How Education Shapes Our Political Landscape

Episode Transcript

John Tomasi: Diana Mutz, welcome to Heterodox Out Loud.

Diana Mutz: Thank you.

John Tomasi: You're a specialist on communication across lines of political difference. So we'll be talking today about some of the work you've done in that area. I want to begin just by having you talk to our listeners about sort of two big changes that you see across the political landscape in America, two big changes that are going to inform some of the research projects you're doing. And the first big change concerns the relationship of education to party affiliation. And I'm thinking about the thesis. People talk about the diploma divide.

Diana Mutz: Right, right.

John Tomasi: Can you just say a bit about that? I mean, I remember as a young person that Democratic Party was the party of and for the working class.

Diana Mutz: Right.

John Tomasi: And Republican Party was sort of the country club crowd to some degree.

Diana Mutz: Yeah, big business country club.

John Tomasi: Tell us about that era and what was the divide or the connection between...

Diana Mutz: It's very interesting because I don't think we fully understand why this flip has happened and why it is that at least this seems to have happened during the first decade of the 2000s. So what the flip is? The flip is going from the most educated population being Republicans to the more educated population being Democrats.

John Tomasi: So that was true. My impression, that's justified, that's verified by the social science. And what years was that? What decades would that be the case?

Diana Mutz: Again, we see the changeover in the first decade of the 2000s and the explanation we don't yet agree on. I mean, there have been a variety of ideas out there, but that's part of what I'm hoping to do this year is get a sense of why that happened. I think people weren't all that aware of it until Trump was elected because they were looking at working class support for Trump. And they thought, well, that doesn't make sense. He's the Republican candidate. That's not usually where the Republican candidates' main support comes from and so forth. But they interpreted that as being about, you know, economic deprivation. And yet most of the research in political science suggests that's not what it was. It actually already started to flip. So I want to know more about what the flip is and how it happened.

John Tomasi: But let me just be sure I understand what the flip was a flip about. So there was an era in which educational attainment and being a Republican party member were connected.

Diana Mutz: Correct.

John Tomasi: Correlated. And in that same era, less educated would mean more likely to be Democrat.

Diana Mutz: That's right.

John Tomasi: And what years was that robustly true?

Diana Mutz: I don't know how far back it goes, but certainly it was that way for my lifetime up until the 2000s.

John Tomasi: Yes. In the last 20 years then, we're seeing a flip now where more educated people tend to be Democrats and less so Republicans.

Diana Mutz: That's right.

John Tomasi: And that's the flip you're talking about.

Diana Mutz: Exactly. So the diploma divide has existed in different forms in different times. And now we're looking at this new time.

John Tomasi: Okay. So then in the current situation, does that flip, does that include, what's the racial or ethnic breakdown of that flip? Is it true across all groups or is it more or less true among some groups?

Diana Mutz: It's more about whites. You know, Democrats, minorities have traditionally been more Democratic, but we were mainly talking in the United States about African Americans. Now minorities are a more diverse group than in the past. And honestly, I don't think I could break it down for you by all different types of minorities. There are multiracial groups. There are, you know, all kinds of combinations of whites and minorities. And so the question is how it affected them. Most of us don't have enough data to actually answer that.

John Tomasi: Well, what about a group like Hispanic Americans? As I understand it, Hispanic Americans are generally, there's increasing levels of education, broadly construed, broadly measured, I believe. And there's also a movement towards the Republican Party.

Diana Mutz: Yeah, I don't know.

John Tomasi: Are they part of the diploma divide?

Diana Mutz: I can't answer that question directly because I haven't done the research yet. But one thing I will say is that we're sitting here talking about Latinos as if they were highly homogeneous politically. They're not. And in fact, most of them identify more as Cubans or Mexicans or their country of origin than they do as Latinos necessarily. So to draw conclusions about them seems to suggest a kind of similarity that isn't really there.

John Tomasi: Yeah, good. So one big thesis, the first big change we're going to have in the background of this conversation is this diploma divide change. The flip that happened with the correlation between education and party, political partisanship gets reversed. The second big change that's going to be in the background of our conversation today is a change about the relationship of education, the degree of educational attainment, and the relationship of that to people's toleration or political toleration of difference, which is connected to their toleration and advocacy of free speech, for example, and free expression. Can you tell us something about that?

Diana Mutz: Sure. That's still positive, actually. Among whether you're a conservative, liberal, Republican, or Democrat, those who are highly educated are still more likely to support freedom of expression. And I don't mean just general, you know, lip service, like, yes, we should have freedom of expression. I mean, even when it's a group they really don't like that is expressing its views. It's still true that more educated people tolerate that better than less educated people.

John Tomasi: And can we look at that connection between educational attainment? So you're saying there's still a positive correlation between higher educational attainment and expressions of support for views, for toleration and free expression.

Diana Mutz: Correct.

John Tomasi: And can you do a partisan look at that, too? Is that the case on both left and right?

