes a good thing" is behind the tolerant, self-expression which defines one dimension of Americans, but we also know that in many cases divorce is "not a good thing" that people get hurt, often the children, which defines the conservative traditional values dimension of America.

    We are not truly relativists that anything goes, i.e. that marriage is just a contract that the parties can dissolve when they wish.

    We know of some cases in which divorce was a good solution and some where it was not. A friend said one day that he would never have divorced his first wife if he had known all the difficulty that it caused in raising his two sons. He told me this because he had just come from begging one of his married sons not to do the same thing with that son's wife and his grandsons.

    So in an affluent society where we have the resources to pick up the pieces we can find some perhaps many divorces not only acceptable but even desirable. However if we were in a survival oriented society we just might decide that the chances of picking up the pieces of a divorce might not be very favorable.

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  9. Even on another more controversial issue, abortion, most Americans are situational and there is a great deal of agreement about certain conditions, e.g. rape, life of the mother, etc.

    We are in fact both pro-life and pro-choice at the same time. We don't like the fact of abortion even at the same time we do not like the idea of a woman not being able to have an abortion.

    In both divorce and abortion how people sort themselves out as liberal or conservative may not have much to do with what they would do in concrete situations but more to do with how they view the world in general.

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  10. I think the thing about divorce is not that it is morally situational but that it isn't seen as a moral thingy at all anymore. It's not "bad" to get a divorce, though it may be painful and unfortunate. Relationships fail, not usually because one person is trying to injure the other. The damage done is accidental, not the purpose of the break-up. Almost everyone gets married with the hope it will last forever, but sometimes love goes away.

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  11. I find interesting the gap between what people claim to tolerate and what they actually do. The stuff at the bottom of the graph seems to be more prevalent than one would predict from the attitudes. I almost think that some more columns need to be added, where there is an inverse relationship between what is not "tolerated" and what one is actually likely to do based on how easy to get away with it. So, for example, porn is popular and lucrative even though many people claim to oppose it, while polygamy is both not tolerated and rare.

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