More dataisdepressing than dataisbeautiful

  • puntyyoke@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    A few folks have mentioned that these charts

    1. conflate liberal/conservative with the dominant left/right parties in these nations
    2. does not include people who do not identify with one of those dominant parties
    3. have some somewhat unreliable stats magic behind them

    A lot of young men in the US are reporting themselves as “not a Democrat or Republican”, and that’s causing a lot of this proportional shift. I would bet that characterizes a lot of folks on this site who are not conservative.

    https://www.vox.com/politics/2024/3/13/24098780/politics-gender-divide-generation-z-youth-men-women

    https://www.allendowney.com/blog/2024/01/28/is-the-ideology-gap-growing/

    • krashmo@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Exactly. I would be almost as upset with being classified as a liberal or a Democrat as I would be a conservative.

      • kautau@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        At the same time I know many people (my brother included) that claim to be “independent” because they think that the trump camp is somehow outside the conservative camp, and therefore respond “independent” on polls. Because they think “I’m not democrat or conservative, I just want to drain the swamp” and then support trump, who is literally a swamp.

        • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          That’s because when talking to tribalist types, you’re seen as either with them or against them and in a system with 2 political parties “against them” means “supporting the other guys”.

          There is no independent thinking amongst the “party supporter” masses, only following and parroting of the party messages, so the idea of somebody being a genuinely independent thinker guided by personal principles rather than following some tribe or other is anathema to them.

    • Zexks@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Those ‘unaffiliated’s are just embarrassed republicans. Just like most of the centrists you’ll run across.

  • selokichtli@lemmy.ml
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    2 months ago

    The important thing here is to know how did they measure young people’s political ideologies. I wouldn’t expect it was self-perceived as currently, people have a hard time admitting they are conservative compared to admitting they sympathize with a conservative party.

    If it was determined by a questionnaire, it would be interesting to see what questions were included. Maybe the questions weren’t well planned and that’s it. Maybe they equalled feminist takes to progressive liberal ones, which is something that can be discussed. In this case, I would be picky about the origin of the graphics.

    • Peruvian_Skies@sh.itjust.works
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      2 months ago

      If the importance of women’s issues like reproductive freedom were overrepresented relative to other issues, this would definitely account for at least part of this difference. But “importance” itself is already a very subjective concept. It’s hard to put numbers on these things and create a scoring system that’s actually useful.

  • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    So probably -

    When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression

    Men want the days back when they were more in charge and didn’t have to worry about consequences so much.

    • Rnet1234@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      I mean minus South Korea, the graphs still show young men leaning left at pretty steady rates. More young women have moved left though, which is perhaps unsurprising given how hostile right wing politics is towards them. (And how open that’s become recently)

    • macrocarpa@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago
      • Different time scales on nearly all the charts

      • no definition for what is conservative vs what is liberal

      • Divergence has occurred within the past 10 yesrs

      • Date range is floating for 18 to 29 year olds

      • no data for equality

      • no data for relative power

      • no data for consequence

      The data just…doesn’t support this premise, so probably not.

    • SanguinePar@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      From a personal point of view, I agree, but playing devil’s advocate, really the chart should be flipped so that the left/rightness is shown that way and the dates are on the vertical axis.

      It’d also be good if the time periods matched, and if there was a source for the data.

      • kautau@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Do shitty things for years in the pressure cooker until the pressure reaches it’s peak, get an explosive reaction.

        • GarbageShootAlt2@lemmy.ml
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          2 months ago

          There’s nothing about men in Korea being sexist that makes it worth supporting people who maliciously spread racial stereotypes or TERFism.

  • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Interestingly it looks like in 3 of 4 charts men have, at worst, returned to mean. It’s the women getting more leftist. And I don’t blame them.

    • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Liberalism isn’t the same as Left. It’s not even in the same political axis.

      You can’t really read “more liberal” as being the same as “more leftist”.

      Left would be something like: “I want the greatest good for the greatest number”.

      Liberalism would be something like: “I want people to have the most freedom to do whatever they want”.

      You might notice that these two things collide in things like the existence of the super-rich, were for a liberal that’s a good thing (they have maximum freedom) whilst for a Leftie it’s a bad thing (wealth concentration reduces the access to resources for the many hence it directly goes against the greatest good for the greatest number).

      Similarly centralizing control of part or the whole of the Economy (which decreases trade freedom) to achieve greater equality is absolutelly valid within the Leftwing principles and entirely against Liberal principles.

      it’s only in places like the US, were the entirety of Leftwing is about 4 congressmen, that Liberalism gets confused with Leftwing.

      • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        In graphs like these it is very much all smushed together. Otherwise they’d need a 3d plot.

        If you want to get really technical too, liberalism and socialism have giant grey overlap areas. Classical Liberalism wasn’t just about personal freedom, but also government by the people, for the people. Which is a collective good and freedom.

        It’s not nearly so easy as labeling one person a leftist and another a liberal. So above I use leftist in it’s colloquial meaning of getting less conservative, literally moving to the left.

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Well, honestly what political positions women have means less in “interesting times” like ours.

      They are not strongly pressured by conservative men of their family and surroundings (if they have such), because tribal parts of politics rely a lot on crowd instincts, and those of women don’t work exactly the same. They do participate in politics, but with the different kind of emotion.

      For men a woman holding different views is usually not an existential enemy. They might ridicule that or dislike, that may look disgusting, but it’s a different kind of attitude. It’s pretty normal for women from families from authoritarian elites to have publicly liberal views. The dictator daddy won’t punish his daughter for reposting something virtue-signalling against what he’s doing. He knows it’s of no consequence.

      At the same time women, of course, see the tendencies around us and their views change accordingly.

      But again, in the “interesting times” what men do may matter just a bit more, because there are power dynamics involved where women are disadvantaged due to both different tribal instincts and to men being more represented among people with power. In some sense political views are a kind of compensation.

      So it’s both bigger incentives for such views (with actual incels loudly talking) and less pressure (that’s spent on threatening violence against male opponents).

      I’m not an incel. Just thinking.

  • DarkCloud@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Here, have some unsourced data on subjective tendencies.

    Nah, that doesn’t count as data just yet then.

    Especially not at a point in time where someone like Trump is said to represent “Conservatism”.

  • okamiueru@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    I believe that a significant factor for this can be attributed to mental development and maturity of boys lagging behind that of girls of the same age, during formative years. And, please read on, if you assume my argument is “boys dumb, conservatives dumb. Q.E.D.”

    The second factor is an education system where this offset in mental development/maturity is further confounded. Boys don’t typically do as well, because sitting idle and being a “good boy”, is more challenging. This leads to a path for boys to start working earlier, while girls get higher degrees. (I assume the trends for higher education by gender, to be similar, if not, then that can falsify this hypothesis).

    What a person then observes they get from society, vs what you pay in terms of taxes, is skewed between these two groups, and highly correlated with gender.

    If this hypothesis has any validity to to it, then one could argue that a way to mitigate this is by correcting the negative causes. Where the fundamental root cause might be improved by revisiting how education is failing boys in particular.

    The challenge with this is that if the conservative parties’ policies are driven by what can make more people vote conservative, then this will be a negative feedback loop. The worse you make it for a certain group of people that vote for you, the more that group is willing to vote for you.

    • sweetpotato@lemmy.ml
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      2 months ago

      I think the issue is simpler, in that the traditionally dominant group statistically reacts negatively to the levelling of the field and their loss of control and power over the other group. This and the fact that it’s statistically harder to see the oppression and feel for it when you are not affected by it(and this goes for every form of oppression).