The Respect Motive

Would be interesting to know what the breakdown was education-wise.

I think this is roughly accurate, except I’d add the caveat that it’s only perceived, conventional wisdom “respect” that matters.

But it makes sense: our brains aren’t really wired for the vast, disconnected, impersonal system that is politics. So it renders it down into things that would make sense back in the day: “which caveperson (out of the 30 in our group) should we allow to wield more power? Well, in my personal interactions with Thag, he seemed to respect me and consider me prestigious, so let’s go with him.”

I would substitute “pretends to care about” for “respects.”

steve, there is so few polar foxes in Latin America; does that mean that polar foxes are incapable of respecting Latinos?

Why don’t the Republicans try a strategy of showing respect for blacks? They could easily frame their policy differences as having more respect, rather than less, couldn’t they?

Romney respects independents more than Obama does? a) what does that even mean, b) why don’t I have any intuition in that direction before I look at the election results page?

This whole endeavor is lost until “respect” is much more clearly defined (without reference to the election results to avoid circularity).

I am going to mangle English here. I think voters pick the type person they respect least and vote against whoever that person supports.

For example, I think there are a decent number of economic conservatives who aren’t really that worried about creationism being taught in their school but still can’t bring themselves to be in a voting coalition with a creationist.

In Alabama, some African Americans supported George Wallace in his run for president and later in his gubernatorial races after he said he was sorry for being stridently, even primarily racist. I just ran a google search and came up with this gem:
http://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/A-0001/excerpts/excerpt_1080.html

Obama won big among Asians, I doubt that he respects them more than Romney does. How about Jews clearly they are respected more by Romney, did he win their votes?

The Asian example has been brought up a few times but I’m not sure how that’s relevant to this model. While Obama may not have talked about Asian-Americans much neither did Romney to my knowledge. Did I miss something there? If neither candidate bothered giving a particular group much respect then we would have to expect other factors would influence that group’s vote. I don’t see anyone claiming this is the sole determinate of voting behavior.

Now I don’t remember Obama talking about Asians very much (except when he was China bashing, which Romney did even more than Obama), but he was rhetorically more pro-immigrant than Romney. If Asians are identifying themselves with the “immigrant” group then Obama did give them more rhetorical respect than Romney did.

Instead of respect, perhaps lack of disrespect would explain the results. Romney’s remark that the 47% of voters that don’t pay income taxes wouldn’t vote for him signals disrespect (perhaps) maybe those voters perceived a signal of disrespect.

You have a serious direction-of-causality issue here.

Does each candidate succeed in attracting the support of the group he respects more?

Or, with a two-party system, does the population necessarily break into two near even-sized political groupings, with each nominating the candidate *it* most prefers — whom *it* respects more, if you will.

I’d say it is pretty plainly mostly the latter. And that makes the fact that they select and then support someone who respects them a pretty trivial level finding.

After all, is any political group going to select, nominate and support a candidate who *doesn’t* respect them?

“Republicans for Krugman!”