Does Washington Weigh on Washington?

June 7, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Will Obama’s coming out for gay marriage swing a referendum in Washington state?

Gay marriage in Washington state is only four months old, but the straights-only forces are trying to nip it in the bud and at the ballot box.  They have filed petitions to let a simple majority of voters decide who has the right to marry.  This strategy has worked in the other states, where hetero majorities have consistently voted keep the gay minority out of their marriage club.

The Times story notes that in Washington it’s not clear which side is in the majority. The article cites surveys and previous voting. But then it adds,

President Obama’s endorsement of same-sex marriage rights last month is probably the biggest new variable in a state that he won handily in 2008 and where he still had a 54 percent approval rating in a poll released last week by Strategies 360. [emphasis added]

Is Obama’s support a big variable?

Surveys taken before and after showed  Obama’s announcement of his own “evolution” having no effect on White voters. It may have had some influence among Black voters, where support for gay marriage increased by nearly 20 points – from 41% to 59%.  That shift should be interpreted cautiously since the number of African Americans in the sample was not large. Even so, African Americans are only 3.6% of the Washington state population, and their percentage among voters may be even smaller  - more reason to question the weight of the Obama variable

Also, as Nate Silver says on his FiveThirtyEight blog at the Times, that effect may dissipate over time.  

For Democrats who oppose gay marriage, the issue now becomes a classic example of “cross pressure.”* Obama’s statement may make that pressure especially felt among African Americans. As Jon Bernstein at WaPo put it,

people who are on Team Church and Team Democrat now realize that those two are in conflict and they have to choose, while before they were getting only one signal.

The beauty of the ballot measure for the ant-gay-marriage forces is that cross-pressured voters do not have to choose. They can split the issues and vote for the Democratic candidate but against gay-marriage. That option makes any possible Obama effect even more feathery and ephemeral.

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* This was a topic of an early post on this blog (here), and although that post was about Republicans, Bernstein’s “Team Church” reinforces the relevance of that post’s title (one of my favorites): “The Old Rugged Cross-Pressure.”

Blaming the Media II

June 3, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross-posted at Sociological Images

If a person thinks that the media are infiltrating his mind and controlling his thoughts and behavior, we consider him a nutjob, and we recommend professional help and serious meds. But if a person thinks that the media are infiltrating other people’s minds and affecting their behavior, we call him or her an astute social observer, one eminently qualified to give speeches or write op-eds.   

The previous post dwelt on economist Isabel Sawhill’s WaPo op-ed channeling Dan Quayle, particularly Quayle’s speech asserting that a TV sitcom was wielding a strong effect on people’s decisions – not just decisions like Pepsi vs. Coke, but decisions like whether to have a baby. 

That was Quayle, this is now.  Still, our current vice-president can sometimes resemble his counterpart of two decades ago.  Just last month, Joe Biden echoed the Quayle idea on the power of sitcoms.  On “Meet the Press,” in response to David Gregory’s question about gay marriage, Biden said that “this is evolving” and added:

And by the way, my measure, David, and I take a look at when things really begin to change, is when the social culture changes.  I think “Will and Grace” probably did more to educate the American public than almost anything anybody’s ever done so far.

“Will and Grace” ran for eight seasons, 1998 - 2006.  Its strongest years were 2001-2005, when it was the top rated show among the 18-49 crowd. If asked for systematic evidence, Biden could have pointed to GSS data on the gay marriage question.  In 1988, ten years before “Will and Grace,” when the GSS asked about gay marriage, only 12% supported it, 73% opposed it.  In 2004, six years into the W+G era, support had more than doubled, and it continued to rise in subsequent years.

(Click on a graph for a larger view.)

Because the gay marriage question was asked only in those two years, 1988 and 2004, we don’t know just when in that 16-year period, 1988 - 2004, things “really began to change.”  Fortunately, the GSS more regularly asked the respondent’s view on sexual relations between same-sex partners.  Here too, tolerance grows in the “Will and Grace” period (gray on the graph).

The trouble is that graph is misleading. To see the error, all we need do is extend our sampling back a few years  Here is the same graph starting in 1973.

The GSS shows attitudes about homosexuality starting to change in 1990.  By the time of the first episode of “Will and Grace” in 1998, the proportion seeing nothing wrong with homosexuality had already doubled.  Like Quayle’s “Murphy Brown” effect, the “Will and Grace” effect is hard to see.

The flaw in the Quayle-Biden method is not in mistaking TV for reality.  It’s in assuming that the public’s awareness is simultaneous with their own. 

But why do our vice-presidents (and many other people) give so much credit (or blame) to a popular TV show for a change in public opinion? The error is partly a simplistic post hoc logic.  “Will and Grace” gave us TV’s first gay principal character; homosexuality became more acceptable.  Murphy Brown was TV’s first happily unwed mother, and in the following years, single motherhood increased.  Cause - Effect.  Besides, we know that these shows are watched by millions of people each week. So it must be the show that is causing the change. 

It’s also possible that our vice-presidents (and many other people) may also have been projecting their own experiences onto the general public.  Maybe Murphy Brown was the first or only unwed mother that Dan Quayle really knew – or at least she was the one he knew best. It’s possible that Joe Biden wasn’t familiar with any gay men, not in the way we feel we know TV characters.  A straight guy might have some gay acquaintances or co-workers, but it’s the fictional Will Truman whose private life he could see, if only for a half hour every week.

