Pat on the butt too much for Pats' fans

As a complement to Jayman's recent post on state laws regarding corporal punishment, I'll note that blacks express the greatest support for the practice as a means of disciplining children. Additional positive correlates include being male, politically conservative, and of modest intelligence. The GSS item doesn't specify who the spanker is, though it's reasonable to assume that much of the time the respondent has a parent in mind--if the question specifically inquired about opinions on schools using corporal punishment, the approval rates would surely be lower across the board.

One of Jayman's recurring themes is to employ an American Nations paradigm when evaluating social phenomena. The GSS doesn't allow quite that level of granularity, but it does break survey participants up by census region. The percentages of respondents who either "agree" or "strongly agree" with the statement "It is sometimes necessary to discipline a child with a good, hard spanking". For contemporary relevance, all responses are from 2000 onward. Here is a map of said regions for those who are unfamiliar with them:

Region	%Spank
1) East South Central	85.9
2) South Atlantic	80.0
3) West South Central	78.5
4) East North Central	72.9
5) Mountain	71.8
6) West North Central	71.4
7) Mid Atlantic	68.2
8) Pacific	64.1
9) New England	46.9

Most acceptable in the South, least so in the Northeast. Embers of the Civil War burn on.

And the same, by reported ethnicity. Minimum sample size of 50, though N is much exceeds that for most groups:

Ethnicity	%Spank
1) African	84.5
2) "American"	81.5
3) Native American	79.0
4) Scottish	78.5
5) Puerto Rican	78.3
6) Dutch	74.9
7) English/Welsh	73.3
8) German	73.1
9) French	71.3
10) Spanish	71.1
11) Mexican	69.0
12) Irish	68.4
13) Filipino	64.5
14) Swedish	63.3
15) Italian	63.0
16) Chinese	61.6
17) Norwegian	61.3
18) Indian (dot)	59.7
19) Russian	59.4
20) Czechoslovakian	58.1

White liberals, black rednecks. Those who refer to themselves as "American" are largely Scottish, and unsurprisingly express attitudes similar to those who consider the highlands to be an ancestral homeland. Most people in the US of Russian national descent are Jewish, not little Putins. No idea about the Slavs!

Parenthetically, regarding the question of ethnicity, people much smarter and far more perspicacious than myself have said that in the contemporary US it is basically meaningless. Perhaps as a biological marker, okay, though it does track geographically and it seems to provide some insight into cultural characteristics. My working assumption is to treat it as good--or at least useful--information, and not an enemy of the perfect even if it falls well short of being as much.

Finally, in the comments section of Jayman's post, there is some incredulity about the use of corporal punishment among readers who are from states where it is legal. I suspect that in these states it occurs almost exclusively in private schools, though few if any of the state laws distinguish between public and private in questions of the legal permissibility of the practice.

GSS variables used: SPANKING(1-2)(3-4), YEAR(2000-2012), REGION, ETHNIC(1)(5)(6)(7)(10)(11)(14)(15)(17)(18)(19)(20)(22)(23)(24)(25)(26)(30)(31)(97)

White New England Protestants, a liberal lot they are not

As a myopic provincial, the figure I conceptualize in my mind as politically representative of New Englanders is a theistically ambivalent liberal white Protestant. A SWPL, basically. N/A, proprietor of R/H/E Notes, who has set me straight on misconceptions in the past, may have done so again by showing that Romney enjoyed a comfortable edge among white Protestants in New England in last November's presidential election.

The GSS allows us to look back almost as far as LBJ and the Great Society to see how white New England Protestants have voted over the last forty years. To avoid regional skews (self-identified New England Republicans tending to be to the left of Republicans on the whole, etc), only presidential elections are considered. The following graph traces the percentages of white New England Protestants and the national popular electorate as a whole who voted for the Republican candidate over the last four decades of US presidential elections as though there were only two tickets to choose from:

Sample sizes are small, in the 50-100 range for each election, so some sampling error is surely present, but the trend is clear--most Protestant white New Englanders find their seats on the right side of the national assembly hall. Only in 1996 do they appear more Democratically-inclined than does the public, and then only marginally so. If they built the Cathedral, they haven't been its most pious votaries.

GSS variables used: PRES68, PRES72, PRES76, PRES80, PRES84, PRES88, PRES92, PRES96, PRES00, PRES04, PRES08, RELIG(1), RACE(1), REGION(1)

Feelings towards Jews by region

After ruminating on Dinah Shore (yeah, I read everything Steve Sailer writes because Steve Sailer wrote it, not because it necessarily piques my interest), Steve concludes:

One might think, from things like Philip Roth's alternative history The Plot Against America, that the South is teeming with anti-Semites, but that seems to be more the cherished belief of Northern Jews than the bitter experience of Southern Jews.

The GSS has queried respondents on their feelings towards four times in its history, most recently in 2004. It asked them to use a "feeling thermometer", for which ratings between 0-49 indicate unfavorable feelings towards Jews and ratings from 51-100 indicating favorable feelings towards them, the higher the score, the more favorable the perception. The following table ranks the nine geographic divisions (as identified by the US census) by their average feelings towards Jews:

Region	Jews
New England	68.21
South Atlantic	62.38
West North Central	62.08
Mountain	61.54
East North Central	61.25
Middle Atlantic	61.22
Pacific	60.30
West South Central	58.69
East South Central	57.50

New England is especially positively predisposed towards Jews, which might make the rest of the country look like fertile ground for the fourth reich to an identity-obsessed Jew like Philip Roth, but warm feelings are the norm across the country, with little difference between the mid-Atlantic states such as Roth's own New Jersey and, say, the southern seaboard which is comprised of states including South Carolina and Georgia.

