Here’s a blog post about how everyone hates each other over politics more than before. [And so on.]
So...I suspect my beliefs on this topic are out of step with the rest of LW, and even if I limit myself to the empirical aspects (i.e. set aside my normative differences) it’s going to take a bit of effort to explain & justify my disagreements/doubts.
The first thing I notice is that the blog post talks about political polarization, as well as hatred/intolerance. Something I didn’t realize until I glanced at the political science literature on polarization is that political polarization is multidimensional, so it’s risky to talk about a change in political polarization in general.
To pin things down, we can first ask whom we’re talking about: citizens in general, or politicians specifically? Then we can ask, polarization of what: specific policy preferences, or party identification? Finally, we can ask, is the polarization we care about variance in its own right (i.e. has the policy/party preference distribution spread out?) or covariance (e.g. has geographic sorting strengthened, which would be a rise in spatial segregation by political belief?) or attitudes between partisan groups?
There are therefore at least 2 × 2 × 3 = 12 conceptually distinct things we might mean when we refer to “polarization”, and they have very likely changed to different degrees over time. There is clear evidence of decreasing inter-party cooperation in the US Congress, but this doesn’t tell us much about the US public at large.
Even if we’re clear that we’re talking about the whole US public, not just politicians, much of the evidence adduced for polarization is consistent with multiple hypotheses. People often presume a null hypothesis that the public is pulling itself apart on policy, or that different partisan groups have more negative attitudes towards each other, but an alternative hypothesis I find plausible is party sorting: an increase in the correlation between party identification and policy preferences, which can take place even if policy preferences and inter-group attitudes remain constant. (The two hypotheses are not mutually exclusive, of course.)
Now I can finally turn to the evidence linked in the blog post. It links a National Journal article which talks a lot about Silicon Valley in the here & now, but much less about change over time (a line which leaps out at me is “Silicon Valley has long been a bastion of liberalism.”, which suggests stasis and not change). The blog post also mentions Brendan Eich losing his job, which is one anecdote (and even if it weren’t anecdotal, detecting a trend over time would call for two data points). Finally, it links systematic polling data from Pew, which I like. But with only one exception, every graph on that page is either (1) unable to tell us about trends over time because it only shows us results from 2014, or (2) consistent with party sorting.
Let’s close in on the exception. (I doubt Pew minds much if I hotlink one figure.)
Because the charts represent responses to “political values questions” rather than something party-related, I don’t see how party sorting can explain the widening of the distribution over time; this appears to be a parting of actual political views. Interestingly, there’s very little polarization between 1994 & 2004; over that period it’s as if the liberal & conservative sides of the distribution merely swapped places. Basically all the action happens after 2004, but even there the effect is not so great. The tails go from capturing 11% of people to 21%, not a negligible shift but not a radical one either.
I think the timing weighs against the idea that the Internet is to blame. Pew have asked US adults whether they use the Internet, and most of the change in Internet use happened in the 1995-2004 period (14% to 63%), not the 2004-2014 period (63% to 87%). One could tweak the Internet-polarized-people hypothesis so it better fits the timing, perhaps by invoking a decade-long time lag between Internet penetration and political effects, or by substituting something like “social networking” for the “Internet”. But I would want to see an argument to back that up.
In a way this is all prologue, because you (75th) are talking specifically about “hate” between different political groups, and that might be worsening regardless of people’s substantial political views. But I think it was worth warning about the multiple constructs lurking behind “political polarization”.
I also hope I’ve made it less surprising that I believe the typical LW poster probably has an exaggerated idea of how much inter-partisan hate/intolerance has worsened. Worsened in the US, anyway, since that’s the place I think most of us are talking about. (As Good_Burning_Plastic indicates, things can be different in different locales.) Given that actual political beliefs haven’t changed much, it would be a bit surprising if the level of partisan hate had blown up. I have two more reasons why my null hypothesis is that partisan hate & intolerance haven’t exploded.
One, I think of partisan intolerance as coming from the fact that political decisions can have big impacts on people’s lives, so people feel strongly about those decisions and readily employ cognitive biases when thinking about them. Since this has always been the case, I expect partisan intolerance has been a constant fixture of political life, and the outside view leads me to predict only gradual & small changes in partisan intolerance’s intensity.
