The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (43 page)

Political participation is not the thing-in-itself of civility. Most of us can recall acquaintances who show up reliably at town council meetings and are hectoring, opinionated, and generally destructive of community life. But, as always, we are talking about statistical tendencies, and for that purpose political participation is not a bad indirect measure.

Consider the act of voting. We have friends, conscientious in many ways, who do not vote and who even look at us, registering and voting, often at some inconvenience, with bemused superiority. They point out with indisputable accuracy that our ballots account for less than a millionth of the overall outcome of most statewide elections, not to mention national ones, and that no major political contest in United States history has ever been decided by a single vote.
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Are we behaving irrationally by voting?
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Not if we value civility. In thinking about what it means to vote, a passage in Aristotle’s
Politics
comes to mind. “Man is by nature a political animal,” Aristotle wrote, “and he who by nature and not by mere accident is without a state, is either a bad man or above humanity; he is like the ‘tribeless, lawless, hearthless one,’ whom Homer denounces.”
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The polling place is a sort of civic hearth. In the aggregate (though not always in every instance) those who do not vote, or who vote less consistently, are weaker in this manifestation of civility than those who do vote consistently. Think inwardly about why you try to keep up with issues that affect your neighborhood or at least try to do some cramming
as an election approaches, and why you usually manage to get to the polling place when the election arrives (or feel guilty when you do not). Are we wrong to assume that the reasons have something to do with a consciousness of the duties of being a citizen and good neighbor? Therein lies the modest claim we make here. There is nothing particularly virtuous or civil about being a political activist, but the simpler ways in which we carry on the basic political business of a democracy betoken the larger attitudes that make up civility.

The connection between intelligence and political involvement has been more thoroughly studied for children than for adults. In part, this is because until recently schools routinely gave IQ tests to children. With the children’s intelligence test scores as a baseline, social scientists could then study whatever variables they were interested in, such as political awareness or interest. Besides being relatively easy to do, studies of childhood political development circumvented some of the questions that arise with adults; children, for example, have no vested political or economic interests (beyond the approval of parents or others) to complicate the analysis of their responses.

One major study assembled a sample of 12,000 children in grades 2 through 8, from schools in middle-or working-class neighborhoods in both large and small cities in various regions of the country in the early 1960s.
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The children provided information about their fathers’ occupations and interest in politics. School records included IQ scores for about 85 percent of the children. The heart of the study was a series of questions about the children’s level and range of political development.
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They were, for example, asked whether they knew which branch of government enacted laws, whether they understood the duties of the president and the courts, whether they ever read about politics in the newspapers or talked about it to their parents or friends, whether they felt that they were protected by the government or whether individuals could exert any political influence on their own, whether they had ever worn campaign buttons or handed out leaflets for a candidate. Their attitudes about voting, about the duties of a citizen, about political change, about legal punishment, among other things, were probed.

The results were predictable in many ways. Younger children tended
to see the government in terms of individuals (government = the current president) and as a fixed and absolute entity; older children were better informed, were more likely to think in terms of institutions instead of individuals, and had a clearer sense of the duties of citizenship. The higher a child’s socioeconomic background, the more rapidly his political socialization proceeded. Among the dimensions most affected by socioeconomic status—again, no surprise—was a child’s sense of political efficacy.
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The big surprise in the study was the impact of IQ, which was larger than that of socioeconomic status. Brighter children from even the poorest households and with uneducated parents learned rapidly about politics, about how the government works, and about the possibilities for change. They were more likely to discuss, read about, and participate in political activities than intellectually slower children were. Not only was the gap in political development across cognitive classes larger than the gap across socioeconomic classes, it tended to widen with age, while the gap due to socioeconomic class did not—an important distinction in trying to understand the comparative roles of intelligence and socioeconomic status. IQ differences tend to be dynamic; socioeconomic differences, static. The more important distinction from our perspective, however, is that cognitive ability had more impact, and socioeconomic status virtually none, on a child’s perception of the duties of citizenship. If this be civility, then it is most purely a result of intelligence, at least among the variables examined.

A study of older children—approximately 400 high school students—set out to determine the importance of intelligence, contrasted with socioeconomic status, as a factor in political development.
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The survey questions tapped a wide range of political behaviors and attitudes. From the responses, scales were constructed for fourteen political dimensions. The youngsters were characterized by an overall measure of socioeconomic background, plus separate measures of parental education, family wealth, media exposure, and a measure of verbal intelligence made available from school records. To a remarkable degree and with only a few exceptions, each of the political dimensions was most strongly correlated with intelligence.
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This was true of scales that measured political knowledge, as would be expected.
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But the bright youngsters were also much more aware of the potentialities of government and the duties of citizenship—civility again. A multivariate analysis of the results indicated
that intelligence per se, rather than socioeconomic status, was driving the relationships, and that when socioeconomic status was significantly correlated with a dimension of political involvement, it was via its effects on intelligence. It is possible that the importance of intelligence was somewhat inflated in this study because the youngsters were disproportionately from working-class backgrounds, hence underestimating the impact of socioeconomic status in more representative samples. However, the qualitative outcome leaves no doubt that intelligence, apart from the usual socioeconomic variables, has a potent effect on political behavior for teenagers, as well as for preteens.
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Social scientists do not find it easy to dragoon large samples of adult Americans and make them sit still for the kinds of assessments of political involvement that can be conducted with children. But they try nonetheless, and they have had some success, mostly centering on voting.

