Poll Puzzle

July 25, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

People responding to opinion surveys don’t have to be consistent or logical.  That’s why using only a few questions to gauge public preferences on policy is a risky business.  Here are results on three questions from a recent NBC/WSJ poll.

(Click on the graphic for a larger and clearer view.)

Obama’s approval rating is nearly four times greater than that of Congress. Yet by ten percentage points (48% - 38%) people prefer that Congress “take the lead in setting policy for the country.” 

This paradoxical result is not a one-off.  Approval of the president almost always greater than approval of Congress.  Since January 2005, approval of Congress has never been above 40% and is often below 20%.  Yet since at least 1994, the earliest year shown in the survey, only once has the president topped Congress on the “take the lead” question.  That one time was January 2002, only four months after the attacks on the Trade Towers and Pentagon.

Political scientists must have an explanation for this.  I just don’t know what it is.

Symbolic Events and Public Opinion

July 24, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

A single event can take on great symbolic importance and change people’s perceptions of reality, especially when the media devote nearly constant attention to that event.*  The big media story of the killing of Trayvon Martin and the trial of George Zimmerman probably does not change the objective economic, social, and political circumstances of Blacks and Whites in the US.  But it changed people’s perceptions of race relations.

A recent NBC/WSJ poll shows that between November of 2011 and July 2013, both Whites and Blacks became more pessimistic about race relations.

(Click on a graph for a larger view.)

Since 1994, Americans had become increasingly sanguine about race relations.  The Obama victory in 2008 gave an added boost to that trend.  In the month of Obama’s first inauguration, nearly two-thirds of Blacks and four-fifths of Whites saw race relations as Good or Very Good.** But now, at least for the moment, the percentages in the most recent poll are very close to what they were nearly 20 years ago. 

The change was predictable, given the obsessive media coverage of the case and the dominant reactions to it.  On one side, the story was that White people were shooting innocent Black people and getting away with it.  The opposing story was that even harmless looking Blacks might unleash potentially fatal assaults on Whites who are merely trying to protect their communities.  In both versions, members of one race are out to kill members of the other – not a happy picture of relations between the races.

My guess is that Zimmerman/Martin effect will have a short life.*** In a few months, we will ascend from the depths of pessimism. Consider that after the verdict in Florida there were no major riots, no burning of neighborhoods to leave permanent scars – just rallies that were for the most part peaceful outcries of anger and anguish.  I also doubt that we will see the optimism of 2009 for a long while, especially if employment remains at its current dismal levels. 

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* Journalist Martin Schram called the coverage, “a roadblock . . . stretched across all lanes of democracy’s information highway.  It blocked the far right lane, the center lane, and the far left lane. Which is to say, Fox News, CNN and MSNBC.”

** The percentages responding Very Good are so small – usually in single digits for both Whites and Blacks – that I combined the two categories.  For a .pdf with the original survey data, go here.

*** Language peeve. The term short-lived does not mean that something was lived for a short time. It means that it had a short life. Therefore, a trend is “short-lived,” pronounced with a long “i” just as someone with a short knife is short-knived.

The Passive-Aggressive Voice

July 21, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

I disagree with those who reject all use of the passive voice as though it were a Voldemort-like construction that must not be uttered.  The problem with the passive voice is not that it’s wrong or “weak,” but that it can create ambiguity.

Ann Coulter, in a column a few days ago wrote the following paragraph:

Perhaps, someday, blacks will win the right to be treated like volitional human beings. But not yet.

It doesn’t mean what you probably think it means – and what many on the left thought it meant.  Coulter was writing about The New York Times’s treatment twenty-eight years ago of the shooting of an unarmed Black teenager, Edmund Perry, by a White undercover cop.  The teenager was a graduate of Exeter and was to enter Stanford in the fall.  The Times at first framed the story as a bright future snuffed out.*

But Perry was not an innocent victim.  In fact, he was trying to mug the cop.  When that fact became known, the Times changed its theme.  Here is Coulter’s sentence just before the money paragraph quoted above.

When it turned out Perry had mugged the cop, it was no one's fault, but a problem of “violence,” “confusion” and “two worlds” colliding.