Two, US writers have been making overblown claims of bottom-up “culture war” and such for years, so I now expect to see some Americans alleging unprecedented political polarization and partisan culture war regardless of the evidence. Some recent events do catch people’s eyes and get brought up as signs that American politics is becoming unusually hostile, but when someone mentions something like the Brendan Eich incident, I have to wonder what the old baseline is supposed to be. Do the 1960s not count? What about the 1990s, when people were inspired to coin the “culture war” phrase? Or, if we want a more specific and more recent analogue, the Dixie Chicks kerfuffle?
I think the timing weighs against the idea that the Internet is to blame. Pew have asked US adults whether they use the Internet, and most of the change in Internet use happened in the 1995-2004 period (14% to 63%), not the 2004-2014 period (63% to 87%). One could tweak the Internet-polarized-people hypothesis so it better fits the timing, perhaps by invoking a decade-long time lag between Internet penetration and political effects, or by substituting something like “social networking” for the “Internet”. But I would want to see an argument to back that up.
Online shopping or wikipedia isn’t going to polarise people. I’m sure many people here were early adopters, and hung out on usenet or mailing lists, but this was not the norm. It was around 2005 when myspace turned online socialising into something mainstream, and 2008 when not being on Facebook was actively contrarian, and a few years later when even the contraians gave in.
Furthermore, in the earlier days blogs could express complex opinions. It was only with facebook and twitter that opinions boiled down to one sentence.
Furthermore, in the earlier days blogs could express complex opinions.
Blogs can still express complex opinions. The political impact of a figure like Glenn Greenwald who writes long blog posts is much higher than it was 5 years ago.
All Facebook users can self-report their political affiliation; 9% of U.S. users over 18 do. We mapped the top 500 political designations on a five-point, −2 (Very Liberal) to +2 (Very Conservative) ideological scale; those with no response or with responses such as “other” or “I don’t care” were not included. 46% of those who entered their political affiliation on their profiles had a response that could be mapped to this scale.
As with my earlier comment, the data represent the US alone, but imply that the vast majority (95%) of Facebook-using adults there don’t care enough about politics on Facebook to put a recognizable political affiliation in their profile. This doesn’t contradict the experiences of the posters here who regularly encounter fighty partisans on Facebook (and real life?), but I’m not sure they’re typical.
Perhaps a selection effect helps to explain LWers’ encounters with Intense Facebook Politics: LWers may be unrepresentatively likely to run into (or even be) Facebook partisans. From the survey, we’re young (median age 26 — hence more likely to spend lots of time on Facebook than middle-aged technophobes), 37% of us are students, and over a quarter of us have consistently strong left-wing views on stereotypical contentious political topics (with a further 6% who simply rate themselves 5⁄5 on their interest in politics).
(The “over a quarter” comes from taking the 8 rate-this-from-1-to-5 items on “Abortion”, “Immigration” and so on, and summing each person’s ratings, reverse scoring the “Human Biodiversity” item because that’s the only stereotypical right-wing item. 272 people left at least one item unrated, but the remaining 1157 people had total scores between 0 and 40, higher scores being more left-wing. 402 people scored 32 or higher, which means 28% of all respondents had an average rating of 4+. Not one respondent gave similarly right-wing responses; the lowest score was 9. This is perhaps unsurprising in light of the political self-identification data.)
When I framed it to myself as “that’s a doubling of the tails!” it did sound impressive, but I remembered how easy it is to make modest changes in a distribution’s mean and/or variance sound extreme by focusing attention on the tails, where such changes have an outsized impact.
My reaction was to roughly translate that tail doubling into the corresponding change in the whole distribution’s standard deviation, and I got about 30%. Expressed like that, the change was clearly substantial, but it didn’t strike me as radical. Opinions may differ!
(For this reply, I thought I’d try estimating a standard deviation for each distribution in a more systematic way. From Pew’s appendix I worked out the mid-interval value for each of the 5 ideological-consistency bins, then calculated the standard deviations using those mid-interval bin values. This is still inexact, but hopefully less so than my original back-of-the-envelope guesstimate. For 1994 I got 3.90; for 2004, 3.91; and for 2014, 4.80. That gives a 23% increase in standard deviation from 2004 to 2014.)
