Thursday, July 10, 2008

The Monkey Cage: Inequality and information among conservatives and liberals

The Monkey Cage: Inequality and information among conservatives and liberals

As a follow up to Lee’s post on Napier and Jost, this graph, from Larry Bartels’ Unequal Democracy, is pretty striking.

Graph of inequality by political information

... Rather than being more likely to recognize the reality of growing inequality, those conservatives who were most politically aware were most likely to deny that income differences had increased. In this instance, political awareness did more to facilitate ideological consistency than it did to promote an accurate perception of real social conditions.

... Among liberals, recognition of increasing income inequality rose markedy with general political awareness, to 86% for people of average political awareness … and a near-unanimous 96% at the highest information level. However, the proportion of extreme conservatives who were willing to admit that economic inequality had increased actually decreased with political information, from 80% among those who were generally least informed about politics to 70% for people of average political awareness to a little less than 60% among those at the top of the distribution of political information.

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