Electoral representation by demographic group

I’m told that one point of our electoral system is to ensure representation of small states. That’s why small states get two senators even if they have tiny populations, and why each state gets at least three electors in the electoral college (equal to the size of their Congressional delegation). You could make a case for finding ways to make sure small groups are represented, even over-represented, because otherwise they would be ignored. So you discount California voters to make sure Wyoming voters get to be part of the process.

Regardless of the history, which suggests the electoral college was created to protect the interests of slave owners, it’s now the case that Whites have more power in the electoral college, because they dominate the small states. As Lara Merling and Dean Baker show, Blacks have 5% less representation, Latinos have 9% less, and Asian Americans have 7% less representation than Whites.

So it is unfair in its results by the contemporary race/ethnic distribution, but that’s not a fixed quality of the system (it’s merely very durable). Underlying the premise, though, is the idea that the identities to be represented are geographic in nature. There are some issues that have geographic boundaries, like land use or climate-related questions, but the point of an analysis like Merling and Baker’s — like much of Civil Rights law — is that identities also adhere in demographic groups, by gender, race/ethnicity, and age. So the geographic system creates inequities according the demographic system. I don’t see why we should prioritize the geographic in our electoral system, now that geography is so much less of a defining feature in our communication systems and popular culture.

What if we redid the electoral system by the demographic categories of gender, race/ethnicity and age, and then let geographic groups complain if they end up underrepresented, instead of the other way around? Before you write to the governor (again) and demand that I be fired: This does not even rise to the level of a suggestion, it’s literally just a thought.

Here’s how it would look, if we divided 435 seats across 40 demographic identity states, using data from the 2015 American Community from IPUMS.org*:

Compared with the 114 Congress (the one finishing now), this one is more diverse, with 224 instead of 108 women, 56 versus 38 Latinos, 24 versus 13 Asian/Pacific Islanders, and 8 versus 2 American Indians. Only Blacks fare a little worse, dropping form 47 to 44. This also gives us a great improvement in age diversity, as the current average age in the House is 57 and this distribution implies an average age of something like 47.

For comparison, here is the Electoral College we would get under this system, which simply adds two electors to each of these House of Representatives districts, representing their Senate delegations:

Now instead of fighting over New Hampshire or Wyoming, presidential candidates would campaign for swing-groups such as middle-aged American Indians, or young Latinos.

This system would also have a built in version of term limits feature, as people who aged out of their districts presumably would have to run in the next age group up. People who changed gender or race/ethnic identity could also switch districts.

Someone could take some voter or opinion data and figure out how our elections would turn out with this (if someone already has done this, please add it in the comments).

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* Because they rounded to zero, I added one House seat to old American Indian men and women, and took one away from middle-aged White women, the largest group. Note also that we might have to redistrict this when the race categories change, as they are expected to in 2020, to add Middle Eastern / North Africans (MENAs).

Don’t flatter yourself, Trump’s America

So Hillary Clinton apparently said,

My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere.

What’s the big deal? Anyone who doesn’t occasionally dream of open borders either hasn’t dreamed much or doesn’t have very high ambitions for the unity of the human race. (She says now it was really just about energy policy, but come on.)

Of course, in the context of speaking to a bunch of .01% bankers, that’s not really the point: it’s a signal that she leans in their direction on “free” trade and movement of labor, so it’s probably not quite the unicorn-style dream I have in mind (I already criticized her currently-expressed vision on this, which reflects her adaptation to the political moment, and might last the rest of her career.)

Anyway, my point is about Trump’s reaction (video).

…frankly when you’re working for Hillary, she wants to let people just pour in. You could have 650 million people pour in and we do nothing about it. Think of it, that’s what could happen. You triple the size of our country in one week.

Two points. First is this is idiotic. I can only guess that whoever gave him that number was adding together the entire populations of North and South America, minus the U.S., which is actually almost exactly 650 million. So, in a week, if allowed, every single person in our hemisphere would move into the US.