Upvoted for question dissolution and thorough analysis; one thing:
A binary Internet-use question seems like a bad metric; people were primarily consumers in the past, now everyone is producing content, or actively sharing the content that others have produced. Furthermore, a lot of people on this thread seem to be talking about Twitter and Facebook; even if everyone’s using the word Internet, clearly they mean social media (blogs included), and that’s what we should be talking about anyway. We wouldn’t expect considerably more polarization from people switching their consumption habits from TV and newspaper to big Internet news sites; that’s just a change of medium. (That is, unless a bunch of people who weren’t getting news from anywhere started using the Internet during that time.) It’s often through extended social interaction that we get various forms of polarization, and social media offers more opportunities for that. And indeed, Pew’s social media use data lines up well with the hypothesis that growth of social media use positively correlates with polarization of policy preferences in the US.
But I would want to see an argument to back that up.
Seems like I’ve tripped this clause but I don’t really get it. Did that count as the sort of argument you were looking for?
Also, I don’t have a strong position either way on this, just pointing out what I perceived as a weakness in what seems like an otherwise good argument.
My guess is that more and more of us are living in Ellen Ullman’s”Museum of Me”:
It is in this sense that the Internet ideal represents the very opposite of what democracy is, democracy being a method for resolving differences in a relatively orderly manner, through the mediation of unavoidable civic associations. Yet there can be no notion of resolving differences in a world where each person is entitled to get exactly what he or she wants. Where all needs and desires are equally valid, equally powerful, I’ll get mine, you get yours, no need for compromise or discussion, I don’t have to tolerate you, you don’t have to tolerate me, no need for messy debate or the whole rigmarole of government with all its creaky, bothersome structures. No need for any of those. Because now that we have the world wide web, the problem of the pursuit of happiness has been solved. We each click for our individual joys and disputes may arise only if something doesn’t get delivered on time.
Combine that concept with one from Alexis de Tocqueville, 167 year earlier:
Inside America, the majority has staked out a formidable fence around thought. Inside those limits a writer is free but woe betide him if he dares to stray beyond them. Not that the need fear an auto-da-fé but he is the victim of all kinds of unpleasantness and everyday persecutions. A political career is closed to him for he has offended the only power with the capacity to give him an opening. He is denied everything, including renown. Before publishing his views, he thought he had supporters; it seems he has lost them once he has declared himself publicly; for his detractors speak out loudly and those who think as he does, but without his courage, keep silent and slink away. He gives in and finally bends beneath the effort of each passing day, withdrawing into silence as if he felt ashamed at having spoken the truth.
On the internet, he need not withdraw into silence. He needs merely to find where everyone else who stated his particular opinion has withdrawn to. Further and further towards the edges of Pew’s graph, most likely.
So...I suspect my beliefs on this topic are out of step with the rest of LW, and even if I limit myself to the empirical aspects (i.e. set aside my normative differences) it’s going to take a bit of effort to explain & justify my disagreements/doubts.
The first thing I notice is that the blog post talks about political polarization, as well as hatred/intolerance. Something I didn’t realize until I glanced at the political science literature on polarization is that political polarization is multidimensional, so it’s risky to talk about a change in political polarization in general.
To pin things down, we can first ask whom we’re talking about: citizens in general, or politicians specifically? Then we can ask, polarization of what: specific policy preferences, or party identification? Finally, we can ask, is the polarization we care about variance in its own right (i.e. has the policy/party preference distribution spread out?) or covariance (e.g. has geographic sorting strengthened, which would be a rise in spatial segregation by political belief?) or attitudes between partisan groups?
There are therefore at least 2 × 2 × 3 = 12 conceptually distinct things we might mean when we refer to “polarization”, and they have very likely changed to different degrees over time. There is clear evidence of decreasing inter-party cooperation in the US Congress, but this doesn’t tell us much about the US public at large.
