The Autonomous and Republican parties are sometimes thought of as mirror images of each other on the right and left, simply the coalitions of voters that brand up each party are quite dissimilar. In this mail, we compare the demographic profiles of those who identify with each party drawing on data from the Grinnell Higher National Poll (GNCP) conducted in Nov of 2018.

Overview

Whatever attempt to describe the members of a political political party involves a diverseness of challenges. On the one hand, research has by and large found that an private's party identification is a social identity that is highly stable over time (Green, Palmquist and Schickler 2002). Once a young adult identifies as either a Democrat or Republican, that choice is likely to endure for the remainder of their life. On the other paw, parties themselves are continually in a country of change every bit older generations exit the electorate and new generations come of age (Miller and Shanks 1996). Major political events can also impact parties by breaking apart the coalitions that make upward the parties.

Both parties have changed dramatically over fourth dimension – a fact well illustrated by the history of the Democratic political party. In the Ceremonious War era, it dedicated the institution of slavery, favored a weak national government, and after the war, opposed protecting the rights of emancipated African Americans (Foner 1990, Key 1984). In the New Deal era, Democrats were divided between a northern and southern wing. The erstwhile Democratic party of the Civil State of war era endured in the due south, while the northern wing of the party took on the crusade of workers and advocated for a powerful national authorities to intervene in the nation'southward economy (Polsby 2004). In time, northern Democrats became supporters of ceremonious rights for African Americans, fracturing the party in 2 and ultimately leading southern Democrats to abandon the party (Schickler 2016). Today, Democrats are known equally the party of economic and cultural liberalism – a complete reversal from their positions of the 1860s (Brownstein 2007).

Changes in the coalitions of voters supporting each party reflect this evolution. For example, African American voters were more probable to back up the Republican party in the wake of the Ceremonious War, simply shifted their support in favor of Democrats as Democrats became identified with support for civil rights (Valelly 2004). Today, the Autonomous party is more probable to exist viewed as the political party that is receptive to emerging claims of rights from historically disenfranchised groups. Parties – and the voters that make them up – change over time.

Observers have argued that the election of Donald Trump as president on a platform of opposition to immigration and economic nationalism has sparked new motility in the coalitions of voters supporting each political party (Sides 2017). In this account, voters with lower levels of education and income, and who are opposed to immigration, shifted toward the Republican political party in 2016. These changes accept injected a new element of uncertainty into the political landscape, as analysts try to assess which party has the advantage in a changing electorate.

Here, we use information from the GCNP to capture a cursory snapshot of the two parties as they stood in November of 2018. While we cannot compare these data with how the parties looked in the by, nosotros can draw a demographic portrait of each party as it stood at that moment that we tin can use as a basis of comparison for the future.

The Data

The Grinnell Higher National Poll was conducted November 24 to 27, 2018, for Grinnell College by Selzer & Co. of Des Moines, IA. It is based on phone interviews with 1,000 U.S. adults ages xviii or older, including 828 likely voters in the 2020 election and 769 self-identified voters in the 2018 midterm election.

Party identification was determined using Question 102 of the poll: "In politics as of today, do you lot consider yourself a Republican, Democrat, or contained?" Respondents who answered with "independent" received a follow up question: "Do y'all lean more than toward the Republicans, or more toward the Democrats, or are you totally contained?" Respondents who answered the initial question with either "Democrat" or "Republican" were asked a separate follow up question: "Do you consider yourself a stiff Democrat/Republican?"

Previous research finds that voters who "lean" toward 1 party take like voting behavior equally those who directly identify with a party. For that reason, nosotros categorize respondents who identified with a major party or who "lean" toward that party equally a member of that political party. Respondents who stated they are "totally contained" are categorized equally independents.

Analysis

We begin past presenting an overview of the 2 parties, comparison the major demographic characteristics of those who affiliate with each political party. Overall, xl percent of respondents in the information are Republicans and forty percent of respondents are Democrats. A full of twenty percentage of respondents are independent.

Our first step was to deport a logistic regression to assess the relationship between a respondent's party identification and a standard prepare of demographic variables. For this assay, our dependent variable was party identification, with Republicans coded equally 0 and Democrats coded equally 1 (independents were excluded from this analysis). Nosotros do non present the total results of the regression assay here. We found statistically pregnant differences between the parties for five variables. Respondents with loftier levels of didactics were likely to be Democrats, while respondents with lower levels of education were likely to be Republicans. African Americans were more than likely to identify as Democrats than white respondents, just nosotros did not find statistically significant relationships to party identification for respondents who identified with other groups. Respondents who described their political ideology every bit either "Moderate" or "Liberal" were more likely than Conservatives to identify with Democrats rather than Republicans. And, respondents who scored high on a nativism variable we constructed for this analysis were more likely to identify every bit Republicans than Democrats. We describe this variable in more than detail below.

Next, we plough to a more than detailed word of our findings for each variable that had a statistically pregnant relationship with party identification.