Diana Mutz: It is the case on both left and right, if you look at them separately, that education still helps. However, what the other flip, if we're going to talk about those kinds of changes, is when political scientists first started studying support for free expression, it was overwhelmingly Democrats, those on the left, who were more tolerant. And that was true for a long, long time. What we see now is that that has flipped and we see greater support for free expression from the right.

John Tomasi: That's very interesting. And on the college campuses, political toleration, expressions of support for political toleration are going down. Is that correct?

Diana Mutz: I don't know specifically among college students in particular, but it would not surprise me because I think we have a norm on many college campuses now that you shouldn't be expressing views that others find offensive. You know, I know there's certainly many cases where, you know, speakers on campuses, because they weren't popular, were shut down. And I think that's too bad for our students in a lot of ways, because I think that they are capable of being exposed without, you know, necessarily being harmed or being persuaded or any of those kinds of things. And that it benefits the development of their own views to be exposed to views from different sides.

John Tomasi: So traditionally, still thinking about this big second change, I just want to be sure we can identify what the change is exactly. Traditionally, the college experience was a time when young people would experience cross-cutting exposure to different ideas. Is that still the case on college campuses?

Diana Mutz: I think it still is. Now, obviously, you can't say that for all campuses. There are some campuses that people are drawn to because of similarities and religious background or something of that sort, where obviously it's not likely they'll be exposed to, you know, radically different ideas than those they arrived with. But I think for a huge number of campuses, many of them large public universities in particular, they tend to be located in areas that are more liberal. And then the students tend to come from all over, from more rural areas to the university campus, and they tend to be exposed to greater diversity there than they would be if they stayed home.

John Tomasi: Right. And certainly, the big story from any kind of higher perspective on the university system of the past 50 years has been the increasing diversity of the campus.

Diana Mutz: Yes.

John Tomasi: So in the Ivy League, an example that I often give is that. Do you know when the last Ivy League university started admitting women?

Diana Mutz: I don't.

John Tomasi: Do you know where it was?

Diana Mutz: No.

John Tomasi: It's just up the road here, Columbia.

Diana Mutz: Really? God love Columbia.

John Tomasi: I love you. A lot of good friends at Columbia, of course. But Columbia started admitting students in 1983, and they were the last Ivy League to start graduating. Women back in 87.

Diana Mutz: Wow.

John Tomasi: Partly because Barnard was such a strong school.

Diana Mutz: That's right.

John Tomasi: They considered that their sister school.

Diana Mutz: That's right.

John Tomasi: There was still this question. Separate but equal. But still, it's quite recent. So we're going to dig more into the university issues shortly. But I wanted to step back now and start talking about some of your research. And I think I've told you this, that the first piece of yours that I remember reading was your book, Hearing the Other Side, which came out in 2006. I think I finally came across it 2009, 2010. I was doing research for my book, Free Market Fairness. And I read your book with – it just was electrical for me to read it. I enjoyed it so much. I mean, part of it was because I was encountering a person who did really high-quality social science research, but also framed the issues in a way that a political philosopher could find lovely.

Diana Mutz: Oh, well, thank you, because I don't consider myself a philosopher.

John Tomasi: The framing is really striking. And let's just talk a little bit about that book, because I know you have a new project here you're doing here at the HxA, looking back at that project now and with some new data. But just tell us about the original study. You were looking at some tensions within democracy. Can you just say something about the main theses of that book work?

Diana Mutz: Well, in 1996, shortly before the presidential election, I decided to do a study of people's political discussion networks. And what I mean by that is not formal settings where they sit down and discuss politics, but just in the course of everyday life, who did they talk to about politics? And what were those people like? Where did they meet them? And to get a sense of how politics was essentially, you know, filtering through everyday life. Because I think the thing we political scientists in particular have trouble remembering is that politics is not the center of everyone's life. That life goes on at the same time and that really politics is filtered through that day-to-day experience. So this was a representative national survey, and we asked people if they ever talked about politics with others. We had them name as many people as they could, and then we asked them a lot of questions about those individual people. And we'd ask them about their political views, their voting behavior, their, you know, political party affiliation, if they thought they had one or knew what it was. And what we found out, you know, there were a lot of things about the individuals themselves as well, their own levels of political participation and their own levels of political tolerance and willingness to censor views they disliked. And a large part of what really shocked me because I had kind of been socialized in academia in an era when deliberative democracy was kind of seen as a subset of participatory democracy. It was just another way that you did politics and participated in the process was by sharing views with others. But what I found was that there was a very clear tension between those two ideals. There were those who were surrounded by very politically like-minded others, and those folks were very politically active. They were very sure of themselves. They had strong views, and the people in their networks encouraged them to get out there and do something about it and promote their own viewpoints. On the other hand, those weren't the same people who were engaging in everyday deliberation. They were not people who had friendships across lines of political difference, and they were not the most tolerant of people either. So people's exposure to neighbors, friends, co-workers of differing political views enabled them to be more tolerant of those people's rights to speak out. And that doesn't mean they were persuaded by them, but they did think, hey, you know, that person has a right to say their piece as well.