Even if we’re clear that we’re talking about the whole US public, not just politicians, much of the evidence adduced for polarization is consistent with multiple hypotheses. People often presume a null hypothesis that the public is pulling itself apart on policy, or that different partisan groups have more negative attitudes towards each other, but an alternative hypothesis I find plausible is party sorting: an increase in the correlation between party identification and policy preferences, which can take place even if policy preferences and inter-group attitudes remain constant. (The two hypotheses are not mutually exclusive, of course.)
Now I can finally turn to the evidence linked in the blog post. It links a National Journal article which talks a lot about Silicon Valley in the here & now, but much less about change over time (a line which leaps out at me is “Silicon Valley has long been a bastion of liberalism.”, which suggests stasis and not change). The blog post also mentions Brendan Eich losing his job, which is one anecdote (and even if it weren’t anecdotal, detecting a trend over time would call for two data points). Finally, it links systematic polling data from Pew, which I like. But with only one exception, every graph on that page is either (1) unable to tell us about trends over time because it only shows us results from 2014, or (2) consistent with party sorting.
Let’s close in on the exception. (I doubt Pew minds much if I hotlink one figure.)
Because the charts represent responses to “political values questions” rather than something party-related, I don’t see how party sorting can explain the widening of the distribution over time; this appears to be a parting of actual political views. Interestingly, there’s very little polarization between 1994 & 2004; over that period it’s as if the liberal & conservative sides of the distribution merely swapped places. Basically all the action happens after 2004, but even there the effect is not so great. The tails go from capturing 11% of people to 21%, not a negligible shift but not a radical one either.
I think the timing weighs against the idea that the Internet is to blame. Pew have asked US adults whether they use the Internet, and most of the change in Internet use happened in the 1995-2004 period (14% to 63%), not the 2004-2014 period (63% to 87%). One could tweak the Internet-polarized-people hypothesis so it better fits the timing, perhaps by invoking a decade-long time lag between Internet penetration and political effects, or by substituting something like “social networking” for the “Internet”. But I would want to see an argument to back that up.
In a way this is all prologue, because you (75th) are talking specifically about “hate” between different political groups, and that might be worsening regardless of people’s substantial political views. But I think it was worth warning about the multiple constructs lurking behind “political polarization”.
I also hope I’ve made it less surprising that I believe the typical LW poster probably has an exaggerated idea of how much inter-partisan hate/intolerance has worsened. Worsened in the US, anyway, since that’s the place I think most of us are talking about. (As Good_Burning_Plastic indicates, things can be different in different locales.) Given that actual political beliefs haven’t changed much, it would be a bit surprising if the level of partisan hate had blown up. I have two more reasons why my null hypothesis is that partisan hate & intolerance haven’t exploded.
One, I think of partisan intolerance as coming from the fact that political decisions can have big impacts on people’s lives, so people feel strongly about those decisions and readily employ cognitive biases when thinking about them. Since this has always been the case, I expect partisan intolerance has been a constant fixture of political life, and the outside view leads me to predict only gradual & small changes in partisan intolerance’s intensity.
Two, US writers have been making overblown claims of bottom-up “culture war” and such for years, so I now expect to see some Americans alleging unprecedented political polarization and partisan culture war regardless of the evidence. Some recent events do catch people’s eyes and get brought up as signs that American politics is becoming unusually hostile, but when someone mentions something like the Brendan Eich incident, I have to wonder what the old baseline is supposed to be. Do the 1960s not count? What about the 1990s, when people were inspired to coin the “culture war” phrase? Or, if we want a more specific and more recent analogue, the Dixie Chicks kerfuffle?
Online shopping or wikipedia isn’t going to polarise people. I’m sure many people here were early adopters, and hung out on usenet or mailing lists, but this was not the norm. It was around 2005 when myspace turned online socialising into something mainstream, and 2008 when not being on Facebook was actively contrarian, and a few years later when even the contraians gave in.
Furthermore, in the earlier days blogs could express complex opinions. It was only with facebook and twitter that opinions boiled down to one sentence.
Blogs can still express complex opinions. The political impact of a figure like Glenn Greenwald who writes long blog posts is much higher than it was 5 years ago.
