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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   30777 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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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.

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