John Tomasi: Right. So deliberative democracy has this idea that thick engagement is an important part of the democratic process. That's flying to, using Rousseau, flying to the city center to engage in your political discussion should be a central part of your life. And deliberative democracy says deep engagement, settled conversations that go on as part of the democratic ideal. On the other hand.

Diana Mutz: Particularly across lines of difference.

John Tomasi: Good.

Diana Mutz: And I think that's the key. There's a heck of a lot of political conversing that goes on in these networks among people who are quite politically active, but they all agree with one another.

John Tomasi: Good.

Diana Mutz: And they spur one another onto action. It's very motivating.

John Tomasi: Good. So that's the tension.

Diana Mutz: And that's the tension in that book.

John Tomasi: Right. A deliberative ideal set down into the context of a pluralistic democracy is going to run up against this other human tendency, which is to not want to be engaging with people who aren't like us. It's not comfortable. It's not attractive. We don't run there. We run away from it typically.

Diana Mutz: Yep.

John Tomasi: And that's the tension you describe.

Diana Mutz: And it's also the case that we ask people about a variety of issues, what their own views are. And then we ask them about the rationales that people who hold opposing views have, as well as the rationales on their own side of it. And of course, people have more rationales for their own views. That's why they have that viewpoint. However, what's really interesting is the gap between your own rationales and others is huge when you have no contact with the other side. You think there are no legitimate rationales for holding that view. Those people are just stupid or, you know, ill-informed and so forth. So in order to cultivate respect for the other side, you really do have to have some contact with them. Even when, you know, you're not talking about politics all the time, you can come to respect people whose political views are different from your own, even without having a political debate.

John Tomasi: And so is it a book you're writing now or a series of articles?

Diana Mutz: I'm planning it to be a book, a sequel of sorts, although sequels are always do poorly. So I don't want to call it that.

John Tomasi: Godfather II is widely considered.

Diana Mutz: Oh, okay. So that might happen.

John Tomasi: So we do Hearing the Other Side, too. But your provisional title is, I think, Hearing the Other Side in an Era of Mass Polarization.

Diana Mutz: Right. And I did this study in 2020, right before the presidential election. We know there's a lot more political talk right before presidential elections. So I purposely did it exactly the same number of days in advance of the election. And I replicated the entire study for the most part. It was not easy to do because means of data collection have also changed a lot. So I purposely went back and made sure it wasn't a difference between talking to people by phone versus online and so on and so forth, their mode of interview effects, et cetera. But what's fascinating, and I think largely what people would anticipate, is that, first of all, people are much more likely to avoid politics now. That is, they say, I don't enjoy talking about politics. That is higher than it was in 1996. Tolerance is lower than in 1996. Participation is through the roof. One of the things that you'll notice is that a lot of the things that advocates of participatory democracy especially value are great right now. We have higher levels of turnout, higher levels of other forms of political participation outside of elections. We have higher levels of political knowledge than we did in 1996. And it's almost like we just can't get away from politics right now. It is everywhere.

John Tomasi: It does seem to be everywhere.

Diana Mutz: Yeah, and I think what we didn't think about in the days of lower voter turnout was that's potentially problematic as well, because politics is invading all of our relationships in ways that aren't necessarily healthy in a pluralistic democracy.

John Tomasi: And with this polarization, you're seeing greater homogeneity in people's discussion networks. Can you say something about that?

Diana Mutz: Sure. We did the same kind of thing we did in 96, where we asked people with whom they talked about politics and what their views were and so forth. And people are talking now to people who are far closer to them. That is, family members, spouses, et cetera. There are far fewer weak ties, far fewer conversations in what we would call the public sphere. So that automatically usually means they're more homogeneous. And in fact, that's what we see. The people who are closest to us are most likely to be similar to us politically. And as a result of being afraid of talking politics with people we don't know well, our networks have essentially kind of, I call it imploded. In fact, that's another title I'm considering. It's sort of the implosion of the public sphere in that everything has shrunk down around us as individuals so that it's only our small, close network that we talk to about politics. They're very similar to us in political views. And thus, it's not as threatening as it is when you're talking to people who may differ from you. The fear, of course, is that if you do talk to people who could turn out to be quite different from you, you will, you know, sacrifice social harmony in your relationships and so forth. So people are aware that politics is scary right now and that people get very emotional and can react very strongly. And let's face it, most of us are kind of conflict-averse. We don't really want a knock-down, drag-out fight.

John Tomasi: And so we're living in a new communications environment, a very different communications environment than the one that you're a subject for living in during, here on the other side. How does that new communications environment change or affect the things you just described?

