I'm reading
"The Kavanaugh confirmation polarized women, and motivated them to vote — some for Republicans, some for Democrats" by Jin Woo Kim in The Washington Post.
I recruited about 4,600 U.S. residents through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. (Amazon.com founder and chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Washington Post.)...
Hmm.
MTurk respondents are not representative of the U.S. population. To ensure that the findings were not driven by the younger and more well-educated people who tend to be overrepresented in the MTurk platform, I checked...
I won't copy the explanation of how he checked.
... Republican women supported the court more after Kavanaugh’s confirmation by nine percentage points, while Democratic women mistrusted it more by 11 percentage points. As a result, the gap between Republican and Democratic women increased from 15 to 34 points....
Because Republican and Democratic women’s views of the court changed by about the same amount in opposite directions, the average gender gap in views about the court remained roughly the same.
In short, Kavanaugh’s confirmation was indeed polarizing, as many predicted. But the most pronounced polarization was not between men and women, but between Republican women and non-Republican women.
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59 comments:
Amazon's Mechanical Turk is an online tech temp agency! I'd say that pool of people is self-selected and NOT representative of woman at all.
Scam study. Fake news. Dartmouth should be embarrassed. Total joke.
Kavanaugh increased polarization?
How is that possible given the last 2 years?
Women weren’t polarized before?
Is this mans’plaining?
It is because most Republican/Right women have overall positive experiences with Right men, but Democratic/Left women deal with the lying hypocrites that are Left men. Bias reenforcement.
So after extensive analysis we find some additional Democrat women opposed Kavanaugh while additional Republican women supported him? Man, that's like, you know, cosmic, dude.
I can't read the whole piece because I won't pay for a subscription. In the part that you quoted, he cites the data for Republican and Democrat women, then at the very end says this shows an increased divide between Republican and non-Republican women. Do the data show non-partisans siding with Democrats, or is he just making that up?
so, like EVERYTHING the demos have done in the past two years, their Kavannaugh exploits caused people Already democrats to be MORE democrats; and caused people Not democrats to be MORE Not democrats?
That sure sounds like the way to win elections; Doesn't It?
When I was at Dartmouth in 1994-95, I bought and read "The Bell Curve." A few friends knew I had it and asked if they could borrow it when I finished. They did not want to be seen buying it in the Dartmouth Bookstore. It has only gotten more left wing since then.
Thanks for the typo alert, Ralph.
Faux outrage can't be sated.
Because it's faux.
Population sample selection methodology looks pretty suspect to me. As soon as you are 'recruiting' respondents, that says you have a self-selected population, and that renders your results very suspect, as far as applying it to the general population.
E.g,. NEW POLL: SELF-IDENTIFIED TRUMP SUPPORTERS WHO RESPONDED TO OUR POLL SUPPORT TRUMP OVERWHELMINGLY.
You may laugh, but a lot of "polls" are just slightly less silly than that.
Don't these folks take statistics anymore? (Answer: no. Or if they do, they throw it out the window. Also a major, major problem even in the so-called 'hard' sciences.)
Also, as per Tommy Duncan's comment above, what does this tell us that one would not already conclude? The only way this would be 'news' would be if one presumed that all women opposed Kavanaugh -- which, come to think of it, is pretty much what the Left has been presuming. It's the same reason they were shocked by Trump's election in 2016, since they assumed all women hated Trump and were stunned to see him win the white female vote (hence the growing demonization of white females over the past two years).
MTurk respondents are not representative of the U.S. population.
And therefore you should not be using results to generalize to the US Population.
Umm, who is Ralph?
Assuming that "Quantitative Social Science" is less of a pseudo science than social science itself, women still only count for half the population, more or less. There's another half, i.e., men, who were likely polarized in the opposite direction. So, not only did the study author sample from a suspect female population, he ignored the male population altogether, and men were likely pushed in the opposite direction from the women. I'm inclined to raise the BS flag on this one.
The outcome rings true to me. Intuitively, isn't the results exactly what you would expect to happen? Maybe it's counterintuitive to the people who thought all women would react the same way.
As for the use of MTurk -- if you don't examine how Mr. Kim normalized the data, it's kind of dumb to say he couldn't possibly have normalized the data.
Umm, who is Ralph?
The MTurk John Doe.
Science dies in darkness.
Ann if you are a true feminist you would be insulted that a seedy investigation is what draws women to vote.If women are only interested in voting due to women issues then that is a bad reflection on them. Time for women to step up.
those located outside the United States were excluded
Raaacists.
“Women weren’t polarized before?”