Now, those of us in the dream-of-open-borders community do dream of these things. I wrote this once, after imagining combining the populations of the US and Central American countries, as well as Israel and with occupied territories:

This simplistic analysis yields a straightforward hypothesis: violence and military force at national borders rises as the income disparity across the border increases. … The demographic solution is obvious: open the borders, release the pressure, and devote resources to improving quality of life and social harmony instead of enforcing inequality. You’re welcome!

I wasn’t really talking about people moving, but rather about borders moving, or being taken down. How many people would actually move is an interesting question, one which I hope will be important one day.

For perspective, you might compare Trump’s fear-mongering in scale to the largest ever migration of people, the movement into the cities of China, during which something like 340 million people moved in about 20 years. It wasn’t pretty! It also wasn’t an “open borders” situation, as most of them weren’t really allowed to move, resulting in a bad situation of second-class citizenship for many of the migrants and their children. Thankfully, it also didn’t take place in a week — although just the annual new year travel in China (which largely results from the separations their great migration has caused) generates some of the most spectacular traffic images ever:

Second, it’s insulting. Like Trump’s description of African Americans living in “hell,” where they have nothing to lose, “your schools are no good, you have no jobs,” etc.:

Many people have made the point that Trump’s sympathy regarding Black hardship is drowned out by his grotesque stereotyping and dehumanizing dismissal. I haven’t heard the same said about his 650-million-migrants claim, but it’s really the same thing.

I’m sure a lot of people would move to the US if the borders were opened. But I bet at least a few people somewhere between Canada and Chile would find a reason to stay in their homes. And not just because that would keep them away from us.

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Related: Must-know demographic facts (it couldn’t hurt!)

Don’t think economic anxiety is rational and racial anxiety is not

Photo by Patrick Feller (and check out his essay about it: https://flic.kr/p/6voQ7g)

Here’s a very quick thought, over which I’m happy to hear objections.

You know how people say “inner city” or “urban” or “low-income” instead of Black because they don’t want to seem racist by mentioning race? This debate over whether Trump supporters are motivated by economic anxiety or racism reminds me of that.*

The debate seems to divide class leftists from race leftists. Some class leftists want to emphasize the economic anxieties of racist Whites (with which they are sympathetic), and the race leftists want to emphasize the racism of economically anxious Whites (which they want to expose). In the regular liberal media, at the same time, there is the common tendency to treat class anxiety as rational and material while any racial motivations are by definition irrational and emotional (which makes “I don’t see race” a moral high ground.)

But Whites losing their race privilege is a real, material concern. And losing class privilege motivates ugly hatred and animosity too. What if “China” threatens your jobs, and your emotional response is to support a dictator who opposes imports and immigration (which will do nothing for you economically)? What if a Black president and anti-discrimination laws threaten your privileged access to relatively high status social recognition, and your rational response is to support school segregation and oppose affirmative action (which might actually protect your privileged status)?

Of course, defense of both class or race privilege can be emotional and ugly and vitriolic, and they always are coming from the mouths of Trump supporters. And you could reasonably argue that all people would be better off embracing a more open and inclusive politics even if it cost them some ill-gotten gain. But those defenses can also be rational and material, and the privileges they protect may need to be forcefully degraded rather than just reasoned away.

Why should Trump supporters motivated by economic anxiety be any more deserving of respect than those motivated by racial anxiety? That’s the politics of our time; don’t treat it as fixed or essential.

Now, you wouldn’t excuse rich bankers supporting a dictator because they had anxiety about their economic position, even though they might really have a lot of economic anxiety. So Why would you excuse White working-class people from supporting a dictator because of their economic anxieties? Is it because they’re actually poor or economically insecure? Well, they’re poorer and more economically insecure than the people having this conversation, but not compared with actual poor people in this country or — shudder — in most of the world that disgusts them.

It is an empirical question whether the anxieties around race are more or less rational than the anxieties around economics for White working-class Americans. Losing your race privilege might mean getting worse service from schools and emergency services and police, and not seeing your people in high status and visible cultural positions, and not hearing your music all the time, and so on and on. These are all the things minorities want. Of course I don’t feel sorry for people losing them like I do for people who never had them, but the issues are the same. You can’t say minorities are rational for demanding these things and then say Whites are irrational for trying to hold onto them. You could (and should) argue it’s not a zero-sum game, of course, but that’s an empirical question and a matter to be worked out through politics and cultural change.