Diana Mutz: Well, it's a contributor on, I think, a pretty large scale. It's not just that people are only talking to those like them. I mean, if you read my 1996 account of this, I already was amazed at how homogeneous people's networks were. But now they're even more so. And that combined with the fact that our media environment has changed substantially since 96 means that it's also true that people get fewer cross-cutting views through their mass media. So we also ask people about their news sources, whether it be online or offline, newspapers, television, social media, and so forth. And what we see is that in 1996, people saw newspapers and television as being as likely to give them differing perspectives as like-minded ones. They were just kind of right on the zero line. Now, overwhelmingly, people tell us that the television they watch agrees with them. And that at least we don't ask them, does it agree with you? We ask them, you know, what views it leans toward. And it's exactly the same as their own views. So television has changed dramatically. I think most people recognize that with the rise of partisan networks. People can self-select into television news content that is more like-minded. What surprised me, though, is we also see this for newspapers. Now, when we ask people about newspapers, we didn't ask, you know, about print newspapers necessarily. We made it clear that they could refer to news sources that they used online as well. And again, because of the expansion of choice in the online news environment, people's newspapers are also now more like-minded. Not to the same extreme extent as television news, but it's definitely far more homogeneous than it was in 96.

John Tomasi: So in 2006, you saw a tension between the deliberative participatory aspects of democracy. You're seeing that tension now.

Diana Mutz: Exacerbated.

John Tomasi: Dramatically exacerbated.

Diana Mutz: Dramatically so.

John Tomasi: And I'm really struck by the phrase you used a few moments ago as a potential title, I suppose I could say, of an implosion. But all these parameters have been just sucking in. It's fascinating. And can you just say a word more about that in terms of rising incivility? So when people venture out now onto Twitter or Facebook, wherever they're going to express your political views, how does that change the environment in terms of civility and civility? How does that affect the democratic possibilities for Americans?

Diana Mutz: Well, it's a good question. I haven't thoroughly analyzed that in the current setting yet, civility. But the book I wrote before that, between these two, was very much about how our media sources incentivize incivility. Certainly politicians know that uncivil takes will be viewed far more often than civil ones. People on social media, we also know, purposely make comments that are uncivil because they'll be retweeted and so forth. They'll be redistributed and reach a larger audience. So the incentive that people have to be uncivil essentially makes it pretty scary for everybody else to enter into that conversation. And what we see is that a very tiny number or tiny percentage of, for example, social media users are responsible for most of the political content on social media. So there are some hardcore people who are, you know, get out there and uncivil. But most people in their day-to-day lives, you know, they just want to get along. They are not out to start a political fight.

John Tomasi: Well, we're all looking forward to the new book on these topics.

Diana Mutz: Thank you.

John Tomasi: I want to shift to another research area that you work in, a general question now about the relationship of education, educational attainment, to the support for free expression. And that's going to bring us pretty close to the ideas that Heterodox Academy cares most about questions about open inquiry and its prospects in our world. So I want to go into that conversation now. But on the way there, I can't help but want to just take the, take this opportunity to, because I'm sitting with you, to geek out and do some social science together. Okay. Or at least I'm going to invite you to. So I'm just really interested in sort of the history of measurements, how, how, how attempts to under, how, how processes and methods of social science have changed over the past 50 years or so. And I want to just begin by inviting you to say a little bit about Samuel Stouffer, whose classic book, Communism, Conformity, and Civil Liberties, 1955, 56, set the stage for a lot of social science. What was Stouffer's idea? What was his method? Tell us what was going on back then, if you, if you, if you will.

Diana Mutz: Sure. Stouffer was, you know, embedded in the McCarthy era and he did something which was rather brave. And that was, he said, I want to see how much support for what McCarthy is doing is really out there in the mass public. So it was really the first effort to empirically measure and assess people's support for key civil liberties, like support for free expression, variety of others as well. But given what was going on, you know, you know, it was a dangerous thing to do, frankly. I think what he found as well as, you know, what a long line of research following his has suggested is we've never, you know, reached a kind of nirvana where everybody supports absolute freedom of speech. But things do wax and wane with where people perceive the greatest threats as coming from. So during the McCarthy era, most Americans perceived the threat as being from the left. They were worried about communism. And thus the title of his book, communism, conformity and civil liberties. And in that era, what we saw is that Democrats or those on the left in general were more likely to support civil liberties and more likely to support the free expression of ideas. However, what's happened over time is that that has switched. And these days, regardless of what kinds of groups people choose as the groups they really don't like, it's Democrats who are less tolerant. People on the left are less rather than more tolerant of freedom of expression. And I think part of this is it's a function to some extent of their desire to suppress racist speech. But what's interesting is it's not all about that. Even if we look at those who choose groups that they want to suppress that have nothing to do with race, they still are more likely to want to censor than are people on the right.

John Tomasi: I want to know more about that. Let me just stay with Stouffer for a moment more in my geek mode. When I think about Stouffer's work, my summary of the, of the, in my mind, my summary of the book goes like this. He asked people, do you support free expression? And people generally answered, yes. But then he asked in a more granular particular way, would you support it with respect to these particular kinds of areas? And the answer was, well, maybe not so much, not so much.

Diana Mutz: Right.

John Tomasi: So there was, right. So I think part of what he did was what, as I read it as a non-specialist, it's, puncturing the myth perhaps that people in America actually do believe in toleration, actually do believe in freedom of expression. So when it came out of particular cases, asking the question that way, this different way, he started finding some different answers.