Exactly. The notion that women who voted for Donald freakin’ Trump we’re going to be put off by some vague ancient accusation against Kavanaugh is just ridiculous. A textbook example of why the sharp political operative makes a point of not being enbubbled.
Were, not we’re. I’m a Cracker but I’ve been a grammar Nazi since the nuns cut me loose.
Well, really more of a spelling Nazi.
And a handwriting Nazi. The loss of nice cursive writing is a major blow to our culture.
This can be broken down quite simply...
Since everything in modern America has essentially de-evolved back into the high school playground in terms of maturity, you should view what has happened from that perspective.
Girls' cliques in high school could always be broken down into a multiplicity of categories, but the 2 that really matter here are the "mean girls" and the "drama queens". Now don't get too hasty in assigning which is what and who is whom because the roles actually got reversed in the last few decades.
It used to be the "mean girls" (aka Beckys) were the R's, but that's not the case anymore. The "mean girls" and "drama queens" actually merged are now D's. This is because the they figured out the being mean and creating drama are actually two sides of the same coin.
So polarization of women due to the recent farce can be summed up pretty much between those women who essentially want the game to continue (lies, slander, weaponized-sexuality, snark, back-stabbing...being mean) and those who, like in the last episode of Girls, have finally had it with the whole scene and recognized its toxicity. They just needed the final prima facia evidence that a large cohort of their sex cannot grow the eff up.
This is why a lot of guys question the wisdom of the 19th Amdt, guaranteeing women the right to vote. Rationally, Kavenaugh should be every woman's dream - the highly successful man, who is a loving husband and father of two daughters. Involved heavily in their lives. Who saved himself for marriage, and has never strayed from his wife. Etc. On the flip side, the #MeToo movement is fueled by resentment of the type of guys that left wing night women seem to tolerate, if not desire, maybe even crave. Maybe it is being stuck with slime bag men that causes these women to react so badly to conservative men like Kavenaugh.
Christy Crazy Ford has been pretty quiet these days. Will she attain the heights of Anita Hill or just fade away back to her cats in Palo Alto.....
@Bruce Hayden -- That's just a bizarre paragraph. A SCOTUS nomination isn't a dating app. Women (and men) who were opposed to a conservative judge on the basis of policy stayed opposed to him before and after the Ford fiasco. Big surprise.
This monkish complaint of a certain slice of conservative men against the 19th Amendment is pathetic. It is a crab-minded scapegoating of women for large scale changes in public policy that took place over decades.
AustinRoth observes: It is because most Republican/Right women have overall positive experiences with Right men, but Democratic/Left women deal with the lying hypocrites that are Left men. Bias reenforcement.
Interesting theory and I'm sure there is some validity to it.
Kavanaugh increased polarization?
How is that possible given the last 2 years?
No kidding. As if the left wasn't 'doing enough already. Short of mass suicides, I mean...
But the most pronounced polarization was not between men and women, but between Republican women and non-Republican women.
Somebody's been reading Sailer. They never admit to it, though.
"Were, not we’re. I’m a Cracker but I’ve been a grammar Nazi since the nuns cut me loose."
Very likely a spell check problem. I see this one all the time, and if I am typing fast enough, it sometimes slips through. I only really started facing this problem awhile back when I moved to doing most of my blog commenting here, and elsewhere, on my iPads. The IOS spellcheck problems get so bad sometimes that I sometimes copy my comments into a new post, fix the most glaring spellcheck errors, repost, then delete the original (that is likely what happened when you see a deleted post one or two entries above one of my longer posts).
I currently use 3 iPads. I use an iPad Pro, with 4G/LTE during the day, while I am out and about, and a pair of older iPads, that require WiFi Internet access, at night, while the iPad Pro is recharging. One of the older iPads would probably be sufficient, except that I will occasionally run into a situation when the other two need charging, plus it allows me to give my partner one with which to watch her shows when traveling (I justified the IPad Pro for that reason, but AT&T only allows streaming of effectively one TV show a month, before they start throttling, so we are stuck, right now, using WiFi for the shows she missed when we are traveling).
Married women who have an investment now see single women as willing to destroy that investment on a whim (yes, the nebulous damage to Roe vs. Wade is whimsical. That women tell themselves these lies doesn't make their feelings invalid...or make them any smarter or self honest)
My wife tells me that the housewives in the neighborhood are polarizing. This is an anecdote...but it is supportive.
So, have Republican Women been kicked out of the "Woman" gender? If so, is that a new gender unto itself? My compass is spinning what with all this polarization.
I "@Bruce Hayden -- That's just a bizarre paragraph. A SCOTUS nomination isn't a dating app. Women (and men) who were opposed to a conservative judge on the basis of policy stayed opposed to him before and after the Ford fiasco. Big surprise."