Does TV matter?  When we think about our own decisions, we are much more likely to focus on our experiences and on the pulls and pushes of family, work, and friends.  We generally don’t attribute much causal weight to the sitcoms we watch.  Why then are we so quick to see these shows as having a profound influence on other people’s behavior, especially behavior we don’t like?  Maybe because it’s such an easy game to play.  Is there more unwed motherhood?  Must be “Murphy Brown.”  Did obesity increase in the 1990s?  “Roseanne.”  Are twentysomethings and older delaying marriage?  “Seinfeld” and “Friends.” And of course “The Simpsons,” at least Bart and Homer, who can be held responsible for a variety of social ills.

Blaming the Media I

June 2, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross-posted at Sociological Images

I’m not sure what effect prime-time sitcoms have on the general public.  Very little, I suspect, but I don’t know the literature on the topic. Still, it’s surprising how many people with a similar lack of knowledge assume that the effect is large and usually for the worse.

Isabel Sawhill, is a serious researcher at Brookings; her areas are poverty and inequality.  Now, in a Washington Post article, she, says that Dan Quayle was right about Murphy Brown. 

Some quick history for those who were out of the room – or hadn’t yet entered the room: In 1992, Dan Quayle was vice-president under Bush I.  Murphy Brown was the title character on a popular sitcom then its fourth season – a divorced TV news anchor played by Candice Bergen.  On the show, she got pregnant.  When the father, her ex, refused to remarry her, she decided to have the baby and raise it on her own. 

Dan Quayle, in his second most famous moment,* gave a campaign speech about family values that included this:

Bearing babies irresponsibly is simply wrong . . . . Failing to support children one has fathered is wrong. . . . It doesn’t help matters when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown, a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid professional woman, mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice.

Sawhill, citing her own research and that of others, argues that Quayle was right about families:  children raised by married parents are better off in many ways – health, education, income, and other measures of well-being – than are children raised by unmarried parents whether single or together.** 

But Sawhill also says that Quayle was right about the more famous part of the statement – that “Murphy Brown” was partly to blame for the rise in nonmarried parenthood.

Dan Quayle was right. Unless the media, parents and other influential leaders celebrate marriage as the best environment for raising children, the new trend — bringing up baby alone — may be irreversible.  

Sawhill, following Quayle, gives pride of place to the media.  But unfortunately, she cites no evidence on the effects of sitcoms or the media in general on unwed parenthood.  I did, however, find this graph of unwed motherhood (here). It shows the percent of all babies that were born to unmarried mothers.  I have added a vertical line to indicate the Murphy Brown moment.

(Click on the graph for a larger view.)

The “Murphy Brown” effect is, at the very least, hard to detect. The rise is general across all racial groups, including those who were probably not watching a sitcom whose characters were all white and well-off.  Also, the trend begins well before “Murphy Brown” ever saw the light of prime time.  So 1992, with Murphy Brown’s fateful decision, was no more a turning point than was 1986, for example, a year when the two top TV shows were “The Cosby Show” and “Family Ties,” sitcoms with a very low rate of single parenthood and, at least for “Cosby,” a more inclusive demographic.

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  * Quayle’s most remembered moment: when a schoolboy wrote “potato” on the blackboard, Quayle “corrected” him by getting him to add a final “e” – “potatoe.”  “There you go,” said the vice-president of the United States approvingly. (A 15-second video is here.) Is anyone claiming a sudden drop in the spelling competence of America subsequent to the vice-president’s gaffe?

** These results are not surprising.  Compared with other wealthy countries, the US does less to support poor children and families or to ease the deleterious effects on children who have been so foolhardy as to choose poor, unmarried parents.

Heroes

May 29, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

If you die in uniform, are you automatically a hero? 

On Memorial Day, the day for honoring our war dead, MSNBC newsman Chris Hayes said he had reservations about the way the word hero gets tossed around.  Some soldiers, he said, die in circumstances of  “tremendous heroism.”  But that implied that other soldiers deaths are not quite as heroic and that not all dead military personnel are heroes. 

Hayese also questioned the whole enterprise of hero-making.

I feel uncomfortable about the word hero because it seems to me that it is so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war.

As you would expect, the right wing swung into full battle vituperation, with the usual name calling – commie, collectivist, intellectual, effete – that tells us more about the fears of the name-callers than it does about Hayes.  (Politico has a summary of the reaction.)

Above all, the critics insisted that the military dead were, ipso facto, heroes.

Whether all are heroes comes down to definitions, and apparently some people’s definition of hero includes all dead soldiers.  More important is Hayes’s discomfort at the motives and the effect of all this hero-mongering: “justification for more war.” It’s sometimes called “waving the bloody shirt.” 

A way to think about this is to imagine other nations or groups doing something similar.  Imagine Al Qaeda, for example, having hero ceremonies for their own dead, saying what heroes all these dead Al Qaeda are and how wonderful and worthwhile their sacrifice.   Might we suspect that the motive behind these sentiments was to stir their followers to further acts of war? 


Imagine a Pakistani newsman saying that this waving of the bloody headscarf, despite the honorable motive of honoring the dead,  seemed to encourage even more war, more killing, and more death.  Would we think maybe he had a point?  Or would we say, “How dare he suggest that some of these fallen Al Qaeda were not heroes?” and then dismiss him as cowardly, effeminate, and disloyal?