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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   30778 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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In the US women are more likely to register for voting and have a higher turnout:

https://cawp.rutgers.edu/facts/voters/gender-differences-voter-turnout

It has been so since the 60s. For Presidential elections, it amounts to roughly 10 million more votes coming from women than men.

Why do you think it is the case?

Yes. My girlfriend has voted like five times in San Francisco this year. She complains they have too many elections there, but keeps voting anyway.

I haven't voted since 2008.

Probably many factors, but if we're in CW thread I'll notice if it were the other way, somebody would already have declared it a national crisis and got a big budget allocation for fixing it. I mean, almost 3% sexist gap! That's millions of people oppressed and disenfranchised!

Probably a mix of a big pile of factors:

-- Homeless people, whether in the true sleeping rough sense or the more vague no-fixed-abode sense, don't vote. The vast majority of homeless people are men (though felony disenfranchisement might take care of most of these anyway)

-- Felony disenfranchisement. Which is also pretty vaguely understood, probably a good number of misdemeanor convictions that guys think mean they can't vote. Given @ymeshkout's work on the topic, authorities themselves might not even be sure who can vote, so why risk it?

-- On a related note, men are more likely to have open warrants, unpaid fines, unpaid taxes, child support arrears, or other legal issues. Such men will frequently avoid all contact with "the system" assuming that something like voting would immediately get him reported to the cops who would come pick him up for his unpaid parking tickets or whatever.

-- Correlation vs causation is tough to gage, but educated people vote. More girls graduate high school and college.

-- Women are more involved in civic organizations, who in turn lead get out the vote efforts. Women are more likely to attend church, churches lead GOTV in many demographics

-- Women are more likely to have friends, who will keep in touch with them about voting. This is a huge part of how people get out to vote, I can say personally every Primary and General election I'm calling friends of mine to remind them.

-- Many stereotypically male professions, manufacturing or construction work for example, are jobs that would be difficult to duck out for a few hours to vote in the afternoon. Where female dominated office and retail jobs might make it easier to take a few hours off.

-- Men tend more towards extremes. Men are more likely to follow cockamamie ideologies, and more likely to whine that politics are dumb and doesn't affect anything anyway.

Maybe it is because men understand voting isn’t really individually useful?

Your vote will probably never change an election outcome (though, you never know - see Exeter in 1910 and some other examples), margins do matter. A bigger margin of victory will obviously embolden a candidate to be more aggressive in pursuing their policies, and vice versa, so your vote does make an (albeit very small) contribution in that respect.

I'm seeing vote difference in CO-3 district of about 550 votes. Given how close the House results are in general, this seat could (though it isn't now) plausibly be crucial for House majority. So 550 votes would change the course of national politics for at least 2 years. Sure, it's not individual vote, but it's not that far from it. There are even closer races, probably - I didn't check every one, I just noticed this one because Boebert is a figure of some prominence.

Yet 550 votes is not 1 vote.

I would suggest this preoccupation with what might be "individually useful" is symptomatic of the toxic femininity that has come to infect the whole of our intellectual class.

To quote George S. Patton...

An army is a team. It lives, eats, sleeps, and fights as a team. This individual hero stuff is bullshit. The bilious bastards who write that stuff for the Saturday Evening Post don't know any more about real battle than they do about fucking. And we have the best team—we have the finest food and equipment, the best spirit and the best men in the world. Why, by God, I actually pity these poor bastards we're going up against.

All the real heroes are not storybook combat fighters. Every single man in the army plays a vital role. So don't ever let up. Don't ever think that your job is unimportant. What if every truck driver decided that he didn't like the whine of the shells and turned yellow and jumped headlong into a ditch? That cowardly bastard could say to himself, 'Hell, they won't miss me, just one man in thousands.' What if every man said that? Where in the hell would we be then? No, thank God, Americans don't say that. Every man does his job. Every man is important. The ordnance men are needed to supply the guns, the quartermaster is needed to bring up the food and clothes for us because where we are going there isn't a hell of a lot to steal. Every last damn man in the mess hall, even the one who boils the water to keep us from getting the GI shits, has a job to do.

This is a good point. The individually useful thing is the result of a kind of libertarian transactionalism that once learned is difficult to unlearn. You can posit a possibly naive but socially useful state of mind wrt politics before coming into contact with it.

But I'm too far gone now. I can't pretend like I didn't learn it.

There is a stereotype that men like to fix problems; women like to talk about problems. If that is true, voting seems to fall (from an individual perspective) more into the latter category instead of the former. A single man might focus his energy into something that can make a difference.

There is also in your Patton quote a bit of Marx’s alienation of labor. Sure, the cook has to abstract why what he does helps the unit. But at the same time he sees a tangible result (food is made). Voting is more abstract.

Agreed. In my earlier years I was interested in WW1 and especially WW2 eating all the autobiographies of fighter pilots and tankers from all sides. I made extra effort to watch every war movie that was on TV. And then my world was upended when I read Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe. His book was all about port capacity, supply line security and throughput and where to open fronts strategically or where to hamper German capacities all with tables and numbers. It really opened my eyes - no amount of heroism on any side could ever made the difference against such a well oiled machine. It did not matter if Germans had "better" tanks or jet fighters or even more experienced troops. They lost the moment US entered the war.

