Dan Goldstein pointed me to this op-ed referring to the work of Arthur Brooks on charitable contributions of Democrats and Republicans. For convenience, I’ll repeat my comments from two years ago:
I was thinking more about a framework for understanding these findings by Arthur Brooks on the rates at which different groups give to charity. Some explanations are “conservatives are nicer than liberals” or “conservatives have more spare cash than liberals” or “conservatives believe in charity as an institution more than liberals.” (My favorite quote on this is “I’d give to charity, but they’d spend it all on drugs.”)
But . . . although I think there’s truth to all of the above explanations, I think some insight can be gained by looking at this another way. Lots of research shows that people are likely to take the default option (see here and here for some thoughts on the topic). The clearest examples are pension plans and organ donations, both of which show lots of variation and also show people’s decisions strongly tracking the default options.
For example, consider organ donation: over 99% of Austrians and only 12% of Gernans consent to donate their organs after death. Are Austrians so much nicer than Germans? Maybe so, but a clue is that Austria has a “presumed consent” rule (the default is to donate) and Germany has an “explicit consent” rule (the default is to not donate). Johnson and Goldstein find huge effects of the default in organ donations, and others have found such default effects elsewhere.
Implicit defaults?
My hypothesis, then, is that the groups that give more to charity, and that give more blood, have defaults that more strongly favor this giving. Such defaults are generally implicit (excepting situations such as religions that require tithing), but to the extent that the U.S. has different “subcultures,” they could be real. We actually might be able to learn more about this with our new GSS questions, where we ask people how many Democrats and Republicans they know (in addition to asking their own political preferences).
Does this explanation add anything, or am I just pushing things back from “why to people vary in how much they give” to “why is there variation in defaults”? I think something is gained, actually, partly because, to the extent the default story is true, one could perhaps increase giving by working on the defaults, rather than trying directly to make people nicer. Just as, for organ donation, it would probably be more effective to change the default rather than to try to convince people individually, based on current defaults.
P.S. More Arthur Brooks links are at item 5 here.
I am curious as to how much our "donation system" in the U.S. distorts studies of charitable giving.
Suppose I give Partners in Health $1,000 one year, but the Obama Campaign $2,000 the next under the assumption that in 2008 this is the most effective way to promote serious U.S. contributions to international health.
From one perspective, my charitable giving has gone from $1,000 to zero. This appears to be what surveys on charitable giving would show.
From another perspective, my charitable giving has increased. ( I confess to not having read all of Brooks. Perhaps he addresses this issue.)
Here's one question — do the kinds of survey results mentioned tend to change depending on which party has control of government? Or in presidential election years? If the statistics do cover 1996-2004, one could perhaps take a look.
More generally, what are the correlations, if any, between political and charitable giving?
Hmm, well, a significant fraction of "conservatives" are members of "conservative" churches, a significant fraction of which tithe (contribute usually 10% of income). This seems like a significant bias in the data.
I have always assumed that one reason for this pattern is that in the US, conservative politics is relatively strongly correlated with church membership at the kind of church whose members "tithe" – if you excluded not ALL religious-affiliated donations but donations to one's, as it were, home religious institution, wouldn't the numbers look much more similar across groups?
I think in Brooks's original presentation of the data he said that the pattern still held if you exclude religious donations. But I do think the religious contributions are relevant in establishing norms (as I conjectured above).
As someone who once (many years ago) earned my living asking people for donations to a non-profit, I can give you the industry's conventional wisdom (which, unlike most conventional wisdom, seems fairly accurate to me).
There is no default for giving. People don't give unless they are asked. The more often donors are asked, the more often they will give, even to other organizations than the one doing the asking. Also, giving to organizations is a social rather than private activity. It can be reinforced or diminished by the expectations of the donor's peers.
Given all that, it's unsurprising that the more religious you are, the more likely you are to give to charities. If you're getting asked to give every week, and you're in a community that values giving (as you would be if you attend most churches in the U.S.), you develop the habit of giving.
I'm fairly sure that if you correct for the frequency of church attendance, you'd find that there's no difference in the giving of liberals and conservatives.
That makes a lot of sense.
Feeble though it is, a data point supporting William Ockham's hypothesis:
As you know, my day job is in tax accounting. Our firm's individual clients are split roughly 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans. (Although technically there is nothing in their tax returns telling me who is who, more often than not I have a pretty good idea.)
Based on my sample of maybe about 100 individuals' returns I've done, and my not very scientific observation of same over the years, I am emphatically of the opinion that charitable giving is strongly correlated to church attendance, even omitting the charity given to actual churches.
I'll bet if you control for church attendance, the liberal-conservative correlation with giving will go away.
Is the argument then that liberals avoid church because someone might ask them to donate to a church charity? Or, if you find out that liberals go to churches as frequently as conservatives, maybe liberals pick their church because it is not associated with a charity, whereas conservatives pick churches that ask for donations, which, in my experience, involves money and time both.
Brad: According to survey reports, liberals go to church much less frequently than conservatives do.