To the extent that there is any relative hostility towards Jews detectable here (and it's stretching prodigiously to even speculate as much--one SD is 20 points on the scale), it shows up in heavily NAM regions of the South and West. Foreign-born Hispanics' opinions on Jews are notoriously 'embarrassing', and there has historically been a lot of tension between blacks and Jews over who is America's most victimized group. Indeed, whites express warmer feelings towards Jews than blacks, Hispanics, or Asians do.

GSS variables used: REGION, JEWTEMP

IQ estimates from wordsum scores by ancestry

++Addition++The Inductivist points out that over half of those who chose the ethnicity "American" are black (I wonder if this is similarly the case with Census data). I should have suspected something was up with the remarkably low average for those of putatively "Scots-Irish" descent. Shame on me for the sloppiness. The white "American" IQ estimate from wordsum scores is 94.2, on the low end of those of European descent but higher than that of blacks or Mexicans.

---

HBD chickadee has a few bones to pick with Ron Unz about his curious assertion that:

"One very intriguing pattern is that according to Lynn’s IQ data certain European populations such as the South Italians, Irish, Greeks, and South Slavs tended to have IQs much lower than other European populations such as the British and the Dutch. However, according to the Wordsum-IQ data, this pattern is exactly reversed in the United States, with the descendents of immigrants from Southern Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Yugoslavia having much higher IQs than Americans of British or Dutch ancestry."

I'm not at a point where I'm able to read the referenced posting at the moment, so I'm taking the chickadee's word for it. She also chastises Unz for failing to make public the data used to come to the conclusions he comes to. Fortunately, it's easy to tap the GSS for the data Unz presumably used and the chickadee is after, so let's turn the database sideways.

 To avoid issues with language fluency, immaturity, and senility, all respondents were born in the US and aged 25-65 at the time of their participation. All ethnic groups have sample sizes of at least 50, with most far exceeding that minimum threshold (both the ETHNIC and WORDSUM variables have been consistently employed since the survey's inception in the early seventies). Mean wordsum values are converted to mean IQ scores under the assumption that a wordsum value of 6.32 equates to an IQ score of 98 (a reasonable estimate of the US average) with a standard deviation of 15 IQ points:

Ancestry	IQ
Russian	105.2
Austrian	104.5
Swiss	103.6
Danish	102.6
English/Welsh	102.4
Norwegian	102.1
Hungarian	101.6
Scottish	101.5
Swedish	101.3
Czech	100.4
Italian	100.4
French	100.0
Irish	99.7
Polish	99.7
Greek	99.0
French Canadian	98.7
German	98.5
Other Canadian	96.2
Dutch	95.9
Spanish	92.4
Native American	91.2
African	89.9
Puerto Rican	89.9
"American"	88.7
Mexican	87.7

Just a few quick comments. Ashkenazim constitute about half of those of Russian descent. Contrary to Unz' assertion, those of English or Welsh descent outscore Italians, Irish, Greeks, and Slavs, though the Dutch do not. The Scots-Irish highlanders of Appalachia who seem to have forgotten their ancestral homelands fare about as well as blacks do. Black rednecks, anyone? Finally, hardly a novel observation here, but current immigration trends in the US portend a dysgenic future for the US.

GSS variables used: WORDSUM, ETHNIC, AGE(25-65), BORN(1)

Our polarized politics

From the perspective of someone who is extremely pessimistic about the prospects of the US' democratic system to successfully guide it past the demographic and economic challenges on the horizon, hearing about how highly polarized politics has become--as if compromising between the Ryan and Obama budget plans like the country would have in the past is all the US needs to do to get its house in order--elicits little more than an eye roll.

But I realize that perspective is an outlier's. Divergence in political orientation really has steadily occurred in the US over the past several decades. Democrats have become more liberal and Republicans more conservative, as the proceeding graph indicates. The y-axis shows the mean political orientation score for each political grouping. The question on political orientation is on a 7-point scale. The higher the score, the more conservative the group is, with 4 as the mid-point indicating perfect moderation:

As someone with a cursory understanding of US history in the second half of the 20th century, my first reaction is that Southern Democrats becoming Reagan Democrats and eventually Republicans might explain the apparent polarization. As conservative Democrats have become disenchanted by the Democratic party's increasing focus on 'civil rights' and a corresponding diminution of bread and butter issues the working class cares most about, they've gone from calling themselves Democrats to calling themselves Republicans without really changing their outlooks and sentiments much.

That may be part of the story, and it's a phenomenon not entirely contained in the South even if more pronounced there than elsewhere, but it's not the whole thing, nor does it even look to be particularly significant. The same graph as above, this time with Southerners* excluded:

There aren't any detectable differences between what we get when Southerners are included or when they're excluded. Political polarization has been occurring nationwide.

GSS variables used: POLVIEWS, PARTYID(0-1)(3)(5-6), REGION(1-4, 8-9), YEAR

* Those living in the West South Central, East South Central, and South Atlantic Census divisions.