Omnivoracious

Red-Blue Roundtable: Bill Bishop (from afar)

It looks like our Red-Blue Roundtable discussion is continuing outside of the walls of Omnivoracious. After I posted Valdis Krebs's updating of his network map of red and blue book purchases on Amazon, I noticed that Bill Bishop had already commented on Krebs's new data on his Slate blog, called, like his book, The Big Sort. And, not surprisingly, he finds that this pre-election behavior matches quite well with his own rather grim argument about how we are sorting ourselves into political and cultural enclaves:

Given a choice, people will go to places where their beliefs are reinforced. In a recent study of Yahoo Finance discussion boards, three University of Texas business professors found that stock-pickers cluster. Those who think Apple is going up talk to each other on one thread. Those who think GE will fall even more find their way to the same little spot on the Web. Technology doesn't help people find new ways of thinking or seeing the world -- even when it might be in their financial interest. We still hunker down with those who hold our opinions....

We read apart, live apart, watch apart, blog apart, and drive apart; we are one country that lacks any shared experiences or, it seems, common purpose.

--Tom

Red-Blue Roundtable: Valdis Krebs

[As a postscript to our Red-Blue Roundtable earlier this month, Valdis Krebs just wrote in to note that he has updated his network map of Amazon political book purchases for the month of October, and to me, it's his most interesting map yet, showing some pretty striking behavior among our customers that his methods reveal better than our own Election 2008 map (snazzy though it is). Among his findings: Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals is being purchased by red customers (doing some amateur oppo research, I assume), while purchasers of Obama's books, at least at this point late in the election season, constitute their own network, with little connection to other political books. Also worth noting: Patriotic Grace, the new book by Republican columnist Peggy Noonan arguing that the country should come together behind whichever candidate is elected, is being bought mostly by blue customers. (By the way, you can listen to my recent interview with Noonan.) Here's his new map (click on it to see a larger version) and his recent post from his blog at The Network Thinker. --Tom]

As both presidential campaigns sprint toward the finish line I took one more look at the political books being bought in October 2008 and the patterns they created.

The arrows in the network map above show which books were "also bought" together.  A-->B shows that customers who bought A, also bought B.  Click on the map above for a larger view.

A few surprising patterns...

• unlike in previous maps, there are no bridging books between the red and blue clusters -- the two parties are totally separated! This reflects the immense polarization and animosity we currently see in campaign rallies on both sides.
• the "key book" of community organizers -- Rules for Radicals -- was being bought by the Right! It was being purchased along with several anti-Obama books. Is the Right trying to figure out why Obama's campaign, based on community organizing principals, is so successful?
• those buying positive books about Obama, are not buying other political books. Are they interested in the candidate, but not politics in general?
• there are no books about McCain or Biden that made the Amazon cut-off for "most popular political books." The book about Palin -- Sarah -- is the only popular book about the Republican team. 
• the Right focus on fewer books to get their message across.  The map does not reflect volume of books sold.  It is possible that the Right buy more volume of fewer books.

See previous views of political book patterns in 2004, and 2008.

Red-Blue Roundtable: Valdis Krebs

For a social network scientist, Amazon is a great sandbox for experimenting and searching for interesting patterns! 

I started mapping book networks in the last century. It was 1998 when an on-line conversation raised my curiosity. Here is the original white paper I wrote about that initial investigation.

After the late Tim Russert brought us the "red states – blue states" meme during the 2000 election I started to investigate patterns of political books. I tried various data collection techniques and found an interesting outcome –- no matter how I collected the data I ended up with highly similar patterns. I use snowball sampling  -- start at a known point and follow the data out 1 or 2 steps. Once the snowball sample is complete, I start to eliminate the noise in the network -– I want to find the strong patterns that multiple overlapping networks provide. When the patterns emerge I usually see two strong clusters, with a minor cluster or scattering of books between the two large components. I only color the components after my network analysis software finds the emergent groups in the data –- then it is obvious which cluster is blue and which is red.

Below is the first political book map I published on my web site. It showed the famous red-blue divide that had become common wisdom by 2003. It was ironic, and a commentary on our situation, that the center book -– holding both sides together -– was titled: What Went Wrong!

