mgroves

Recently, Zogby and the Norman Lear center did a survey to find out the entertainment tastes of conservatives and liberals.

First off, note that Norman Lear is an outspoken liberal and friend of Meathead, but also that Zogby is a credible source of statistics and polling.

Let’s go over the concept of correlation and average, briefly. As you should know, correlation is not causation, it’s simply the statistical strength of a relationship. So for instance, just because 85% of people who drink beer are healthy, doesn’t mean beer makes you healthy. It could mean that being healthy makes you drink beer, or that some other factor external to the data causes both.

The data for the survey is attached. The sample sizes were statistically pretty good (n around 1000 for each political grouping). However, there are no confidence intervals or anything like that (I’m sure they were calculated, but they aren’t in the data), so there’s no way of knowing how accurate these point estimates are.

With that quick preface, here are some interesting points from the survey:

• Dr. Gregory House apparently unifies us all with his cynical cruelty. Conservatives and liberals all enjoy his show.
• Of all the movies surveyed about, The Departed was the only apolitical/irreligious movie that was preferred by one group (liberals) — I guess because it’s R-rated? C’mon adult conservatives, this is a good movie!
• Conservatives don’t seem to play a lot of video games, what with being employed and all.
• Out of 15 TV and film genres, “arts” emerged as the one with the highest positive correlation to liberal viewers, “arts” being a codeword for “gay”.

(Those last two are jokes, people, jokes!)

And here are some interesting things that weren’t talked about in the article, but were hiding in the data:

• People polled were all likely voters. So there are hardly any non-voters. I think this is a potential bias, as a non-voter isn’t necessarily apolitical in their opinions.
• Liberals surveyed believed that government generally solved problems (69.7%). I’m going to assume they think that liberal government generally solved problems, not government in general. Whereas conservatives (89.5%) think that government doesn’t solve problems (it doesn’t matter WHO is in there). This is strange given that the data also suggests that 80% or more of all surveyed (including liberals) were cynical about the motives of elected officials. So what’s up liberals, something doesn’t jive here.
• Nader got most of his survey votes from so-called “moderates”. Interesting.
• Liberals were observant enough to say they lived on “planet Earth” but were unable to specify any further.
• The “global economy” issue was close to split 50/50 among liberals. I’m guessing 50% are in “dey took our jerbs” camp, and 50% are in the “every other country is superior” camp?