This is the third of several Demographic Tuesdays, that I am going to do covering those questions that the good folks over at at MyDD have covered, insofar as we here have not done them already (and we have done many they did not do).
This week: How do you ideologically self-identify?
I am not very happy with the categories that Bowers' used, but will use them all the same just for comparisons sake:
Are you...
- Progressive
- Liberal
- Moderate / Mixed
- Libertarian
- Conservative
- Other / None
This is interesting in numerous ways... in how the Daily Kos community is and is not similar to that of the United States in general, the Democratic party (voters, members) in general, other blog communities such as MyDD, etc.
As always, this will work best if it gets onto the Recommended Diary list and stays up there into the evening, so that the west coast has equal chance to participate.
MyDD has had some polls, done differently than those here on dKos covering both Partisanship, Voting and Idealogy as well as general demographics. They did their polls differently with folks going to a separate website to do their multi-way, multiple questions at a time, voting... so the results are not exactly comparable. And we have already done many of the same questions. But there are some good ones they did that we have not yet done. So... let's have at it.
MyDD's categories were:
- Progressive
- Liberal
- Moderate / Mixed
- Libertarian
- Conservative
- Other / None
As noted I am not crazy about these categories, but am using them for consistency/comparison sake.
For example, I am presuming that in in this context, Progressive is meant to be just a general term for being further to the left than Liberal. Obviously this can encompass some mix of economic left populism (higher minimum wage, labor rights, fair trade, expanded EITC, tax the wealthy and corporations) and/or social liberalism (women's and minority rights, abortion rights, stronger affirmative action, gay rights and marriage, gun control, anti-war, environmentalism) with any given mix of items appealing to some and not others. Webb/Tester/Schuler on the one hand, and perhaps some mix of Lee/Conyers/Kucinich/McDermott/Nadler/Grijalva/Schalkowsky on the other hand... though of course there is much that unites all of the above.
Similarly, the term Libertarian means pretty wildly different things to different things. To me it is still the classic (silly? selfish? evil?) sense of no government except police power of the state to enforce individual property rights (police & military enforce for them that got already); otherwise individual freedom trumps everything and no social contract or communal or group rights; minimal taxes, regulation or government power or interventions (Mises, Hayak, Rand, Norquist). Then there are those who are Social Libertarians, but economically progressive. And some who are Civil Libertarians and may be left (classic ACLU), right (Barr) and mixed (Hentoff). And of course there is a newer young generation (Kos? South Park?) that have their own (dare I say confused) reinterpretation or at least blend of what they mean by Libertarian.
To my mind, in this context, Conservative is some mix of both social conservative and classic economic libertarian.
UPDATE: I Agree - The Categories Are Not Great - Alternatives for Future
This is one poll, I really do intend to re-do.
I did it this way, once, because MyDD did it this way.
But categories are not well defined, neither comprhensive categories, nor linear/ordinal.
There are two alternative options for doing again later:
- Keep it simple and linear, standard ordinal scale:
- Very left/liberal/progressive (from left wing of current Democratic party to further over on left)
- Somewhat Left liberal progressive (middle of road center-left of Democratic party)
- Centrist/Moderate/Mixed (from middle of the road to right wing Democratic; middle of road left wing of Republicans; DLC, Unity, Third Way)
- Somewhat Conservative (traditional Republican before Reagan/Gingrich/BushII/Norquist/Dobson)
- Very Conservative (center to right wing of current Republican party to even further over on right)
- Other / None
- Or multiple choices with lot of different terms, but the limitation is still only one choice per person; single axis with up to 15 mutually exclusive answers.
I prefer option one, but would entertain #2 if you have specific list of options/answers to suggest.
P.S.: I have a "brain worm" with regard to the spelling of ideology... for some reason I keep thinking it is idea-logy. LOL. Anyway, fixed.
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Last Week:
Union membership?
- Current Union member: 27% (compared to MyDDs 9.5%)
- Current union household, but not union member: 13% (5.9%)
- Former union member or household: 19% (21.9%)
- Not union member or household, and never have been: 38 (62.6%)
One caveat though: Polls that are about "membership" or not... be they last week's about Union or an earlier one about Military, may tend to self select for those who are members, with those who are not more likely to skip over them. So they may be more even more prone to selection bias than a poll where everybody "belongs" such as the polls on age, race, sex. One possible indicator of this is that the total poll count was less. So the real percent of Union membership at Daily Kos is likely to be less than the poll indicated.
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The Usual Caveats:
Of course these polls are not "scientific." Since the poll is inherently self selecting and is not a random sample there is always the presumption of selection bias, making the survey results different than truth. These will never be valid random sample. And just size alone does not make it valid since still self selecting and has inherent selection bias. But probably has some validity... though since not a random sample, and don't know enough about total population, sample frame and self selecting factors, cannot even measure how inaccurate it is... Yet probably has some validity... yet not valid and can't even measure how invalid... yet....
Granting all that, there are some indicators suggestive of possible validity in these polls: for example if distriubtion is relatively stable and does not jump around wildly this is not definititive but suggestive (at least that it is not being "freeped". Also, when poll done repeatedly, either same way, or only slightly different way (some advantage to doing slightly differently, if thought out, as test of validity), at different times, lets say different day of week, weekday and weekend, morning vs. night, months or years apart.
Some folks asked why should we do these demographic polls at all, and raised the issue of privacy concerns. As to the why question, the simple answer is "know thyself." Who are we when we spout off and comment? Also, it can be fun. It also helps the discussion of whatever the topic is. And yes, maybe it will be reported by other media or be used to market advertising to the site.
As to the privacy concerns, Kos has certainly made clear his strong views against "outing" the real identities of anybody. I do not know what access the site administrators have to the data or linkages of usernames to poll responses. Myself, I am just a regular user, and have nothing to do with administration or behind the scenes here. I am not doing anything with these polls (though I imagine somebody somewhere might be using them for a political science or sociology thesis). I don't know who has voted or what age goes with whom. I have no special access or use. All I have is the same bar graph and diary that is publicly visible. Also, there are no cross-tabs between any variables (e.g., prior urban-rural with region with religion). It is not like a questionnaire with multiple separate questions per single interviewee. I guess the question is a matter of what the site administrators COULD access and link or identify if they were so inclined, whether they WOULD do so; and what protections are there on system to prevent an outsider from doing so? Clearly if there were a serious break of confidentiality/privacy, the Kos community would react very badly. The simple answer is, if you are that concerned, with this or any other issue, then do not participate; don't vote. This is a voluntary poll, within one of many diaries on DKos, with DKos just among the nearly infinite number of webpages you can browse.
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