The sharp left-right divide remained in place for the 2004 US presidential election. Below are two graphs of the same data. The first graph is the emergent cluster view –- those similarly connected are closer together. This map was done about 1 year after the 2003 map above. They both contain many different books, yet reveal a very similar pattern and a strong divide.

Red-Blue Roundtable: Valdis Krebs

Voting is simple... precinct, district, state, add 'em up, send 'em in. Outside of Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004 this hierarchy of geographical boxes works well. Boxes are simple, you are either in this one or that one, or not eligible to play. Simple clear rules. Simple clear math.

We vote in boxes, but most of us don't think in boxes. We think in networks -- those near to us [in social, not physical distance] influence what we know, how we think, and who we vote for. We are social animals, not logical animals, nor economically maximizing animals. Many vote against their economic self-interest. Many make illogical choices... or so it appears.

Are we stupid? Are we sheep? Are we random? Our behavior often appears that way -- especially to outsiders who do not know the social ecosystem we are embedded in. Political pundits often get voting behavior wrong because they look at voters as independent, logical, demographically-driven, self-maximizing individuals. They miss the 800-pound gorilla in the room -- various social networks and their power to influence behavior and overwhelm demographics, economics, and geography.

Birds of a feather flock together. This is a strong driver of human behavior and found throughout living systems in nature. Besides being a fascinating read, The Big Sort is a verifiable and happening dynamic.  Yet, we will never live in totally homogenous tracts bereft of diversity. Even if we appear to do so on the surface -- "gee, they all look and dress the same" -- our largely invisible social ties may not be so homophilous. 

Simple organizing systems such as hierarchies and neighborhoods are never as they appear on the surface. Below is a picture of a corporate hierarchy -- simple reporting relationships, everyone in their own group. Blue nodes are managers, green nodes are directors, and the magenta colored node is the VP. It could be a picture of our state political structure. Precincts reporting into districts reporting into the state. Or broken down further, households into neighborhoods, into precincts. The simple organized hierarchy of boxes.

The hierarchy below is viewed as a hub-and-spoke network, or tree, with the black lines showing reporting relationships and gold boxes being either departments or districts.

In organizations we know that the interesting stuff -- learning, innovation, adaption -- usually does not happen within formal reporting structures. The good stuff happens in the "white space" on the organization chart -- between boxes, across groups, spanning boundaries. The invisible network that permeates every organization and every neighborhood is shown by the grey links below. Of course, in the age of the internet many of these grey lines cover large geographical distance.

Votes are counted along the black links in the hierarchy, but votes are created, influenced and reinforced along the grey links which represent overlapping social networks that we are all embedded in. Our friends, family, and colleagues, who influence our vote, are distributed through many neighborhoods, precincts, districts, and states near and far. This is why it is not only important to look at quantity of book sales by geography, but to look at networks of books and how they reveal the influence factors in each of our political sense-making processes.

Networks of books?  Do books have a social life?  Not really, but Amazon provides us data to evaluate book purchases as a social system. Amazon's consistent feedback on every product page -- people that bought [this] also bought [those] –- allows us to create a social network of books. Of course what we are really evaluating are not the social dynamics of books but the social dynamics of buyers and readers of those books –- all without revealing the identity of the Amazon customers making their consumer choices.

So, what do you think our network of books will reveal for this election? --Valdis Krebs

See the whole Red-Blue Roundtable

Red-Blue Roundtable: Andrew Gelman

A conversation between a pollster, a journalist, and a professor seems like a great idea--we all do research, but using different methods and with different goals. But in this particular forum we seem to have been talking past each other, with Zogby emphasizing how most Americans have a fundamental non-ideological view of policy, Bishop talking about partisan divisions, and me going on about red and blue states. Perhaps our areas of expertise are just too far apart. Nonetheless, I will try one more time to make some linkages. I am interested to hear my co-discussants' views on these issues.

As I noted in my earlier entry to this discussion, I think Zogby's and Bishop's positions can be reconciled. Zogby's approach "has been to find broad areas of commonality, the overarching groupings that tens of millions of Americans find themselves in," while Bishop says that Americans are "sorting by economy, by ways of life, by education, by belief and, only every election day, by politics."