On a kind of related note, this is another thing I find funny about Paul Verhoeven's adaptation of Starship Troopers. Verhoeven famously didn't read the book and basically set out to to subvert what he saw as "some warmonger's manifesto" yet accidentally made a decent enough adaptation that Heinlein's core point about the importance of "doing one's part" even when it may be relatively insignificant in the grand scheme of things remains readily legible.

I find it weird to invoke this idea about voting of all things. Old Blood and Guts wasn't exactly elected into the position.

No he wasn't but this is also one of those bits if inferential distance. "Old blood and guts" was "old blood and guts" because he acted in contravention to rationalist conceptions of power rather than accordance with. His degree of success exists as a sort of "fuck you" to the modern academic ethos which is why he is so despised by the modern academic. The grand Irony of course being that Patton was probably more of a "democrat" than any one currently in the democratic party. After all where does the power of an army lie if not in the rank and file? IE "the demos"

Adding my vote (haha!) to this one. Women are just more susceptible to propaganda in general, and this includes "YoUr VoTe MaTtErS!" propaganda.

'Your vote matters' isn't really intended to mean 'your vote might decide the next President/Mayor/legislator', it (at least in my mind) is intended to convey the point that the result of elections matters in more ways than deciding the winner. The more crushing the margin of the winner, the less they have to worry about winning over voters other than their core base, or alternatively the closer the margin the more they have to appease their less enthused voters and potential swing voters voted for someone else.

Now, of course, one vote won't make an enormous difference to the overall perception of the margin, but it is basically true that ever vote matters just a little bit even if you almost certainly won't change the winner. This is especially true because not just margin in isolation, but margin also gets significant attention paid to it. In the 1970 UK election, which saw Heath replace Wilson in No. 10, the average swing to the Conservatives was only about 4% - now some seats only had about 30,000 votes cast (many even fewer), which means that a pretty small number of voters could change the swing significantly.

Women tend to score higher on conscientiousness than men, and voting is a boring activity that requires planning and deferred gratification.

I know in my house, my husband’s mail-in ballot would never make it out the door without my prodding (even though I know his vote will undo mine).

As a note, women score about the same as men on conscientiousness, however men score more on subcategory of industriousness and women more on subcategory of orderliness: the tendency toward tidiness, routine and perfectionism. So your premise stands but with this caveat.

Where is the gratification? Voting seems like a cost without any real reward. It isn’t “defer a marshmallow today for two tomorrow.” Instead it’s defer a marshmallow today for nothing tomorrow.

Winning elections is the reward?

Probably more that 'watching the victory of the side you supported' is the reward.

If vicarious enjoyment of a win you personally did (almost) nothing to contribute to wasn't a thing, professional sports wouldn't be a trillion dollar industry.

Elections aren’t won by you voting; they are won by influencing a multitude of people to vote.

But if you vote, you become part of the "winning team". Voting is like going to watch your favourite sports team: you have almost no influence on the result, but you feel part of something.

Or the majority of the time they're determined by a relatively small population in swing seats

At a macro level I think the big thing is it would mean the democrats assumption they crush the popular vote is misleading.

And under the surface tough to sort thru because of felons and the heavy black proportion. But these non-voters I would guess are still heavy gop leans.

Politics today is about persuasive emotional messaging, which women are more receptive to.

This isn't a place for low effort comments and memeing. Don't do this.

Two ideas:

  1. The start of the mainstreaming of modern second-wave feminism was basically in the 60s. This perhaps demoralizes many (if not most) men and of course demoralized people vote less over time.

  2. As modern politics developed, voting became more often driven by social/moral/etc. panics (commonly of the "They're coming for [X]!" or "Think of the [children/women/oppressed minorities]!" variety, though of course variations of these take hold to some degree at times on both sides) and emotional/moralistic appeals, and naturally the more socially-attuned and emotionally-driven gender would be more vulnerable to them. (Though this effect likely works in both directions, with more women voters causing politics to trend in that direction just as much as they're more likely to turn out for it.)

There's over 20 million felons in the country, the vast majority of which are men, I'd imagine that's a big chunk of it.

I think this is the largest confounder.

Naively assuming that ~1/3 of all voting-aged people vote, And assuming that roughly everyone in prison is a man, this explains around 6 million of the missing votes. There are a lot more hidden variables but I'll leave that for the "social scientists".

Are felons less likely to vote demographically, though? Wild speculation but I'd imagine a variety of factors that correlate with felonious inclination are anti-correlated with voting.

Since they are banned by law from voting in most places, yes.

No as in 'things that make you more likely to be a felon also make you less likely to be a voter'

Hard to disentangle that when they are barred from voting.

To put out an alternative to all the theories you'll frequently see here about women controlling soft power, maybe women just have more follow through?

Could be that men are better/more capable of signaling socially but then not actually committing to the corresponding action, because they have a more isolated sense of identity. Whereas the identity of women is more directly socially mediated, so their actions are more affected by what they say to others and how they identify on along tribal lines.