Diana Mutz: Right. Abstract norms of all kinds are much easier for people to endorse. But when, you know, the rubber hits the road is when it's something you really don't like that's being expressed. And that's when these democratic norms are challenging. I should say the other thing that came out in Stouffer's work that I find extremely important in light of what's going on today is that Stouffer found that the well-educated political leaders, those in positions of authority, were especially likely to uphold democratic norms. Those folks were what's been called the carriers of the creed. And so even if the mass public wasn't all that tolerant, they were the ones who were going to ensure that we abided by these rules. What we see today is very different from that. We see a lot of political leaders on both the right and the left wanting to censor.

John Tomasi: So for Stouffer, I thought it was Stouffer, but you say Stouffer, so I'm going to go with you.

Diana Mutz: That's what I'm told.

John Tomasi: I'm going to go with you. I'm going to go with you. I learned that today. So with Stouffer, we have educational attainment goes up, means that toleration goes up.

Diana Mutz: Right.

John Tomasi: And then, but later in the 1970s, there was some realization that maybe his methods had biases hidden inside them as well. That there was some support for free expression. Those questions then were granular of the way he asked them, which was a step forward. Nonetheless, had an implicit bias perhaps built in because the views that people on the left were asked, would you tolerate them, were often lefty views.

Diana Mutz: Exactly.

John Tomasi: So can you tell us about that? What was that change?

Diana Mutz: Sure. I mean, it's natural. We all respond to what the key issues of our day are. He asked a lot more about groups on the left than he did groups on the right. He asked about atheists. He asked about communists and socialists and so forth. And because those are groups on the left, it isn't all that surprising that groups on the left should be more likely to tolerate them, see them as less threatening. But over time, things change. And obviously, the norm is not supposed to be specific to the left or the right. So if people now feel threatened by the right, the question is, you know, how does that affect who looks more tolerant? And it does, because certainly we perceive things different from our own views as more potentially threatening. So what became popular in the late 70s, early 80s was providing a variety of groups and people could choose their least like group. And then they were asked civil liberties type questions. Should they be allowed to give a speech? Should they be allowed to do this and such about that specific group?

John Tomasi: And I've heard that called the least like group test.

Diana Mutz: Yes, yes.

John Tomasi: And just to be sure we get it, so the idea now in this kind of survey work is to say, first, identify for us the target group that you least agree with. And now we're going to ask you that same kind of question about toleration, about your support for freedom of expression with respect to that group. Because toleration doesn't apply to people you agree with.

Diana Mutz: That's right.

John Tomasi: At least not so obviously.

Diana Mutz: Theoretically, it needs to be something you don't like. And so that's how this least like group method developed.

John Tomasi: It was developed. This was in the 1970s, 80s?

Diana Mutz: Late 70s, early 80s. Most of those studies came out in the 80s.

John Tomasi: And who were the big, was it Piereson? Who was doing that work?

Diana Mutz: Sullivan, Piereson and Marcus came up with it originally. I think they were the first publication. And it was a clever idea. However, there were difficulties with it. And the difficulties were, we know, you know, we protect free speech. We don't protect inciting people to violence. So what if people are thinking about incidents that involve violence and reacting in an anti-civil liberty support kind of way for reasons that are actually justified? So that was a big concern that came out of that study or the several studies that use groups like that people could nominate. And here, I got to tell you a funny story, because I was trying to figure out how do we make sure people aren't thinking about violence being committed by those groups? So I did a little pilot study to find out, you know, what groups do people perceive as inciting violence and so forth? Well, when you let people just completely open-ended name their own least-liked group and you don't give them a list to choose from, 75% or so chose Republicans or Democrats. Now, sometimes they said, as a label, not the groups like the KKK or white supremacists or the kind of groups we were offering people, but rather middle of what we consider mainstream kinds of groups today.

John Tomasi: Did you say 70%?

Diana Mutz: I think it's 68 point something, yeah, offhand. But what's interesting about it is that they're not coming up with groups that are nearly as extreme as the kind we were offering them in these lists of potential least-like groups. They would say extreme Republicans, extreme Democrats, the alt-right or MAGA supporters, or, you know, they come up with groups that are not nearly as radical as the kind we were thinking of in the original questions. But then we did a follow-up question where we asked people whether or not these groups were inciting violence. And you want to know how many people thought they were at least like- I'm not sure I do want to know, but tell us. It's about 70-some percent.

John Tomasi: Wow. But again- Sorry, even when the group is described as a political party member?

Diana Mutz: Yes, yes. And so I think that reflects a couple things. It could reflect the January 6th events where we have talked a great deal about Republicans inciting violence. But it could also refer to the kind of concept creep that has occurred with the word violence. Like when people say, oh, that speech does violence to this group. They don't usually mean it actually physically hurts them. They mean it is insulting or offensive or something along those lines. So I think one of the problems we have in communicating civil liberties norms is that the meaning of these terms has expanded. So if people think, oh, we don't really protect that kind of speech anymore, that's not the case, at least thus far as the courts have upheld it. But they do see even mainstream politics as involving violence now. So it becomes very difficult to figure out, you know, which groups are acceptable to include and which ones are not. We are trying to develop a series of questions that includes the basic civil liberties, rights to free expression, but that makes it clear that what the person is expressing is not an incitement to violence.