How can both these statements be true?  Most obviously, there can be unity across population groups amid geographic separation. It is easier than before to communicate with people who live in other cities; in my own world of academia, many have noted the transferring of allegience of faculty from their university where they work to the academic "field" they inhabit.

Beyond this, surveys have repeatedly found that most Americans have moderate views on issues (as shown in the distributions of ideological positions displayed in my previous entry) and also are not particularly ideological, in that it is not particularly easy to predict views on one issue from views on another. As we say in our book, each person maintains a mix of attitudes within himself or herself. For instance, 40% of Americans in a 2004 survey labeled themselves as Republican, but only 23% identified themselves as both Republican and conservative.

Almost half of Republicans do not describe themselves as being ideologically conservative. If we also consider issue preferences, the constraint of people's political preferences looks even weaker. Only 6% of respondents were Republicans who think of themselves as conservatives, oppose abortion, and have conservative views on affirmative action and health policy. Fully 85% of self-declared Republicans are nonconservative or take a nonconservative stand on at least one of these three traditional issues.

A similar picture emerges if we look at Democrats. In this case, of the 49% self-declared Democrats in the sample, only 36% call themselves liberals. Overall, almost 90% of Democrats are nonliberal or have nonliberal views on abortion, affirmative action, or health policy.

These numbers should not be surprising, given that in general, the correlation between party identification or ideology and opinion on political issues is low. Knowing somebody's political identification increases our chances to guess his or her issue preferences, but not by much. This supports Zogby's view of Americans as nonideological and Bishop's view of sorting based on lifestyle rather than politics.

So, yes, most people are not consistently ideological in their attitudes. But people have strong views about the Democratic and Republican parties. Higher-income Americans in red states have distinctly different views than higher-income Americans in blue states.  See this graph, which shows average ideological positions (as estimated from survey questions on economic and social issues) among poor, middle-income, and rich voters in red, purple, and blue states:

The higher the income level, the more distinct are the residents of red and blue states. This doesn't contradict Zogby's point that most Americans are broadly in the political center; it just shows that the distinctions that do exist manifest themselves geographically. It is a challenge of politicians, when campaigning, to make the most of these divisions and, when governing, to find the underlying unity. --Andrew Gelman

See the whole Red-Blue Roundtable

Red-Blue Roundtable: John Zogby

We have pretty well established the many ways in which Americans have figured out to divide ourselves into warring political cultures. There are a number of ways to move beyond this. One of my colleagues has written very eloquently about "microtrends," small little clusters of new demographic groups that provide guideposts for strategists and marketers. My approach has been to find broad areas of commonality, the overarching groupings that tens of millions of Americans find themselves in. That is how we build bridges, reach consensus, and move a nation forward, as opposed to locking it into gridlock and political entropy. And the exciting thing is that these large clusters and meta-movements are being driven by the people themselves. Thus, instead of a quadrillion little pieces of religious fragments, tens of millions of Americans are adopting a Secular Spiritualism – a myriad of ways to reject and avoid materialism and crass consumerism, replacing it with a search for a broader purpose to their lives.

There is a new investor class – The Investor Next Door – who reject the Michael Douglas character and the message of "greed is good" in the movie Wall Street. These new investors have modest expectations for a comfortable retirement and educating their kids and they increasingly prefer socially responsible investments. I even redefine age cohorts and try to fit them into a role they will play in a new America defined by living within limits.

There have been huge tectonic changes in our lives since the 1970s -- remember we lost the war, dealt with stagflation, experienced commodity shortages, were at the knees of an oil embargo, and saw our economy shift. The truth is Americans have come to understand this, whether they experience a shrinking dollar in their own lives or a dollar that just seems to mean less the more they get. There are also tens of millions of Baby Boomers who will face 25 to 35 more years of healthy living after their retirement. These are Americans who are making changes in their own lives and making different kinds of choices as consumers.

It is our institutions and leaders that are seriously lagging. The people get it just fine. There is a new political consensus – for change, for problem-solving, for consensus-building – instead of partisanship and there is a new American consumer. --John Zogby

See the whole Red-Blue Roundtable.

Red-Blue Roundtable: Bill Bishop

The Big Sort is big because we aren't just separating by political party. We're sorting by economy, by ways of life, by education, by belief and, only every election day, by politics.

