Increasingly, researchers have better data on social justice ideology (some call this ‘woke’, though I dislike the term). This week, the British Election Study (BES), a large panel study of British voters, published a wave which includes a battery of items on social justice ideology. When analysed with data from the 2020 American National Election Study (
Interesting reading, would be keen to hear more about the difference between liberalism and social justice ideology.
It feels to me like there's a soft conservatism within social justice ideology. They wish, like conservatives in the 1950s, people could just behave or obey.
This is good stuff, albeit it feels so far a bit shallow. Women and the young are more left wing than old men, gosh, you don't say :)
A lot of these aspects feel clearly like they're just correlates of each other that weren't fully controlled for, e.g. I'd expect social justice ... adherents (SJW is just so much easier to type though) to have lower income because they gravitate towards highly competitive but relatively low paid and insecure roles like NGOs, charities, art/drama, journalism etc. That is, their low income is an effect not a cause of their ideology.
As for what drives this at a fundamental level, I feel like it was already solved decades ago by Thomas Sowell's theory of visions. It's not something he tried to prove with data, but I've found his theory to have great predictive power in a variety of real-world situations and it generalizes across many very different domains beyond ordinary hot button national politics. I think this generalization ability comes from the very deep and abstract level at which it operates, which in turn allows you to "compute" what views people will have on very different questions by progressively lowering the abstraction level until you arrive at the specific question you're interested in. He shows in his book "Conflict of Visions" how to apply this theory to many different areas of life and generate valid predictions for how people will behave.
Sowell is an (American) academic but the sort that has tenure and spends his time writing books instead of doing surveys and publishing papers. He's also quite explicitly conservative, and so his impact in academia has been limited to say the least.
Interesting reading, would be keen to hear more about the difference between liberalism and social justice ideology.
It feels to me like there's a soft conservatism within social justice ideology. They wish, like conservatives in the 1950s, people could just behave or obey.
Could you explain the charts for this dullard, please? What the numbers on the horizontal axis mean along with what the red line signifies?
This is good stuff, albeit it feels so far a bit shallow. Women and the young are more left wing than old men, gosh, you don't say :)
A lot of these aspects feel clearly like they're just correlates of each other that weren't fully controlled for, e.g. I'd expect social justice ... adherents (SJW is just so much easier to type though) to have lower income because they gravitate towards highly competitive but relatively low paid and insecure roles like NGOs, charities, art/drama, journalism etc. That is, their low income is an effect not a cause of their ideology.
As for what drives this at a fundamental level, I feel like it was already solved decades ago by Thomas Sowell's theory of visions. It's not something he tried to prove with data, but I've found his theory to have great predictive power in a variety of real-world situations and it generalizes across many very different domains beyond ordinary hot button national politics. I think this generalization ability comes from the very deep and abstract level at which it operates, which in turn allows you to "compute" what views people will have on very different questions by progressively lowering the abstraction level until you arrive at the specific question you're interested in. He shows in his book "Conflict of Visions" how to apply this theory to many different areas of life and generate valid predictions for how people will behave.
Sowell is an (American) academic but the sort that has tenure and spends his time writing books instead of doing surveys and publishing papers. He's also quite explicitly conservative, and so his impact in academia has been limited to say the least.