People who support Trump definitely are anxious about losing things of value as the world changes, and their response is deplorable and must be opposed — regardless of the relative mix of economic and racial components in their minds.

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* Not doing a full lit review, but to get a sense of it, read and follow the links in pieces by Dylan Matthews, Mike Konczal, Derek Thompson, or Michael Tesler, Brian Beutler, and there must be some other White men I’m missing. Feel free to recommend readings you prefer in the comments.

Not-too-racist Whites of America: Do you want to be that person?

Everyone is at least a little racist. But hardly any Whites really actively want to hate Blacks and people from other racial-ethnic minority groups. And I bet that includes a lot of people who are thinking of voting for Trump. So this is for people who don’t want to be haters, or even seen as haters.

Think about it this way: Voting is pretty symbolic. Your individual vote is really not going to make the difference. But it says something about who you are, to yourself at least, and to anyone else who knows.

So look at these polling results for African Americans in five key states. Between 2 and 5 out of every 100 Black voters says they support Trump:

If you vote for Trump, because you’re angry about politicians who never get anything done, or you don’t trust Hillary, or you think it’s time for a change in Washington, think about this: do you want to spend the next four or eight years knowing that you voted against virtually every Black person who you will know or meet during that time?

Maybe they’re wrong. But I think, if you’re not the hating kind, it might gnaw at you, and you might feel better if you didn’t take that stand against them. I’m not trying to change your political views in a short blog post, but I do think we’ll get along better – and you will too – if you don’t vote for Trump.

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Sources:

NYT/Siena: North Carolina, 9/16-9/19

Detroit Free Press: Michigan, 9/10-9/13

NYT/Siena: Florida, 9/10-/14

Monmouth: Georgia, 9/15-9/18

UMW: Virginia, 9/6-9/12

81 countries made more progress than the USA on women’s representation

The Inter-Parliamentary Union has a great archive of women’s representation in parliaments in most countries, from 1997 to 2016. I made this figure using the numbers for the lower houses (or single houses, if only one), which in the USA is the House of Representatives.

From 1997 to 2016, women rose from 12% to 19% of House members. During that time, for 163 countries, the average rose from 10% to 21%. When I cut the list down to 137, arbitrarily excluding a lot of very small countries, the USA slipped from 54th place to 84th place. Here’s the breakdown of changes in those countries (click to enlarge):

At this rate, in just 36 more years the House will get to the level of women’s representation that Hanna Rosin said Congress was at in 2012.

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Previous posts:

• Women in parliaments, by income
• Marriage and gender inequality in 124 countries
• Fact pattern: Women’s life expectancy advantage

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Note: The code for making this figure in Stata looks like this:

gr twoway scatter rank16 rank97, mlabel(country) mlabposition(0) msymbol(i)

Before tinkering with the appearance and titles in the graph editor.

More on racist Trump supporters, and My 3Qs

It’s been hard for me to stay out of electoral politics debates lately (follow the elections tag if you’re having the same problem).

The latest is another piece with Sean McElwee in Salon. It again features my analysis of the ANES 2016 pilot survey, with Sean’s write-up, this time focusing on attitudes of White Trump supporters toward Blacks. The short answer is White Trump supporters stereotype Blacks more than other Republican or Democrat Whites, and people with self-described “cold” feelings toward Blacks are most likely to support Trump. The biggest difference was on answers to the question, “How well does the word ‘lazy’ describe most blacks?”

This ANES data has lots of potential for addressing the pressing questions on a breaking-news basis. Whether it holds up (it’s an opt-in online survey) is yet to be seen, but I haven’t seen a reason to think it would be biased toward producing racist Trump supporters. So I think it’s worth doing. (I’ve also discovered that when you criticize Trump on a popular website like Salon, and have a Jewish name, you attract anti-Semitic Twitter.)