America really is different from place to place. To show that, Bob Cushing developed a simple scheme. He divided the nation's 3100 counties into four groups based on the 2004 election results. There were counties that voted in a landslide (more than 20 percentage points) for George Bush. They are bright red in the charts below.

Those counties that voted for Bush but at margins under 20 points are in a lighter red (well, kinda purple).

The counties that voted for John Kerry in a landslide are bright blue and the counties that voted for the Democrat at margins under 20 percentage points are light blue.

It so happens that about a quarter of the nation's population are in each of these four groups. So things are nice and (almost) even.

Over time, these county groups were collecting different kinds of people. For instance, here we can see that the blue counties from 2004 were pulling in more people with college degrees. The greater the vote for the Democrat, the higher the proportion of the population that has a college degree. (Get used to this stairstep pattern.)

Red-Blue Roundtable: Andrew Gelman

Bill Bishop and John Zogby both point out that there are important divisions within as well as between states. Bishop focuses on partisan divisions distinguishing his blue neighborhood of Travis Heights from bright red areas nearby in Texas, contrasts that appear in voting patterns, political contributions, and social attitudes such as gay marriage. Zogby is more interested in cross-cutting categories such as economic winners in growing states, or people falling behind in declining states: these are groups that are not clearly tied to one party or another.

I attribute part of the difference in focus between Bishop and Zogby to their different goals: Bishop is interested in America's political divisions and thus writes about the increasing number of local areas that are becoming politically more monochromatic. In contrast, Zogby, as a pollster, is particularly interested in groups of people who can be persuaded--swing voters--and their relation to the economy, which remains the most important issue in deciding people's votes.

As a result of these different focuses, Bishop sees Americans as divided whereas Zogby sees the country as fundamentally centrist. What do the data say?

There's truth in both Bishop's and Zogby's perspectives; it all depends on how you slice the population. First, in defense of Bishop's view of polarization, there's lots of evidence that partisanship is much more ideological than it used to be. For example, here are the average positions of self-declared Democrats, Republicans, and independents on the issue of abortion:

As late as the Reagan years, the parties were indistinguishable on abortion. As we discuss in chapter 8 of our Red State, Blue State book, voters have become polarized in their attitudes to their parties and in economic, social, and foreign policy issues, in a way that they weren't, 30 or 50 years ago.

Yes, the voters are divided by party. But where do they stand on the issues? Here, Zogby's hypothesis of moderation is supported by detailed modeling of survey data. When we put voters and congressmembers on a single left-right scale, we found that most voters are in the middle with their elected representatives sitting to their left and right:

These ideologies are not self-declared "liberalism" or "conservatism"--we don't necessarily trust responses on these politically-loaded terms--but are estimated from positions on a bunch of issues. In the book, we also break these down by Democratic, Republican, and battleground states.

Finally, I read with interest Bishop's description of geographical and ideological sorting, and I'd only like to add that this sorting is predominantly being done by upper-income Americans. It's hard to get precise data on political affiliation and mobility, but I suspect it's the richer people who are more able to pick neighborhoods and "decamp for more politically hospitable environs." These are the people who are making red America red and blue America blue, and forming the patterns we see on the Amazon map and elsewhere. --Andrew Gelman

See the whole Red-Blue Roundtable.

Red-Blue Roundtable: Bill Bishop

The sign outside my local elementary school last spring wished students a "great summer" in a typical Travis Heights way: "Whatever Higher Power(s) You May Or May Not Believe In...YEE HA!"

Gender neutral, faith neutral, God neutral...that's my neighborhood here in Austin, Texas. In 2000, George Bush came in behind both Al Gore AND Ralph Nader in Travis Heights. When 70 percent of Texas voted in favor of a ban on gay marriage, my precinct voted 90% against. In my zip code, 90% of the federal election contributions this year went to Democrats.

Oh, and one more thing. Travis Heights Elementary is exactly one block from the house where liberal writer Molly Ivins lived. (If Molly were still alive and writing, our zip code would be bright blue on the Amazon book map.)

To the cable television boys who finger paint on the electoral map, Texas is always solid red. (The CNN guy never taps his digit down in our direction.) But here, in the neighborhood where I live, we're bluer than Vermont. And that's the point about all those red and blue state maps. They are good for showing what has been a remarkably static division in the Electoral College. But they miss how people are living and, I suspect, buying books.