John Tomasi: I'm trying to follow the big picture here to some degree. And so we said before that there's been a diploma thesis sort of got flipped and now educational attainment is more likely to be correlated with being a Democrat than with a Republican. Are we saying that is it still, is it also the case that higher educational attainment is associated with more political tolerance and free expression?

Diana Mutz: Yes, it still is despite parties.

John Tomasi: And does that mean that Democrats tend to be more in favor of toleration than Republicans?

Diana Mutz: No, the opposite. Right now, Republicans are more tolerant.

John Tomasi: So explain, how do you explain that?

Diana Mutz: But that's controlling for things like education. We're looking at the impact of party affiliation independent of education.

John Tomasi: I'm sorry, so say more about that.

Diana Mutz: Well, right now, what we find is when people choose a least-like group, overwhelmingly, they choose groups on the right. Even Republicans choose groups on the right most often. So, for example, well, I can't remember the exact percentages here, but basically we have the flip side of what we had during the McCarthy period, where if people feel really threatened by other viewpoints, it tends to be viewpoints on the right for the most part. And as a result of that, they are, you know, willing to censor those views on the right because they view them as very dangerous. So now, basically, people who are on the left look less tolerant because the threat is coming from the right. They look less tolerant, but I would say- And they are less tolerant. I mean, that's actually real, but I guess what I'm saying is the shift in where the threats that people see out there come from is driving this. I don't think it's anything inherent in identifying with a particular political party. But we do see, what I find in my analyses of these data is that being a member of a political party, Republican or Democrat, makes you less tolerant relative to independence. That is, these are people with strong views, and these are people who see more threat from the other side. And so they're less tolerant than people who don't have a party affiliation.

John Tomasi: Can you tell us something about how changes of viewpoints among Americans regarding racial justice and racial equality, how do changes in that set of norms affect these free expression debates?

Diana Mutz: So I think it has in that, you know, certainly many college campuses have had rules of various kinds. I know I was at University of Wisconsin-Madison when there was a hate speech prohibition, and that was highly debated by the faculty, went into effect, but was eventually overthrown by the Supreme Court. That kind of thing is an effort in many cases to protect minorities from offensive speech. And yet, at least in the Wisconsin example, most of the uses of the hate speech statute to take students out of classes were comments men made about women in bars. So even though I think this plays out as an issue of race relations, it isn't always really that's what's going on here. And I know in many cases for younger people in particular, college-educated younger people, see the expression of negative statements about racial minorities as an exception to normal free speech norms. I think part of what's happening, because what I see in my data is that it's not limited to those who are worried about racial groups suffering offensive speech. Younger people in that category are also increasingly thinking these other things are also exceptions, whether it's women, any kind of group that is seen as potentially a victim or less powerful. And so as a result, I've heard some people, I know Jack Citrin and Dennis Chong and Morris Levy have done a piece where they argue it's identity groups that are seen as exceptions to the rule. However, as I went through my list of groups, I'm not sure where identity groups end and other things begin, because people argue that political parties are strong identity groups.

John Tomasi: Right. So then what do we do?

Diana Mutz: Right. Because they're, you know, the exception is essentially bleeding into all areas of speech.

John Tomasi: And so is there, is being more identitarian in your world outlook make you less likely to value a pre-expression?

Diana Mutz: I don't know. Depends a little bit on what we mean by an identitarian and which identities we're talking about.

John Tomasi: Slice, slice, slice, that's how I'd love to have you do a little bit. Slice that up for us. What, what.

Diana Mutz: Well, most of us have multiple identities. We have identities through our occupations. We have identities through our gender. We have identities through our age groups, political parties, all kinds of things. And those don't always, you know, push in the same direction. And I think that's the problem in a lot of ways is that we can make people, you know, think about a racial group and think, oh, yeah, they have, you know, had a horrible time in this country and been mistreated endlessly. If we're going to make any exceptions to this norm, it ought to be for them. But the problem is then it kind of grows. And that's, I think, what we see happening a lot on some college campuses is that we don't know, you know, we've kind of lost track of what the democratic norm actually is.

John Tomasi: Yeah, this seems right. Let's talk about the college campuses a bit more then. So on college campuses today, there's a lot of attention placed on questions about racial justice and other kinds of concerns about historically marginalized peoples. And there seems to be less conversation or at least explicit coaching or bringing up of the question about open inquiry and free discourse. And it's important on college campuses. Have you looked into this? Do you think there's, is there a, is higher education less likely to make people advocate political tolerance than it used to? What, what, what, what can you, what would you say about that?

Diana Mutz: That's a good question. And one that's hard to answer in part, because we don't have tolerance measured the same way over time. If we go back and look at the sixties, it was very much the Stouffer method where we only ask about specific groups. And we ask everybody about those specific groups, whether they dislike those groups or not. Now we're measuring it a different way. We can see that education still on the whole has benefits. But is the size of the benefit from education less now than it used to be? That's possible, but I don't have good evidence one way or another.