My 3 Qs

In other news, I did a short interview with Molly McNulty, the Council on Contemporary Families pubic affairs intern at Framingham State University.  It’s reprinted here from the CCF site on The Society Pages:

TSP readers likely appreciate Philip Cohen for his provocative blog, Family Inequality, which—based on a look at who retweets him—regularly has material valued by undergraduates, senior scholars, data nerds, policy wonks, and journalists alike. Cohen is a Council on Contemporary Families senior scholar and a professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland. His research focuses on the sociology of families, social demography, and social inequality. His family textbook, The Family: Diversity, Inequality, and Social Change, was published in 2014. Cohen gave me these useful answers to my “3q”:

Q: First, a challenge: What’s one single thing you “know” with certainty, after years of research into modern families?

PC: Family inequality is remarkably resilient, but when it changes it does so under the influence of external forces. When women’s opportunities increase (or men’s decrease), when public investment in education increases, when the legal environment changes when technology permits reductions in household labor, when policies lighten (or compensate) the load of caring labor — that’s when inequality within families shifts. There is a dialectic here, and micro-level interactions within families matter, but these external forces are in the historical driver’s seat.

Q: Give us the “Twitter” version of your current research—in 140 characters (give or take), what are you working on now?

PC: This is what I’m working on today, in 140 characters: The culture wars over family politics always return to gender difference itself; it’s what’s at stake when left & right fight over families.

Q: How would you encourage a scholar of family life to work to get their research into public life, affecting policy and challenging assumptions about “average families”?

PC: The public loves to argue about families. There are lots of opportunities to get your work out there and make it relevant. Unlike some areas of sociological research, if you’re working on families, almost everything has a potential angle — in fact, one of the challenges is to not oversell the implications of our research. There is also a lot of translational work to do — interpreting and explaining new data and research as it comes out, helping people figure out what to make of the latest findings in the context of what we already know rather than participating in the whipsaw advice machine that thrives on contradicting conventional wisdom. I recommend that junior scholars get involved with the Council on Contemporary Families, which helps organize and transmit new research responsibly and effectively, and to look for opportunities to publish popular pieces in online venues that encourage well-reasoned and empirically-grounding discussion and debate.

Trump supporters don’t like Muslims

Sean McElwee and I have a piece on Salon about the relationship between hating Muslims and supporting Donald Trump. The empirical facts are that people who support Trump hold nasty stereotypes about Muslims, and dislike them, more even than the average Republican.

Sean did most of the writing, and I produced two of the figures. I hope you’ll read it (and check out Sean on Twitter if you like funny leftism). The data, the ANES 2016 Pilot Study, which was collected in January, is available free (with registration) here.  I put my code for these figures here; feel free to use it if you’re interested in the data (lots of good potential there).

Here are the two figures. The first shows the responses to the question of how well the word “violent” describes “most Muslims.” The Trump supporters are in gray, all Republicans are red, and Democrats are Blue.* Trump supporters have by far the nastiest views:

The second is from models predicting whether respondents support Trump, identifies as Republican, or identifies as Democrat, as a function of their feelings toward Muslims. In the models, hating Muslims increases the odds of being a Trump supporter or Republican, and lowers the odds of being a Democrat. The slopes for Trump and Republican are significantly different, meaning the nasty relationship is strongest for Trump support.

Here is the conclusion:

The explanation of Trump’s success is simple: The latent racism, xenophobia and other powerful social forces fostered by the right for decades have simply been extended by Trump to their next logical extreme. As racial scholar Ian Haney-Lopezwrites,

“[George W.] Bush was careful to cabin his remarks in terms of extremists and ‘a perverted visions of Islam,’ but the global terms in which he framed his analysis belied such fine distinctions.”

That is, Bush’s language “was operating more in the register of a dog whistle, a way to advance a basically racial message while still maintaining plausible deniability.” Even today, Bush is seen as more moderate on issues related to Islamophobia. But the aggressive domestic surveillance policies he pursued, and the rhetoric of the last few years indicate Islamophobia was ripe on the right. Trump is just the most successful politician to date at picking the fruit.

* We restricted Trump supporters to those who identified as Republican or independent, since everyone was asked to pick their favorite Republican and we didn’t think Democrats were likely to really support Trump.