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Identity Politics and Local Political Culture: The Politics of Gender, Race, Class and Religion in Comparative Perspective
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Introduction:
The Four Kinds of Questions We Attempt to Answer
in this Study, with Illustrative Answers
This paper reports the results of our attempt to answer certain kinds of questions about identity politics and political culture through a comparative analysis of thirty community sample survey datasets obtained from the Roper Social Capital Benchmark Survey. Although our inquiry was primarily driven by a substantive interest in learning about identity politics in various local settings, an important secondary purpose was to explore the potential of the Roper survey as a resource for comparative urban research. To motivate the reader’s interest, here we formulate and illustrate the four principal kinds of research questions we sought to answer, at least partially, in our study. The first kind of question is purely descriptive. To what extent does the frequency of a particular political characteristic of interest, such as the proportion of “liberals” or the level of political protest, vary across the thirty urban communities included in our study? The scatterplot shown in Figure 1, the first of many to be displayed in this paper, illustrates an answer based on an analysis of the Roper survey data.
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FIGURE 1 ABOUT HERE
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As seen in Figure 1, the thirty communities range widely in their levels of liberalism (left scale) and levels of political protest (bottom scale). San Francisco (“S.F.”) stands out as an extreme high outlier on both scales, and a clump of five communities (Minneapolis, Boulder, Denver, Boston, and Seattle) is located below San Francisco but still high above the other twenty-four communities. Those communities are clustered around the national norm on both scales, marked by a cross-hatch. The second kind of question we seek to answer in this paper is: What is the relationship within each community between an individual-level dependent variable of interest (e.g., an individual’s political ideology or level of political protest activity) and an individual’s gender, race, social class, and religiosity – the four types of “identity variables” we examine in this study? To illustrate the answers we got to this kind of question using the Roper survey data, we found that in San Francisco the race and the political ideology of individuals are strongly correlated (even statistically controlling for six other predictors). Specifically, using the odds ratio (OR) as a measure, whites are nearly twice as likely as nonwhites (OR = 1.84, p < .01) to say they are liberal in San Francisco. The third kind of question is raised by the answers we got to the second. To what extent do communities differ in the magnitude and direction of the relationship observed within each community between a dependent variable of interest (e.g., liberalism) and a given identity variable, such as race? For example, we found a positive correlation between white race and liberalism in San Francisco but a negative correlation between white race and liberalism in Baton
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| | Authors: DeLeon, Richard. and Naff, Katherine. |
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Introduction:
The Four Kinds of Questions We Attempt to Answer
in this Study, with Illustrative Answers
This paper reports the results of our attempt to answer certain kinds of questions about identity
politics and political culture through a comparative analysis of thirty community sample survey
datasets obtained from the Roper Social Capital Benchmark Survey. Although our inquiry was
primarily driven by a substantive interest in learning about identity politics in various local
settings, an important secondary purpose was to explore the potential of the Roper survey as a
resource for comparative urban research. To motivate the reader’s interest, here we formulate
and illustrate the four principal kinds of research questions we sought to answer, at least
partially, in our study.
The first kind of question is purely descriptive. To what extent does the frequency of a particular
political characteristic of interest, such as the proportion of “liberals” or the level of political
protest, vary across the thirty urban communities included in our study? The scatterplot shown in
Figure 1, the first of many to be displayed in this paper, illustrates an answer based on an
analysis of the Roper survey data.
====================
FIGURE 1 ABOUT HERE
====================
As seen in Figure 1, the thirty communities range widely in their levels of liberalism (left scale)
and levels of political protest (bottom scale). San Francisco (“S.F.”) stands out as an extreme
high outlier on both scales, and a clump of five communities (Minneapolis, Boulder, Denver,
Boston, and Seattle) is located below San Francisco but still high above the other twenty-four
communities. Those communities are clustered around the national norm on both scales, marked
by a cross-hatch.
The second kind of question we seek to answer in this paper is: What is the relationship within
each community between an individual-level dependent variable of interest (e.g., an individual’s
political ideology or level of political protest activity) and an individual’s gender, race, social
class, and religiosity – the four types of “identity variables” we examine in this study? To
illustrate the answers we got to this kind of question using the Roper survey data, we found that
in San Francisco the race and the political ideology of individuals are strongly correlated (even
statistically controlling for six other predictors). Specifically, using the odds ratio (OR) as a
measure, whites are nearly twice as likely as nonwhites (OR = 1.84, p < .01) to say they are
liberal in San Francisco.
The third kind of question is raised by the answers we got to the second. To what extent do
communities differ in the magnitude and direction of the relationship observed within each
community between a dependent variable of interest (e.g., liberalism) and a given identity
variable, such as race? For example, we found a positive correlation between white race and
liberalism in San Francisco but a negative correlation between white race and liberalism in Baton
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