John Tomasi: So previously, as I understand your work, it was the case that liberal political affiliations would be positively correlated with advocating free expression.

Diana Mutz: Correct.

John Tomasi: But now, would you say it's been reversed? That having liberal political orientation means being less in favor of political expression?

Diana Mutz: Yes, that is the pattern.

John Tomasi: And do I understand your work correctly that you would say that attention to racial justice and there are changing views about racial justice are affecting that pattern, affecting that switch?

Diana Mutz: Yes, I think it's a sense that people who have been mistreated should have different rules in this case or that it is appropriate, you know, to create safe spaces and so forth. Obviously, that's contested. I think what should be contested more, I should say, is to what extent it actually helps those groups. You know, I am in general a strong free speech advocate, but I do worry about whether or not we are undermining the agency of people who want to speak their own views, who don't like having others tell them what their views should be. And I think there's a backlash against that that's potentially quite dangerous.

John Tomasi: Can you say more about that? Give an example of what you meant by that.

Diana Mutz: Well, increasingly in the United States, not just universities are espousing institutional political perspectives, but also companies are. It used to be thought that it was a really bad idea, you know, if you're a commercial business, to associate yourself with politics in either direction because you would alienate half your customers.

John Tomasi: That's right.

Diana Mutz: These days, companies do it all the time.

John Tomasi: That was kind of the Milton Friedman view to some degree. We should, this is a neutral place for politics.

Diana Mutz: Exactly.

John Tomasi: And it goes with this, with what I understood to be a sort of a strong feature of American society. And that was that the workplace traditionally was thought of as a place or was found to be a place where people would encounter people with different political views. They'd be working with them on a very close basis, on a daily basis at work. And so this workplace was a, was a site of a special cross-cutting political affiliation experiences.

Diana Mutz: It still is, and I will tell you in that book based on the date of 1996, overwhelmingly, people who talked to those who were different from them knew those people from work. Because overwhelmingly, people don't feel they have much control over the people with whom they have to work. They've got to get along with them. Their livelihood depends on it. And as a result, they do what they have to do to get along with people of differing political views.

John Tomasi: We just, we just now thought, I've talked about some incentives for people to getting along with each other. And we're just sort of floating, I'll float the hypothesis that economic incentives might be one of the categories that would help make this happen. But also, I mean, a lot of people get to know them long before they learn about their politics.

Diana Mutz: Right. And in that case, you know, you develop a certain respect or liking for someone. And then later you find out, oh, I can't believe it. They voted for so and so.

John Tomasi: Yeah, exactly. And it's harder to demonize them in that case.

Diana Mutz: But I'll tell you the really sad thing that I see right now. And that is when, going back to the more recent study that I have not written up yet, that is the area of the biggest decline in cross-cutting exposure. That is, people used to go to work every day, interact with those. They did not have any input in selecting. And as a result, they felt like, you know, they were talking to a variety of people of different political views. We still see the workplace as being the most politically diverse of all kind of venues where you might meet people. Voluntary associations tend to be very politically homogeneous these days, even when they are totally apolitical. But we still see people saying, I think it's like 65% say, my workplace is roughly equally split between Republicans and Democrats. And then the remainder is evenly split between those who see their workplaces overwhelmingly Republican or overwhelmingly Democratic. What has happened, though, is that people aren't inhabiting those spaces. And if you think of the timing of my 2020 study, people are working from home. And even though COVID is, you know, thought to be more or less over as an emergency situation, a lot of people are continuing to work at home. And what we see in people's levels of cross-cutting exposure is that, first of all, working is good in and of itself. People who work outside the home are exposed to far more diverse political perspectives than people who don't. But within people who work, those who get the most cross-cutting exposure are people who work on site every day.

John Tomasi: That's fascinating.

Diana Mutz: And the people who do part-time in the office, part-time at home or in the middle, and the people who stay home to work all the time report almost no exposure to political difference.

John Tomasi: So we are saying the workplace is unique, and you say it still is unique in the sense of being the place where people encounter political difference and learn to live with it because they have to produce widgets or whatever their job might be. Well, let's talk about one workplace that you and I both inhabited for some time, the academy. And the academy is that people are not going to be encountering diverse viewpoints, at least not among their professorial peer group. We have a lot of studies showing that the imbalance between, say, Democrats and Republicans, which was always a presence in America, at least for the last 100 years, that's been exacerbated and getting much more extreme. Some Daniel Klein study, for example, is showing that junior faculty and graduate students in particular tend to be more homogeneous in their political orientation. Can you say something about how the university is changing with respect to that? These are people doing research. These are our people, right? They're doing research. They're teaching courses. They're communicating to the next generation. But are they encountering difference on their campus?