True, its possible the political influence of blogs has increased, but as a percentage of online politics blogs have massivly decreased
That has some plausibility. Contrarian that I am, however, I have some more opposing evidence in my pocket.
In one of life’s little coincidences, a potentially germane Science paper appeared on the same day as your comment. I’m less interested here in the paper itself (though it has some relevance) than in a snippet from its supplementary materials:
As with my earlier comment, the data represent the US alone, but imply that the vast majority (95%) of Facebook-using adults there don’t care enough about politics on Facebook to put a recognizable political affiliation in their profile. This doesn’t contradict the experiences of the posters here who regularly encounter fighty partisans on Facebook (and real life?), but I’m not sure they’re typical.
Perhaps a selection effect helps to explain LWers’ encounters with Intense Facebook Politics: LWers may be unrepresentatively likely to run into (or even be) Facebook partisans. From the survey, we’re young (median age 26 — hence more likely to spend lots of time on Facebook than middle-aged technophobes), 37% of us are students, and over a quarter of us have consistently strong left-wing views on stereotypical contentious political topics (with a further 6% who simply rate themselves 5⁄5 on their interest in politics).
(The “over a quarter” comes from taking the 8 rate-this-from-1-to-5 items on “Abortion”, “Immigration” and so on, and summing each person’s ratings, reverse scoring the “Human Biodiversity” item because that’s the only stereotypical right-wing item. 272 people left at least one item unrated, but the remaining 1157 people had total scores between 0 and 40, higher scores being more left-wing. 402 people scored 32 or higher, which means 28% of all respondents had an average rating of 4+. Not one respondent gave similarly right-wing responses; the lowest score was 9. This is perhaps unsurprising in light of the political self-identification data.)
Seems pretty radical to me (assuming it’s real and not a measurement artefact, of course).
When I framed it to myself as “that’s a doubling of the tails!” it did sound impressive, but I remembered how easy it is to make modest changes in a distribution’s mean and/or variance sound extreme by focusing attention on the tails, where such changes have an outsized impact.
My reaction was to roughly translate that tail doubling into the corresponding change in the whole distribution’s standard deviation, and I got about 30%. Expressed like that, the change was clearly substantial, but it didn’t strike me as radical. Opinions may differ!
(For this reply, I thought I’d try estimating a standard deviation for each distribution in a more systematic way. From Pew’s appendix I worked out the mid-interval value for each of the 5 ideological-consistency bins, then calculated the standard deviations using those mid-interval bin values. This is still inexact, but hopefully less so than my original back-of-the-envelope guesstimate. For 1994 I got 3.90; for 2004, 3.91; and for 2014, 4.80. That gives a 23% increase in standard deviation from 2004 to 2014.)
ETA: Just noticed skeptical_lurker’s comment.
Upvoted for question dissolution and thorough analysis; one thing: A binary Internet-use question seems like a bad metric; people were primarily consumers in the past, now everyone is producing content, or actively sharing the content that others have produced. Furthermore, a lot of people on this thread seem to be talking about Twitter and Facebook; even if everyone’s using the word Internet, clearly they mean social media (blogs included), and that’s what we should be talking about anyway. We wouldn’t expect considerably more polarization from people switching their consumption habits from TV and newspaper to big Internet news sites; that’s just a change of medium. (That is, unless a bunch of people who weren’t getting news from anywhere started using the Internet during that time.) It’s often through extended social interaction that we get various forms of polarization, and social media offers more opportunities for that. And indeed, Pew’s social media use data lines up well with the hypothesis that growth of social media use positively correlates with polarization of policy preferences in the US.
Seems like I’ve tripped this clause but I don’t really get it. Did that count as the sort of argument you were looking for?
Also, I don’t have a strong position either way on this, just pointing out what I perceived as a weakness in what seems like an otherwise good argument.
My guess is that more and more of us are living in Ellen Ullman’s”Museum of Me”:
Combine that concept with one from Alexis de Tocqueville, 167 year earlier:
On the internet, he need not withdraw into silence. He needs merely to find where everyone else who stated his particular opinion has withdrawn to. Further and further towards the edges of Pew’s graph, most likely.