Faith, Values and Voting

TPM Cafe has an excellent article by Bill Bishop about values and voting.  Without casting judgement on the various values discussed he makes some excellent generalizations about values and voting patterns. 

Russel Kirk, in his groundbreaking best-seller The Conservative Mind says that "political problems are, at bottom, religious and moral problems."  Bishop seems to help make this point as he draws a direct correlation between values and party affiliation. 

I've made the point many times before that, despite many of the left's (and our libertarian friends) protests, we can't simply declare our government and our society "values neutral." 

A demographer at the University of Michigan measured family formation patterns in the U.S. and noticed an interesting correlation. The states with the largest percentage of people who had cohabitated before marriage voted for John Kerry in '04. The higher the shacking rate, Ron Lestheghe found, the bluer the state.

We've had a lot of discussion this week about how lifestyle links up with political choice. We ought to explore what's behind this relationship.

So, we turn to Ronald Inglehart, who has been conducting his World Values Survey since the 1970s. Inglehart theorized that as people grew up in relative security, their social values -- what they wanted out of life -- changed. People who knew their basic needs were satisfied would have different values from those who grew up in scarcity. Those who lived in times of depression or joblessness esteemed economic growth. But those who grew up in "post-materialist" societies, Inglehart argued, would value the environment, self-expression and individual rights.

There would be a culture shift, a "silent revolution," Inglehart predicted three decades ago. Traditional religious denominations would lose members as "post materialists" rolled their own spiritual lives. People would reject centralized authority. Class politics would diminish. Traditional political institutions would decline as people found more individualistic ways to bring about political change. Material goods would lose cachet as people would seek to fill their lives with unique experiences. Hierarchical institutions were out, self-expression was in. And, people would lose trust in all institutions -- government, science, business, the church.

Oh, and post materialists would be prone to shack.

Comments

[Morgan Wilkins]

Nice Post.

[Nick Gulliford]

I was also very interested to see Bill Bishop's "The Silent Revolution".

There is another possible connection with cohabitation you might consider, if you think it appropriate.

My theory - in a nutshell - is that the recent and rapid increase in cohabitation has precipitated the mortgage/credit/economic crisis, because cohabiting couples break up about 5 times faster than married ones.

An article I wrote "Are the Sub-Prime, Northern Rock, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac fiascos connected with the increase in cohabitation?" has been published, which you may like to see. [http://www.bloggernews.net/117003]

I have since managed to add to it some evidence to show:

"On average change in marital status increases the risk of default 4.5 times".

This is supported further by other research, “Why have a rising number of Americans defaulted on their mortgage payments in recent years? When economist Darryl E. Getter of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development set out to answer this question, he discovered that the problem was often not chiefly financial, but rather marital: many of the American homeowners who fall behind in their mortgage payments are experiencing the economic distress occasioned by divorce or separation from a spouse……….. Getter specifically identifies divorce/marital separation as a “variable that represents changes in economic circumstances” likely to cause a default on home mortgage payments. Whether looking at all households or just at those with “normal and unusually high” incomes, Getter finds unusually high default rates for home mortgages among Americans who are divorced/separated ……… (Source: Darryl E. Getter, “Contributing to the Delinquency of Borrowers,” The Journal of Consumer Affairs 37.1 [2003]: 86-100.)

The UK's FT [Financial Times] made some reference to my theory last week at "Rock repo data will not be exposed"

But almost the entire financial press has failed to comment on what may well be the main trigger of the crisis.

Perhaps you know a demographer and a financial journalist who could investigate this connection more thoroghly?