Diana Mutz: They seem not to be on the studies I just described. Based on the data I've seen, and I think psychology has done the most to study the changing political views of professional psychologists. But I don't know, in political science in particular, if there's been a good study that's done. But, yes, my impression is that faculty have become more homogeneously liberal in political orientation, more likely to be Democrats, for sure. Why that has happened is, I think, the million-dollar question. Is there something about academe that causes more liberals to self-select into it? Or, you know, is it something else? I don't know. Is it conformity once they get there? Or we don't know yet, I think, how that came about. But it's definitely come about. I know you're a really careful social scientist, so I'm going to invite you, if you want to. Do you want to speculate about why that change has happened? I don't know. I honestly don't. I do think some of it is self-selection. I'll give you an example. When I told my family I was going to stay and get a PhD, they're like, oh, you don't want to do that. You'll never make any money doing that. And so I think, you know, if you value intellectual freedom, academe seems like kind of a good thing. But if you're much more concerned about your finances, I can see how that doesn't make as much sense to go into. So there could be some self-selection based on differing values. But, yeah, I have not seen anything convincing one way or another about this. But now that faculties do seem to be more predominantly liberal, I would bet students who are undergrads, when they think about becoming an undergrad, may think about, oh, will I fit in? And that could have its own effect. I don't think that was the case back when I decided to go to grad school. And it does differ a lot on university campuses. For example, we know campuses that have professional schools have far more diversity of partisanship.

John Tomasi: Interesting.

Diana Mutz: Business schools, law schools, medical schools.

John Tomasi: Interesting.

Diana Mutz: These kinds of things.

John Tomasi: So the workplace is unique as a site of cross-cutting experiences. But on the university campus, that's, by every statistic that I know, less and less the case, at least among the group of professoriates.

Diana Mutz: For faculty. Now, we do get a lot of exposure through our students. And I know I'm always surprised to hear from students. And, in fact, you know, even when discussing issues that you might think they've been convinced are not appropriate conversations to be had, they will talk. If you make them feel safe and they're not going to be attacked, the student bodies are far more diverse than the faculty are. And, you know, that's because we draw from all walks of life, our undergrads. The key thing, though, that's going on that I do worry a lot about is that now that workplaces, often companies, identify themselves with political leanings, then people can self-select into workplaces more easily. We already see that shift going on between 96 and 2020. That is, more people now work in a politically like-minded workplace than did in 96. It's a small shift, significant one. Nonetheless, to the extent that businesses continue to do this, we're going to see self-selection. And we see it already. We have a lot of students say, I want to work for a place that I can believe in politically and so forth. And while I completely understand that, it's also the case that that means you're going to be among like-minded others.

John Tomasi: And if people are among like-minded others, does that generally lead to them being less supportive of free expression?

Diana Mutz: That's what the data suggests, yes. It did suggest that in 96 and it does again in 2020.

John Tomasi: I won't put these words in your mouth, but it sounds as though the homogeneity at the university has downstream effects in terms of what citizens were producing, what kind of experiences they've had then, whether they develop a robust sense of the importance of toleration and free expression, or that perhaps they don't, or they become skeptical of those values.

Diana Mutz: Yeah, I'm always a bit hesitant to suggest that we have a huge influence on our student bodies because, as you know, people aren't persuaded all that easily. But I do think that college is supposed to be a time when you can be exposed to all kinds of wild ideas. And it's good for people to learn how to handle that kind of situation, to learn how to negotiate difference. And to the extent that we don't have that diversity of views being expressed, it's not preparing them very well for the real world. Because when you get out in the real world, those people are going to be there that vehemently disagree with you. And, you know, I do think also we could do a lot better job in socializing people to what our democratic norms are. And certainly, you know, with the violence of January 6th, people are very concerned about lack of support for democratic norms and the whole idea of a peaceful transfer of power. And I know I certainly grew up priding myself on coming from a country that did that. You know, we didn't have coups. That's not how we determined who the political leadership was.

John Tomasi: But nor do we have street fighting regarding Black Lives Matter and other kinds of...

Diana Mutz: It's true. All kinds of things have... I mean, I think we have had protests. Now, let's, you know, think about the Vietnam War era and civil rights era. Look, that's always been a part of things. But what's different, it wasn't our political leaders who are engaging in it. And I do think that's really problematic because what kind of example are they setting for people coming, growing up, being socialized in this kind of system? I find overwhelmingly even these really bright, really eager young undergrads say, oh, no, I would never run for public office. They see it as a dirty business. I hear that, too. And those are the people we need running our country. We need those people to want to. But it's been made to seem like such a nasty business that they really don't want to be a part of it. And I think that's really sad because we're going to have people then who aren't very well-educated, aren't very well-socialized to democratic norms running the country. And I know that's not what I want.

John Tomasi: Diana Mutz, thank you so much for talking with us on Heterodox Out Loud. And it's just lovely to be sitting here in the podcast studio with you instead of just out in the offices where you normally are.

Diana Mutz: Well, it's been my pleasure. Thank you, John.

John Tomasi: Thank you so much.

S2 Episode 11: The Diploma Divide: How Education Shapes Our Political Landscape

With the changing 'diploma divide,' what does the new correlation between education and party affiliation tell us about American politics?

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