Reading Arthur C. Brooks‘ Who Really Cares reminded me of a bit of extracurricular research I did along these lines as an undergraduate. The resulting chart, which I used to rile up some of my fellow students at Yale, can be seen here.
The book is interesting and well worth picking up (though you might only need to read the first couple of chapters to get the idea). The book’s main topic is to show that, contrary to popular wisdom among both liberals and conservatives, conservatives are both more likely to give to charity and to give more. Once that datum is established, Brooks goes on to explain why this is so. This explanation is significant, because it shows what is misleading about saying that conservatives are more compassionate than liberals.
It turns out that religious people are much more generous and compassionate than the secular types. Furthermore, if you divide the population into four groups rather than two (religious conservatives, secular conservatives, religious liberals, and secular liberals), it turns out that the secular conservatives are the least compassionate, with religious liberals a close second to the religious conservatives. So the reason that conservatives are more compassionate in this country is because religious folk here tend to be conservative. That’s rather brief — Brooks identifies three other significant factors besides religion — but you get the idea. This point about how it is not actually the political conservativeness itself that fosters compassion is a point that a number of Brooks’ critics failed to pick up on, with the result that some of the reviews of the book say some rather silly things.
The striking difference between religious conservatives and secular conservatives reminded me of Brad Wilcox‘s research into religion’s effect on marriage and parenting (Soft Patriarchs, New Men is also well worth a read). For many of the measures that he looked at (e.g., wives’ happiness with their husband’s affection and understanding, couples’ socializing time, wives’ likelihood of escaping domestic violence), conservative Protestants who were active in a church ranked significantly higher than mainline Protestants who were active. Interestingly, however, conservative nominal Protestants, i.e., ones not actively affiliated with a church, ranked lower than both active and nominal mainline Protestants.
All this goes to show that dividing society into two groups is often exceedingly unhelpful and misleading. I could now start a rant about two-party politics in the U.S., but perhaps this post is long enough already.
-Sydney
Alan Schmierer
I guess I have to wonder about a few possible confounding factors:
1) Do they take into account the relative wealth of conservatives vs. liberals? That is to say, do conservatives give more because they have more?
2) Do they differentiate between religions? For example, does a religious Jew give more than a secular Jew, or do their generalizations only hold for Christians?
3) Do they count religious organizations (like one’s church) within their counts of “charitable donations”?
Just some thoughts. I miss my random chats w/you, Sydney!
-L
1) Brooks does address a variety of confounding factors, including wealth. I found the book a bit repetitive, but there are definitely a few relevant details that did not make it into my summary. One thing he doesn’t address, though, is wealth with respect to motivation for giving. At one point he argues against the claim that people just give in order to boost their reputations. In general I have little use for the cynical view that there is no such thing as altruism. But I didn’t find Brooks’ argument here entirely satisfactory. Specifically, I suspect that some of the wealthy, high-profile philanthropists who get to have buildings, endowments, and so on named after them do in fact give as a means of attaining fame, good reputations, social capital, etc.
That worry aside, the point that conservatives give more than liberals holds true even after controlling for wealth.
By the way, are conservatives wealthier than liberals? I have no idea. Blue states tend to be wealthier than red states, but that of course doesn’t entail that Democrats are wealthier than Republicans. Though experiences at Yale might suggest that liberals control a lot of the wealth in the country …
2) Brooks briefly discusses the difference that different religions might make. In a lot of cases, the numbers for non-Christian groups are so small that it is impossible to come up with statistically significant results from the available data. What evidence there is, though, suggests that it makes little or no difference what religion one belongs to as far as how charitable one is. Rather, the difference is between religious and secular.
3) Yes, Brooks does include donations to one’s church. This, of course, is quite tendentious, and so he discusses this issue at some length. I think his argument for why such donations should be counted is quite convincing. It is also noteworthy that a lot of his results would obtain (though less strikingly) even if they were not counted, since religious types give so much more money overall that they end up giving more money to secular organizations than seculars do.
4) Two other points. One, I think there is at least one pretty serious weakness in some of Brooks’ specific claims, in that he doesn’t address cost of living in some cases where that would clearly be important. That is, “amount given / (income – cost of living)” is more meaningful than “amount given / income.” Still, I don’t think there is any reason to think that correcting for this would falsify his main claims. It would just make them less dramatic (i.e., less likely to get the attention of the press). Two, data for Canada supports claims similar to Brooks’. I took a class from Kurt Bowen at Acadia, in which he talked quite a bit about his research into these sorts of issues. His research also showed that religious people gave much more both in terms of money and volunteer time than the non-religious.
-Sydney