Income, education predict pseudo-independence
The largest partisan bloc in America has some predictable demographic characteristics.
A few years ago I wrote about one of the most important but least studied political groups in the United States: the pseudo-independent. In brief: pseudo-independents are people who identify as independent, but who think and behave exactly like partisans. An overwhelming majority of so-called independents in the United States are actually pseudo-independents, and in fact there are more pseudo-independents than there are Democrats or Republicans.
So who exactly are these pseudo-independents? The most interesting thing, of course, would be to find ideological commonalities among them since they are ostensibly from different parties, but so far my research hasn’t turned much up. What I have discovered, however, is that pseudo-independence has a clear relationship to income and education. First, income:
This graph gives us the percentage of independents in each income bracket group who intends to vote a particular way. In the poorest bracket, for example, about 10% of self-identified independents intend to vote for Republicans while nearly 80% of them either aren’t sure who they’ll vote for or won’t vote at all. Independents who can confidently predict which party they’ll vote for ahead of time correspond to pseudo-independents; the others, marked by the yellow line, are true independents.
What this graph shows us is that the more money an independent makes, the less likely he is to be a true independant, and the more likely he is to be a pseudo-independent. And the trend is quite pronounced; by the time an independent reaches the highest income bracket he is more likely to vote for a Republican than he is to be an actual independent.
Next, look at the same data but break it down by income and education:
This graph just shows us the share of independents who are pseudo-independents in each income group, broken down by degree and again the trends are straightforward. Higher earners are generally more likely to be pseudo-independents, and so are people with degrees! On the other hand, income has a much more pronounced effect on people without degrees: as they make more, they are much more likely to call themselves independent but to be good-ol’ fashioned partisans.
How we explain these trends is another matter. It may be that rich people are more likely to be partisans, or that they are more likely to call themselves independent, or some combination of both. The same possible explanations apply to people with degrees. If I am being ungenerous, I would suspect that people who make a lot of money begin to see themselves as above the petty fray of crass partisanship, and that people with degrees are more likely to intellectualize themselves into the same conclusion. But again, it’s hard to say.
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