The divisions state to state are real, but they are nothing compared to how Americans are sorting themselves from community to community. Statistician Bob Cushing and I traced the votes at the county level from 1948 to 2004 in our book The Big Sort. We could see that majorities, Republican or Democratic, were piling up in communities. The last five presidential elections have been as close as any in the last 100 years. But an increasing number of people live in counties where elections aren't close at all, where either one party or another wins in a landslide.

So, in 1976 — the nearly dead-even contest between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford — about a quarter of all voters lived in a county where one side or the other won by 20 points or more. By 2004 — the nearly dead-even contest between John Kerry and George W. Bush — almost a half of all voters lived in places, like Travis Heights, where 20 points or more decided the election.

When you look at local voting results over time, you see that counties tip Republican or Democratic, and then they keep tipping as more Republicans move into Republican counties and Democrats cluster in Democratic communities. (Or, at the same time, counties grow increasingly lopsided as members of the minority party decamp for more politically hospitable environs.)

One half of U.S. voters live in counties that have remained unchanged in their presidential preference since 1980; 60 percent live in counties that have not changed since 1988; and nearly 73 percent live in counties that have not changed since 1992. Orange and Los Angeles counties in California are side by side, but local political majorities have been growing in opposite directions since 1976, a phenomenon found in two-thirds of U.S. communities.

Our sense is that people aren't moving to be around others who feel as they did about the Iraq War or single-payer health plans. People are clustering around others who live as they do — people who have similar lifestyles, who read similar kinds of books. And every four years those ways of life align with political party.

Marketing folks have known for some time that demographic factors have little meaning these days. People don't define themselves as "single, male, college-educated, 25 to 35 years of age." They think of themselves as environmentalists, car-racing enthusiasts, or, as one woman told me, "I'm an ocean-oriented person." They know that to learn about another's politics you consider the way they live, not their age, race, or level of education. In a radio talk show in Minneapolis, three callers told me they realized they had moved into a community with political opposites when they saw their neighbors using lawn chemicals. (It was a public radio show, in case you couldn't tell.)

Politics these days aren't about issues. People don't line up with a party because they agree with a set of policy position papers. One political scientist described the choice of a political party this way: You have a choice of attending one of two parties being held in two rooms off the same hall. You look into each room and you look at the people — how they appear, their gestures, what they're wearing. You get a vibe and then you join with the group you think is most like you.

You might even look at the books they are reading.

That's how people pick neighborhoods these days. It's also how they pick churches and civic clubs. It's the reason people with college degrees are clustering in particular cities and why some places are succeeding economically while others are slipping further behind.

That's The Big Sort. And it plays out more in culture, in books, than in politics. --Bill Bishop

See the whole Red-Blue Roundtable.

Red-Blue Roundtable: Andrew Gelman

The big message of our Red State, Blue State book is that the "culture war" between red and blue America is real, but it is concentrated among upper-income voters.  Richer Americans tend to be more politically involved and more ideological in their voting patterns.

Here are some maps from our book showing our estimate of who would've won each state in 2004 if only the votes of rich, middle-income, or poor voters were counted. For each scenario, we show the states (red if Bush would've won in that income category, blue if Kerry would've won) and then a scatterplot of estimated Bush vote vs. state income.

Among the rich, you see a strong red-state, blue-state divide, with Kerry winning rich voters in only four states--the cultural elite of New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and California--and Bush winning the other forty-six. Going to lower-income voters, you see Kerry winning in a mixture of rich and poor states.

So, what does this say about Amazon book-buying patterns? Or, more to the point, what do Amazon book-buying patterns tell us about the electorate? I assume Amazon purchasers are mostly in the upper third of income, and so I'd expect to see pretty strong red-state, blue-state divisions. And, indeed, the colors of Amazon's red-blue map of book purchasers looks a lot more like the voting patterns of the rich than the poor.

For example, look at Nevada, whose Amazon purchases are going 2:1 Red to Blue. Nevada as a whole is split evenly between the two parties, but higher-income Nevadans have gone Republican in recent elections.