Figure i

Education has five categories, with the everyman indicating a high school education or less and the highest indicating post-graduate education. Our data show that Democrats are more than educated on boilerplate than Republicans. According to the graph above, 48 percent of Republicans take a high schoolhouse education or less, compared to 35 per centum of Democrats. Additionally, 36 per centum of Democrats have a bachelor's caste or above, compared to 28 per centum of Republicans.

Figure 2

Income has five categories, with the lowest indicating an income $25,000 a twelvemonth or under, and the highest indicating an income of $100,000 a year or over. Our data show that Republicans have college incomes than Democrats on boilerplate. Nigh 29 percent of Democrats have incomes under $25,000, compared to 13 percent of Republicans. In improver, 26 per centum of Republicans have incomes above $100,000, compared to just nether 20 per centum of Democrats.

Figure 3

The GCNP asks respondents to cull "what racial or ethnic group" they place with nigh. Hither, we study our findings for groups with over 100 respondents. We consolidate whatsoever group with less than 100 respondents, which includes respondents who identified as Asian, Native American, multi-racial, other, or refused, into a group we phone call "Additional." Small samples sizes for each of these groups hateful that specific findings about them cannot be reported with confidence.

Our information show that the Democratic party is more racially heterogeneous than the Republican political party. Virtually 46 percentage of Democrats self-identify equally members of racial minority groups or autumn into the "Additional" category, compared to 29 percentage of Republicans. Twenty percent of Democrats identify equally black and fifteen percent identify as Latinx. Past contrast, iv percent of Republicans identify as blackness while 18 percent identify every bit Latinx.

Figure 4

Ideology has three categories: bourgeois, moderate, and liberal. Our information evidence more ideological heterogeneity among Democrats than Republicans. Nearly lxx percent of Republicans say they are conservative, compared to 43 percent of Democrats who say they are liberal. In addition, 45 percent of Democrats are moderate, compared to only 23 pct of Republicans.

Effigy 5

Finally, recent enquiry (Sides 2017) finds that nativist attitudes among voters are associated with support for Donald Trump and a political agenda of limiting immigration to the Us. To assess the degree of nativist sentiment amid Democrats and Republicans, nosotros follow an approach modeled after Citrin and Wright (2009). They describe two competing models of the way that Americans think about American national identity. The first is the civic model, in which respondents define being American as adhering to "certain fundamental values and institutions" (3). The second is an ethnic model in which existence an American is defined by an individual's descriptive characteristics, such as their organized religion or language. The GCNP asks a battery of questions about the kinds of characteristics respondents acquaintance with being a "real" American to assess whether their attitudes better fit one model or the other.

We created a variable called "nativism" past combining the responses from iv questions in which respondents are asked to evaluate the importance of a set up of descriptive characteristics to beingness a "real" American: being born in the United States; living in the The states for almost of one's life; the ability to speak English; and to be of the Christian religion. Respondents who rated having all of these characteristics as "very important" scored highest on the nativism variable. Respondents who rated these characteristics as "not important" scored lowest. The rescaled variable ranges from 0 to one, with 0 indicating the lowest level of nativism and one the highest.

Consequent with past research, our data show a statistically significant departure in the level of nativist sentiment measured among Republicans and Democrats. The mean nativism score for Republicans was 0.52. compared to 0.33 for the Democratic Party, indicating that Republicans were more than likely than Democrats to identify characteristics associated with the ethnic model of American national identify as being important to being a "real" American.

Conclusion

Using the November 2018 Grinnell College National Poll information, we present a brief overview of the ii political parties and clarify their major differences. Specifically, we clarify how pedagogy, income, racial demographic, ideology, and nativism differ betwixt ii parties. We observe that Democrats are more educated, racially diverse, and ideologically heterogeneous than Republicans. Republicans are more than likely to have higher levels of income than Democrats, lower levels of education, and are more likely to adopt nativist views of what it means to be a "real" American.

References

Brownstein, Ronald. 2007. The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America. New York: Penguin Press.

Citrin, Jack and Matthew Wright. 2009. "Defining the Circle of Nosotros: American Identity and Immigration Policy." The Forum, Volume 7, Issue 3.

Foner, Eric. 1990. A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863-1877. New York: Harper and Row.

Greenish, Donald, Bradley Palmquist and Eric Schickler. 2002. Partisan Hearts and Minds: Political Parties and the Social Identities of Voters. New Haven: Yale University Printing.

Central, 5.O. 1984. Southern Politics in State and Nation. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Printing.

Miller, Warren and J. Merrill Shanks. 1996. The New American Voter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Polsby, Nelson. 2004. How Congress Evolves: Social Bases of Institutional Change. New York: Oxford University Press.

Schickler, Eric. 2016. Racial Realignment: The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932-1965. Princeton: Princeton Academy Press.

Sides, John. 2017. "Race, Organized religion, and Immigration in 2016: How the Debate over American Identity Shaped the Election and What It Means for a Trump Presidency." Democracy Fund Voter Study Group. https://world wide web.voterstudygroup.org/publication/race-faith-clearing-2016

Valelly, Richard. 2004. The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Peter Hanson is associate professor of political science at Grinnell Higher.

Yuejun Chen '20 is a double major in economics and mathematics at Grinnell College, and a research assistant with the Grinnell College National Poll.