Saturday, August 05, 2006

The "Culture Wars" Survey

Mark Twain said there were three kinds of untruths: lies, damn lies and statistics.

The NY Times covers a recent survey on the "culture wars" by the Pew Research Center in Culture Wars Seen Within Political Parties.

“Despite talk of ‘culture wars’ and the high visibility of activist groups on both sides of the cultural divide, there has been no polarization of the public into liberal and conservative camps.”

That was the conclusion that researchers from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life drew from the latest in their periodic surveys of public opinion, conducted from July 6 to July 19 and released Thursday.

Americans, the researchers wrote, “are conservative in opposing gay marriage and gay adoption, liberal in favoring embryonic stem cell research, and a little of both on abortion.”

Americans, according to this survey, based on telephone interviews with a representative national sample of 2,003 adults, display what the cultural warriors might find as a distressing inconsistency over these issues, and yet a remarkable consistency over time.

Opposition to same-sex marriage, for example, appears to have changed little over recent years: 56 percent of Americans are against it, 35 percent for it.

Religion appears to be the big factor here: 78 percent of white, evangelical Protestants and 74 percent of African-American Protestants are opposed to same-sex marriage. So are 58 percent of white, non-Hispanic Catholics. Mainline Protestants are almost split evenly. Only those identified by the researchers as “secular” are solidly in favor, by 63 percent to 27 percent.

Opinions on abortion are even more unchanging. Asked which option came closest to their own view, 31 percent of respondents said abortion should be “generally available”; 20 percent said “available but under stricter limits than it is now”; 35 percent said “against the law except in cases of rape, incest and to save the woman’s life”; and 11 percent said “not be permitted at all.”

These figures are a bit more conservative than those from 1996, but most of the differences fell in the survey’s margin of sampling error — plus or minus four percentage points on some questions, including those on abortion, and three points on others, like the one on same-sex marriage.

There are signs, however, of changing convictions, more in the case of homosexuality than in abortion; but the change regarding homosexuality is in a liberal direction, while the more modest change regarding abortion is in a conservative direction.

While continuing to oppose same-sex marriage, Americans, by 54 percent to 42 percent, have come to support civil unions that would provide gay and lesbian couples many of the same rights as married couples. Likewise, Americans are less likely to think that sexual orientation can be changed than they were a few years ago, and adults under 30 are much more supportive of same-sex marriage than are their elders.

This support comes from mainline Protestants, Catholics and the non-religious, with white evangelicals and Protestants constituting the persistent opposition.

By contrast, support for keeping abortion generally available is highest among men and women ages 50 to 64 — the survey found no gender gap on this issue — and goes steadily lower as one moves down the age scale.

More interesting perhaps than these views on the issues themselves are the public’s preferences on how the nation should address them. For example, respondents consistently favored resolving these hot-button questions at the national level rather than the state one, although the results were virtually a dead heat in the case of same-sex marriage.

Supporters and opponents of same-sex marriage showed strong caution regarding their causes in the survey. Over 40 percent of those opposing same-sex marriage said that amending the Constitution was a bad way to do it. A similar percentage of supporters of same-sex marriage questioned the wisdom of pushing hard for its legalization, given the risk of an anti-gay backlash.

Although abortion remained, in the researchers’ judgment, “the most divisive social concern of the day,” fully two-thirds of those surveyed, rather than seeing “no room for compromise,” said that “the country needs to find a middle ground on abortion laws.”

The question about finding a middle ground versus refusing compromise was a new one, the Pew researchers said. Scott Keeter, director of survey research for Pew, compared it with a 1997 question that asked people whether they thought their political party should compromise on abortion in order to reach some agreement, or stick to its position even if that blocked legislative progress. Over 60 percent chose “stick to its position.”

While emphasizing that the two questions were not strictly comparable, Mr. Keeter said that the results “would suggest that the desire for compromise has grown since.”

It is easy to prefer “a middle ground,” of course, as long as it remains conveniently undefined. Still, this desire for compromise stretches across the political, ideological and religious spectrum, attracting majorities of over 60 percent among Democrats, Republicans and independents, among liberals, conservatives and moderates, and among evangelicals as well as Catholics and mainline Protestants.

Debate on the legal right to abortion, as well as its underlying morality, is not about to ease, but it will almost certainly be increasingly staked out in terms of some “middle ground.” Even those opposed in principle to any compromise will take comfort in the idea that by remaining resolute, they can shift the “middle” in one direction or in another.

On abortion, the researchers found significant differences between conservative Republicans, who have determined the party’s public stance, and moderate and liberal Republicans, whose views have been eclipsed. On same-sex marriage, the conservatives were overwhelmingly opposed in the survey; the liberals and moderates were similarly opposed, but not so strongly.

Among Democrats, however, the gaps on these issues between liberals, who have established the party’s profile, and the moderates and conservatives in the shadows are yawning. Sixty percent of liberal Democrats believed that abortion should be generally available, for instance, versus 25 percent of moderates and conservatives. Two-thirds of liberal Democrats favored same-sex marriage, while 59 percent of conservative and moderate Democrats opposed it.

The real import of these splits within the parties — and the problems they pose for Democrats — becomes apparent only when one seeks out the weight of the differing groups within each party.

Moderate and liberal Republicans constitute only 36 percent of the Republicans, according to Pew’s findings, compared with the 62 percent considered conservative. The ideologically dominant group, in other words, is also numerically dominant.

For Democrats, it is quite different: 67 percent fall in the moderate-conservative category, while 31 percent qualify as liberals. The ideologically dominant group — certainly on abortion, less so on same-sex marriage — is the numerical minority.

In the end, opinion polls give only a partial view of culture wars, just as body counts and troop levels give only a partial view of guerrilla wars. One can be entranced by the figures and distracted from the dynamics. The latest Pew survey, by confirming the disjunction between the public and activist elites, provides at least a few insights into the dynamics.