Then comes that sentence about winning the right to be treated like volitional human beings.  But whose treatment of Blacks are we talking about? Many readers would assume Coulter meant society or White people in general and that she was saying that until Blacks win that right, Whites may legitimately treat them as something other than human beings.

But in fact, Coulter is talking about the treatment of Blacks by the liberal media.  It is they, says Coulter, who are denying volition to Blacks. The liberal media treat Blacks as though their behavior were entirely caused by external circumstances rather than by their own decisions.  Here is how the sentence should have read:

Someday, Blacks will win the right to have the liberal media treat them as volitional human beings.

The passive-voice construction allows her to omit that crucial element.

Did Coulter deliberately create this ambiguity?  We don’t know, and I assume that she would deny it.  But she is a professional writer, and she does delight in baiting liberals.  So it would not at all surprise me if in writing this sentence and in setting it apart as an entire paragraph, she was already, with a satisfied smirk, imagining how liberals would react.

Stick it to those hated liberals by writing an agent-less “to be treated” – the passive-aggressive voice.

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* Coulter says, “the media rushed out with a story about Officer Lee Van Houten being a trigger-happy, racist cop.” But except for one sentence from The Village Voice (“Perry was "just too black for his own good," ) she gives no quotes from the Times or anywhere else to illustrate her view.

Need To – The Non-imperative Imperative

July 18, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross-posted at Sociological Images

Dispatcher: Which entrance is that that he’s heading towards? Zimmerman: The back entrance... fucking punks. Dispatcher: Are you following him? Zimmerman: Yeah. Dispatcher: Okay, don’t do that. Zimmerman: Okay

If you followed the Zimmerman/Martin killing closely, you probably recognized that the dispatcher did not say, “Don’t do that.”   The correct transcript is:

Dispatcher: Okay, we don’t need you to do that.

Nowadays, we don’t tell people what to do and what not to do. We don’t tell them what they should or should not do or what they ought or ought not to do.  Instead, we talk about needs – our needs and their needs.  “Clean up your room” has become “I need you to clean up your room.”

The age of “there are no shoulds,” the age of needs, began in the 1970s and accelerated until very recently. Here are Google n-grams for the ratio of “need to” to “should” and “ought to.”

(Click on a graph for a larger view.)

  It was Benjamin Schmidt’s Atlantic post (here) about “Mad Men” that alerted me to this ought/need change. Nowadays, we don’t say, “The writers on ‘Mad Men’ ought to watch out for anachronistic language.” We say that they “need to” watch out for it.  Schmidt created a chart showing the relative use of “ought to” and “need to” in selected movies from 1960 to 2011. 

All the films and TV shows in the chart are set in the 1960s.  It’s easy to see which ones were actually written in the 60s. They are more likely to use “ought.” The scripts written in the 21st century use “need.” The writers are projecting their own speech style back onto 1960s characters. The “Mad Men” writers might just as well have had the 1960s Don Draper say, “Peggy needs to shoot Starbucks an e-mail about the Frappuccino thing.” (Schmidt’s article has several other examples of “Mad Men” anachronisms you probably wouldn’t have noticed, e.g. “feel good about.”)

Real imperatives (“Stop that right now”) claim moral authority. So do ought and should. But need is not about general principles of right and wrong.  In the language of need, the speaker claims no moral authority over the person being spoken to. It’s up to the listener to weigh his own needs against those of the speaker and then make his own decision.   

No wonder Zimmerman felt free to ignore the implications of the dispatcher’s statement.  It was not a command (“Don’t do that”), it did not assert authority or the rightness of an action (“You should not do that”).  It did not even state what the police department needed or wanted.  It merely said that Zimmerman’s pursuit of Martin was not necessary.  Not wrong, not ill-advised, just unnecessary.

If the dispatcher had spoken in the language of the 1960s and told Zimmerman that he should not pursue Martin,* would Trayvon Martin be alive?  We cannot possibly know. But it’s reasonable to think it would have increased that probability.

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* Philip Cohen tells me that a TV commentator said that dispatchers have a protocol of not giving direct orders.  If such an instruction led to a bad outcome, the department might be held accountable.If so, this means that dispatchers themselves recognize need to as the non-imperative.