To put out an alternative to all the theories you'll frequently see here about women controlling soft power, maybe women just have more follow through?

The conventional wisdom is that "easy voting" (i.e. policies that reduce the friction to vote) helps the left. If your theory is correct, then that's partially backwards -- the follow through required in a low-barrier system would result in more men voting, which in turn would (in aggregate) help the right.

I'm not convinced (at all) of this, but it seems like an interesting corollary.

The type of men and women who benefit from easy voting are not similar to the median voter. When you are discussing the least likely 20% of each coalition to vote that is what you are targeting in get out the vote efforts.

That depends on the distribution of reasons for the set of voters in the least likely 20%.

Above /u/FiveHourMarathon suggests that part of the holdup is that some typically-male jobs don't accommodate ducking out to vote. That's one example of a reason that's not likely to have a large skew on those voters.

My model is a bit different than that. Democrat get out the vote efforts is about cajoling demographics with 80%+ D lean to actually go to the polls. These are basically college students, blacks, and poor single mothers. There aren't really any 80% R lean demos that can be harvested in this manner.

The R strategy would have to be getting a bunch of 60/40 people into the booth by convincing them that the 60 is really worth it.

That's just a question of how you slice up what constitutes a demographic. People who drive pickup trucks, or own boats, or belong to a gun club, or operate heavy power equipment are probably as R as college students are D; Republican failures to target them effectively are a failure of imagination and effort rather than existence.

Before I get accused of saying this to boo outgroup: I've worked with the campaign targeting software offered by both parties. It's playing a World of Warcraft raid with a full suite of add-ons and macros; versus playing SNES Yoshi's island.

Also, huffing my own paint, as I pointed out in a prior post churches are in some ways restricted on political advocacy, this weakens the ability to use churches as demographic groupings for GOTV. But that advantages women anyway.

People who drive pickup trucks, or own boats, or belong to a gun club, or operate heavy power equipment are probably as R as college students are D

But which of those are low-propensity voters? Gun club guys almost certainly are not. Boat and truck ownership puts you solidly in the middle incomes, which is also not associated with low voting rates. Heavy power equipment operators also make good money and its not a 70 IQ job. The low propensity R-voter is adjacent to those sorts of people, but is working a shittier job than those people you pointed out. And they are right next to a 60/40 hispanic guy whos propensity is to vote Dem not Rep.

the follow through required in a low-barrier system would result in more men voting, which in turn would (in aggregate) help the right.

You imply that the male

thought process goes:

"I have a certain amount of willpower X and the effort barrier to my voting is >X, therefore I will not vote"

and thus if the effort barrier for voting is lowered to <X, men will vote. If instead we posit that the male thought process goes

"I have a certain amount of willpower X and the effort barrier to my voting is >0, therefore I will not vote"

then male voters actually WON'T be tempted out to the polls by reductions in effort barriers, because the effort barriers would have to be impossibly small.

Yes, we can debate a threshold vs no-threshold model here. My understand from the empirical results studying Motor Voter and similar programs is that they do something which suggests that there is at least some sensitivity to effort.

I think what I was trying to get at in my original comment is that men could be more likely to 'socially optimize' or lie about voting than women are, for some reason. Not sure I fully endorse that.

the effort barriers would have to be impossibly small.

I think this depends on the context. For instance I would imagine if the 'effort barrier' was that everyone could track if you voted and there was real social status to be gained/lost on your actual participation (as opposed to stated participation), we might see more men vote than women.

Some truth here. My engagement in online economics and politics is probably too 1%. I’ve voted once in my life. Though a confounding variable that mostly lived in areas where my team was going to lose.

This seems to be contradicted by how much more likely men are to sign up to go to war though, even though that's a collective action that doesn't reinforce any isolated sense of identity.

I think war has been the historically 'male' past time, and the activity most associated with glory and/or status. It's natural that more men are drawn to war than women, given the historic focus on war as a way to win glory.

If anything it's amazing that modern society has allowed women to be grunts in war so readily. The modern Western idea of letting women participate formally in the armed services is a remarkable innovation. Given that most of human cultural development has happened in the last ~15,000 years, it's significant that women are only now involved in the armed forces' ground troops of the hegemonic U.S.

All that being said, I see war as one of the last male holdouts, especially since men are still more powerful today in a physically violent sense.

Seems like a straightforward corollary of the Things vs People difference in preferences among genders. Men tend to be more interested in doing physical things and making things and thinking about object level things, while women tend to be more interested in social things and people and interactions.

Voting is an indirect social thing. You are not making the world a better place directly on the object level, you are not building bridges or earning money or arresting criminals as a voter. Instead, you are exerting influence on the assignment of people to a role that will do those things. Voting is not a central example of social interactions, but it fits into it better than it fits into object level things. As such, we should expect women to be more interested in and engaged in voting, and men to be more interested in running for office where they actually get to do stuff directly. (I'm somewhat hesitant on the latter conclusion. You can make an argument that being a politician is still social since you're directing other people to do things rather than physically doing it yourself, but the same is true of being a manager or CEO and we see more men rise to those roles anyway, so it's probably object level enough).

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