But those aren't the women we are really talking about, because they aren't the ones who changed their minds with Kavenaugh. And the attacks on him had little to do with those policy questions, and everything to do with trying to #MeToo Kavenaugh.
"This monkish complaint of a certain slice of conservative men against the 19th Amendment is pathetic. It is a crab-minded scapegoating of women for large scale changes in public policy that took place over decades."
My point is that this is an illustration of women reacting emotionally, and not logically. The large scale changes in public policy were barely discussed. Instead there was a lot of screaming, yelling, and temper tantrums. Since that is what most people took away from it was the emotion, and not the policy discussions, Yet, significant numbers of, at least these, supposedly better educated, women changing their minds would seem to be evidence of women reacting more emotionally, than logically.
Let me add that it would be unlikely that repealing the 19th Amdt would deprive women of the vote. Out west, the women were already voting, starting with Wyoming, and that wouldn't change. And I expect that 14th Amdt Equal Protection would be used against any state that tried to disenfranchise women. My point was that one of the arguments against letting women vote is that they would vote more emotionally, than logically, and that would be bad for the country.
Women react emotionally because they enjoy reacting emotionally. Men react structurally, e.g., to a large-scale that-can't-work proposal, because they enjoy abstrating from details. Women go to details.
Enjoy means find interesting to do.
You can avoid spell-check screwups by not using spell-check. Just go with spelling errors and typos as they happen.
I happen to have gotten suddenly very good at spelling (independent or independant? resistence or resistance?) by copying out pages and pages from books as an aid to slowing down and as a side-effect learned to spell most stuff.
"Rationally, Kavenaugh should be every woman's dream - the highly successful man, who is a loving husband and father of two daughters."
No. Kavanaugh is the "dream" of women who don't marry the State, which is to say: non-leftist women.
For Leftist women, who expect either to never get married, or to get divorced, the State is their actual husband (see "The Life of Julia"). And Kavanaugh, as an honest judge, threatens the power and reach of the State.
The study sucked. A useful study would have controlled for married / divorced and re-married / divorced / never married among the women, and compared across Party for each.
IIRC, most Republican women are married. As such, they look at "accusation of man by woman == guilt" and say "that's crazy! My husband could have his life destroyed, over nothing."
Women who see men as a tool, not a partner, OTOH, are more likely to want the increased power for themselves, and not care about the threat to innocent men.
Thus the split
The other major problem with the study was it didn't have any data from before the accusations came out. I expect and believe a significant hardening of thought happened before the initial Oct 2-3 questions.
It's not like there were a lot of surprises post 10/3, other than Collins stepping up to the plate and blowing apart the Democrat rape fantasy piñata
Sex politics. Sex in politics.
Besides, those public policy discussions really aren't that relevant. Roe v Wade really is super precedent, and that is because the three trimester framework set out by that decision is fairly well accepted by the American public, where the majority opinion seems to be to set the dividing line at fetal viability. That case essentially set out a sliding scale, where a woman's right to control her own body during the first trimester is supreme, and the right of the fetus to life becomes more and more compelling, as the pregnancy advances, and it matures towards birth. I don't think that you are ever going to get to the place where a majority are going to support third trimester abortions, where the fetuses are a couple minute emergency C Section surgery away from full human rights. Partially delivering it, and then killing it by severing its spinal cord, etc, before the final contractions, is going to continue to appear to a significant majority in this country to be murder. And that is the hill that feminists want to die on, their right to kill fully viable third trimester babies.
Jesus Hardin. Give it a rest, you are 100% wrong. Women show emotion, but make cold-blooded decisions. Men hid their emotions and are driven by them. This is why all great artists are men. Fingering out signal from noise in the jungle isn't enhanced by fixating on di da dit
Blogger rhhardin said...
"Women react emotionally because they enjoy reacting emotionally. Men react structurally, e.g., to a large-scale that-can't-work proposal, because they enjoy abstrating from details"
The problem that a lot of guys, in particular, see here is that making political and policy decisions emotionally results, in many cases, in suboptimal decisions being made. Why should a decision on the direction that this country is going to take, and what it is going to be line for our children and grandchildren, shouldn't be nade based on which side can scream the loudest or misbehave the worst. We seem to be separating into two countries, one that wants civility and rational discourse, and one that wants to win by intimidating the other through screaming, temper tantrums, and threats of, and actual violence.
I don't like the unexplained switch from the term "Democratic women" to "non-Republican women". Inching towards vagueness, one word at a time.