Depending on the election and the historical period, the turnout in elections for federal officeholders ranges from about 25 to 70 percent, with the recent level in presidential elections in the 45 to 60 percent range. It may or may not be a pity that so many of our fellow citizens fail to vote, but it is a boon to social scientists. With the deep split between voters and nonvoters, voting has been an invaluable resource for gaining a glimpse into the nature of this manifestation of civility.
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The literature on voting repeats the familiar story: Most of the analysis has focused on socioeconomic class, not cognitive ability. The standard model of political participation, including voting, is that it is highly dependent on socioeconomic status.
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“College graduates vote more than high school graduates; white-collar workers vote more than blue-collar workers; and the rich vote more than the poor,” as Wolfinger summarized it.
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The connection between political participation and social status is so strong that almost any measure of it, no matter how casual, will pick up some part of the relationship. The impression we all have that elections are settled mostly by the votes of the middle and upper classes broadly construed is confirmed by careful scrutiny, if socioeconomic status is the only measure taken of potential voters.

When we are able to look behind the isolated vote to broader kinds of political behavior, the same relationship prevails. The landmark study on this topic was conducted by Sidney Verba and Norman Nie, who polled several thousand people representing the national population in 1967 not only about their voting but also about other political activities—campaigning, demonstrating, contacting officials, and so on.
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Verba and Nie identified six categories of political activity, from “totally inactive” at one end to the “totally active” at the other, with four gradations in between. Almost without exception, however political participation was defined, socioeconomic status was not only a significant predictor in a statistical sense, but the differences across classes were large.
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Among the totally inactive (the lowest category), people were almost six times as likely to be from the bottom third in socioeconomic status as from the top third; among the totally active (the highest category), more than four times as many were from the top third as from the bottom third. In between the extremes of political participation, the trends were unbroken and smooth: The higher the level of participation, the more likely the person was from a high-status background; the lower the level of participation, the more likely the person was from a low-status background.

What is it about socioeconomic status that leads people to behave so differently? Verba and Nie did not present the breakdowns that permit an answer to that question.
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For that, we turn to another study, by Raymond Wolfinger and Steven Rosenstone, that used the Current Population Surveys (CPS), conducted by the Census Bureau, to answer questions about voting.
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The authors asked which of the three components of socioeconomic status—education, income, and occupational status—primarily influences voting. The clear answer was education. A college education raised a person’s probability of voting almost 40 percentage points over what it would be if the person had less than five years of education, independent of income or occupational status; postgraduate education raised it even more. Even for people in the top income category (more than $75,000 per year in 1990 dollars) a college education added 34 percentage points to a person’s probability of voting. Occupational status per se had an even smaller overall effect than income, and it was ambiguous to boot. For example, with education held
constant, sales and clerical workers voted at slightly higher rates than professionals or managers.

Educational attainment correlates not just with voting itself but with political knowledge, interest, and attitudes—in short, with political sophistication.
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Political sophistication, in turn, correlates with voting.
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Educated people read more about political issues, and they keep their television sets and radios tuned to the news and public issues programs more than do people with less education. They think about political issues at more abstract levels than do less educated people, and less in terms of concrete, personal benefit. They are more likely to disagree with statements like, “So many people vote in the national election that it doesn’t matter much to me whether I vote or not.” Or, “It isn’t so important to vote when you know your party doesn’t have a chance to win.”
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By disagreeing, educated people seem to be saying that they participate in an election even when the only payoff is a sense of having done the right thing, which we see as a mark of civility.

Other scholars who have examined this issue have come to the same conclusion that Wolfinger and Rosenstone demonstrated most decisively: it is predominantly education, rather than income or occupational status, that links voting and socioeconomic status.
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Some scholars go so far as to conclude that, aside from the major effect of education, voting and socioeconomic status have little to do with each other.
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This turns the standard theory on its head: Rather than explaining the correlation between education and voting as an effect of socioeconomic status, the evidence says that the correlation between socioeconomic status and voting would more properly be attributed to education.

Turning the explanation on its head may solve a puzzle that Verba and Nie noted.
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Having shown that political leaders respond to pressure from their constituencies, they wondered why the upper socioeconomic classes participated more in political matters, when those at the bottom were more dependent on the government to solve their problems. If the people who have the most to gain or lose participated the most, then the lower classes would vote more than the middle or upper. Why don’t they? The answer is that participation is less a matter of direct benefit than of civility in the sense we are using the word here, and civility is higher among more educated people than among less educated ones.
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