Higher-income, more politically involved citizens drive our political discussions, on both the left and the right, and so I think the Amazon data are telling us something. But let's not forget that the geographic distribution of political attitudes is different among other segments of the population. --Andrew Gelman

See the whole Red-Blue Roundtable.

Red-Blue Roundtable: John Zogby

I think we're moving well beyond red states vs. blue states. Back in 2004, this artificial construct actually defined the election and the nation. We saw in our polling huge differences in demographics, attitudes, and behaviors between citizens of the red states and citizens of the blue states.

This could very well be the year when the old red state vs. blue state paradigm disappears. Frankly there are other demographics that I’m watching, notably the Equinox Voters -- the Spring Aheads, who are the economic winners in key new- economy states like New Hampshire, North Carolina, Florida, New Mexico, and Colorado vs. the Fall Backwards, the victims of the old-economy who are bouncing from lower paying job to lower paying job in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Missouri.

People are buying fewer hardbound books: first and foremost that's a statement on the economy and technology -- other forms of reading cost significantly less. Right-wing books have their devoted following, thus an Ann Coulter or Bill O'Reilly is assured strong sales. While the left has its devoted followers, they seem to show up mainly on the blogs and online.

Those differences still persist but are moving into the background because of the rise of the political center and a growing need by Americans of all stripes for problem solvers not ideologues. That is what over 80% of voters tell us they want -- a problem solver, a competent manager of government, someone who can work with the opposition, and someone who can command the military. Not one of those is ideological or partisan. The most interesting thing to watch this year is not the hyper-partisan rhetoric, but instead the way both major candidates are appealing to the middle. Something worthy of note: there is always a centrist political party waiting to be formed. If either party tilts too far toward its base, the center could rise. Frankly, had this election been about Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee vs. Hillary Clinton, I think a centrist like Mike Bloomberg running on the characteristics I just noted had the potential to do very well. --John Zogby

Election 2008: Red-Blue Roundtable

Halloween and even Christmas decorations are starting to appear this fall, but it's still the season of red and blue: yard signs, cable TV graphics, and, most of all, maps, maps, maps. We've been following our own electoral map of Amazon customers' book reading at the same time that we've been watching the polls predict the final red and blue presidential tally. But even as we were constructing that snazzy map (have I mentioned that it's snazzy? Uh, yes.), we were wondering: how well do those "red" and "blue" labels describe us now (if they ever did)? And what connection does our book-buying map (which has been very red for the past couple of months) have to the election maps (where the polls have been turning more and more blue recently).

So we've brought together some people who might actually know more than us about those questions (we may be bookselling professionals but we're certainly amateur demographers). This week we're hosting a Red-Blue Roundtable on Omnivoracious, featuring four authors and bloggers who have looked at that supposed red-blue divide, and who will be talking about it here, along with taking a look at our book-buying map and, of course, next month's election. I've started them off with a few questions of my own along those lines, but please step in with your own comments and questions as well. They'll be posting here all week, and you'll be able to find the discussion collected here. Joining us will be:

• John Zogby, one of the world's best known pollsters, as the president and CEO of Zogby International. His new book, The Way We'll Be: The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the American Dream, argues that we are moving beyond the red/blue divide toward a "new national consensus."
• Bill Bishop, a longtime reporter and the co-editor of The Daily Yonder, a web-based publication covering rural America. In The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart, he sees a country that is becoming polarized less by red and blue states than by "way-of-life segregation" in which we choose to live in microcommunities that match our own ideologies.
• Andrew Gelman, professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University. He has just written Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do, which parses voting data to show that many of our assumptions about red and blue states are wrong, and that the real red/blue divide is not between rich blue states and poor red states but between rich and poor voters within those states.
• Valdis Krebs, the founder and chief scientist at Orgnet.com. His innovative network analysis has been used by clients including IBM, Google, and Boeing, and covered by The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Business Week. He's been tracking red/blue book buying at Amazon even longer (and no doubt more wisely) than we have, using our people-who-bought-this-also-bought recommendations to map a network of how Amazon book purchasers organize their political reading. He blogs at thenetworkthinker.com.

We're thrilled that all four of them can stop by this week during a very busy political month, and we hope you'll join in the discussion too. --Tom