"Jesus Hardin. Give it a rest, you are 100% wrong. Women show emotion, but make cold-blooded decisions. Men hid their emotions and are driven by them. This is why all great artists are men. Fingering out signal from noise in the jungle isn't enhanced by fixating on di da dit"
You seem to be missing the fact that the study essentially claims to have measured the effects that the very emotional Kavenaugh hearing had on women, and how it increased the divide between conservative and liberal women. And, no, women don't always make cold blooded decisions. They often make emotional decisions. Or, to be more accurate, some women make mostly emotional decisions, and others tend to be mostly rational, but in the aggregate, they tend towards more emotional decision making than men do, statistically. I tend to end up with the hyper rational types of women, who cannot deal well with over emotional women or emotional decision making -.which means that they tend to prefer dealing with men over women. And, yes, they tend to be conservative.
Rhhardin over-generalizes: Women react emotionally because they enjoy reacting emotionally. Men react structurally, e.g., to a large-scale that-can't-work proposal, because they enjoy abstrating from details. Women go to details.
I daresay you don't know very many women. Your perceptions come from your favorite 'romcoms', no doubt. And maybe you really DO watch soap operas, happily reinforcing your personal bias.
The first few months of pregnancy — the first trimester — are marked by rapid changes for both you and your baby.
For you, first trimester physical changes might include breast tenderness, fatigue and nausea. Your emotions might range from excitement to anxiety. For your baby, the first trimester is a time of rapid growth and development. Your baby's brain, spinal cord and other organs begin to form, and your baby's heart begins to beat. Your baby's fingers and toes even begin to take shape.
-- mayoclinic.org
The viability of the baby is limited by Nature, Choice, and technology. The perceptual and scientific dissonance has been forced by the progress of the technical, antiseptic term "fetus" (i.e. an early stage of human evolution inside her mother's womb) in lieu of the more common offspring, baby, and the normalization of abortion rites (i.e. elective abortion for social progress), until the wholly innocent human life is deemed worthy. We can and should do better than the wicked solution.
You seem to be missing the fact that the study essentially claims to have measured the effects that the very emotional Kavenaugh hearing had on women, and how it increased the divide between conservative and liberal women.
You're drawing a conclusion from a controversy that by its very definition had a gendered component.
If the Kavanaugh controversy had centered on tax evasion, you may have seen a divergence in its emotional impact on tax accountants. If Kavanaugh was accused of kneeling during the national anthem, the divergence may well have been between white middle-aged men.
"RHHardin
I happen to have gotten suddenly very good at spelling (independent or independant? resistence or resistance?) by copying out pages and pages from books as an aid to slowing down and as a side-effect learned to spell most stuff."
I spent hours copying words used in biology in order to learn to spell them and my handwriting improved. In some way my understanding also shifted but that is vague. But I feel that if we made people hand-write and spell out their thoughts, they would be less ready to accept cliches and slogans. Cultural hegemony - thumbs up and you never think about it. Cultural hegemony - write it down, spell it out and in those moments you think about the words.
I doubt there is additional polarization- it was already there and explains why Republican women believed Kavanaugh, and Democrat women disbelieved him. What changed is that the positions are hardened.
One point that seems to be missing from this discussion. According to the study, men were affected, though less so:
Men’s confidence in the court didn’t shift as much, although the gap between Republican and Democratic men increased by nine percentage points.
It's very easy to note how the emotional impact of the hearings were turned into cold blooded rationalizations. You could read it right here in Althouse. There were Trump supporters who were more supportive of Kavanaugh after Ford because of the assumption that the vitriol he experienced would make him more ideological in the right direction. All a liberal has to do is flip that script to make the argument against.
Also interesting, and in a similar vein: we often hear about the gender disparity in various voting surveys. That's interesting: how men and women differ. Usually there's a significant difference. However, when it comes to electoral surveys, there's almost always a bigger gap among women, between married and never married (or single), then there is between women and men. Gender is too crude to be predictive, and we have better indicators, but we always go back to the gender gap between men and women for some reason (this flawed analysis excepted).
Here's a piece on that in National Review.
"There were Trump supporters who were more supportive of Kavanaugh after Ford because of the assumption that the vitriol he experienced would make him more ideological in the right direction. All a liberal has to do is flip that script to make the argument against."
True, but it was less about Kavanaugh's supposed increased conservatism than about the layers of blunder in the Left's attempted smear.
Henry,
If the Left wants to make the case: "Kavanaugh is unfit because after we smeared him relentlessly with false accusations he can't possibly be inclined to 'grow in office' in our direction anymore!", I solidly encourage it. Bang that drum loudly. Maybe that'll make the Left think twice before doing it again. God knows I'm still waiting for any consequences for anyone besides Avenatti.
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