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Study: Conservatives and liberals are equally charitable, but give to different charities

POSTED BY: KPO
UPDATED: Tuesday, October 23, 2012 06:29
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Monday, October 22, 2012 5:32 AM

KPO

Sometimes you own the libs. Sometimes, the libs own you.


Follow the link if you want to see the graphs:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/10/21/study-con
servatives-and-liberals-are-equally-charitable-but-they-give-to-different-charities
/

Quote:


While Mitt Romney pays a lot less in taxes than people who make a great deal less than him, defenders point to his generous charitable contributions as evidence that he’s giving back nonetheless. Paul Bedard at the conservative Washington Examiner, for example, touted the fact that Romney paid 57.9 percent of his income in either taxes or charitable donations in 2011. More generally, Arthur Brooks, the president of the American Enterprise Institute, frequently claims that conservative Americans are more generous with their charitable giving than their liberal counterparts.

Leaving aside the fraught question of whether charitable donations and taxes serve the same question, is this really true? Do conservatives give more away? According to a new study by two MIT political scientists, not really.

Michele Margolis and Michael Sances note that Brooks’ conclusion comes from a dataset that doesn’t really ask how conservative people are politically so much as how conservative they are socially. Using a dataset which uses more traditional questions to test political beliefs – the General Social Survey – they found no statistically significant relationship between peoples’ political beliefs, or their partisan affiliation, and their charitable giving level. And this held at the state level too. There was no significant relationship between a state’s level of giving and the vote share that Bush received in that state in 2004.

However, they did find that there was a strong relationship between political beliefs and what kind of giving people engaged in. Conservative individuals and individuals in red states were more likely to donate to religious organizations, a finding that Margolis and Sances found to be statistically significant:

Conversely, blue states were likely to give to secular organizations:

As well as to 2005 tsunami relief:

This makes intuitive sense. Conservatives and Republicans are likelier to attend church or otherwise be religiously active than liberal and Democrats, so it makes sense that they’d direct their giving that way as well. But Margolis and Sances’ work should put to rest the idea that liberals and conservatives iffer in the level, rather than the form, of their charitable giving.


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Monday, October 22, 2012 9:39 AM

CANTTAKESKY


I'm not sure tithing to one's church or giving to a non-profit that serves one ideological agenda should count in this analysis.

I would like to see more data on more altruistic (vs. ideological) charities, more like this tsunami relief graph. I think making the distinction would make charity data more meaningful.



-----

Don’t waste your life not making amazing things with equally amazing people.

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Monday, October 22, 2012 9:58 AM

KPO

Sometimes you own the libs. Sometimes, the libs own you.


Completly agree.

It's not personal. It's just war.

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Monday, October 22, 2012 2:35 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.


altruistic (vs. ideological) charities

I find donating to environmental causes extremely altruistic. It's not like anyone is getting personal gratitude from impoverished recipients, or community recognition from your chosen group, or even a tax write-off, or anything other than the personal knowledge of doing good for all.

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Monday, October 22, 2012 3:52 PM

NIKI2

Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...


Thank you, KPO. It's nice to see a more nuanced view of the claim that "conservatives donate more" that we hear. I agree with KPO, and my feathers always get ruffled at the touting of Romney's "charity", given, in case anyone has forgotten, he is REQUIRED to give 10% of everything he earns, and by the way his children are required to give 10% individually, as is his wife, etc., to the Mormon church. As far as I'm concerned, requiring it nullifies it as "charity" in my eyes.

While there is no question to me that all charity is to be applauded, in my OWN personal opinion, donating solely to religious organizations doesn't mean much. There is so much, and so many, in the world that need help, and so many churches do so well, that donating only to religions leaves out pretty much the entire rest of the world, from the earth itself to everything on it. JMHO.

I agree with everyone else who has responded.


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Tuesday, October 23, 2012 6:29 AM

KPO

Sometimes you own the libs. Sometimes, the libs own you.


Quote:

Originally posted by 1kiki:
altruistic (vs. ideological) charities

I find donating to environmental causes extremely altruistic. It's not like anyone is getting personal gratitude from impoverished recipients, or community recognition from your chosen group, or even a tax write-off, or anything other than the personal knowledge of doing good for all.


One could say the same thing about a lot of religious charity giving as well though. There's definitely an overlap between altruistic and ideological giving, for both the left and the right. And there's probably also useless or even worse-than-useless charitable giving on the left and on the right as well.

It's not personal. It's just war.

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